"I wish you would not ask me that."
"Ask what?"
"How I feel."
"I didn't ask you that."
"How are you?" she mimicked, her voice taking a nasty tone.
He sighed, and he hated sighing, hated what it said about how he felt. "It's what people say. They say, 'Hi. How are you?' You could try it sometime."
She glared at him from her cage. "Am I people?"
He couldn't answer without looking at her. She was something out of a fantasy artist's dream, with curves, red skin, golden hair and feathers around her eyes, circling her breasts, and making a metallic-looking nest of down between her legs. He couldn't even think about the patterns of gold and shining orange down her back, they were so beautiful. She stood over four feet high.
He jerked his eyes back up to hers, gold circles around dark pupils stretch wide in the dim light.
She laughed then, a raucous noise that no human throat could make.
"I don't know," he said, and sighed again. Why couldn't the big questions like this stay on Star Trek? What does it mean to be human? Is Commander Data a person or a toaster? "What do you think you are?"
"Caged. Stared at," she spat.
She had reason for her ire. He flopped into the old vinyl chair, split and battered, but still more comfortable than anything picked up from a street half a decade ago had a right to be. "I can put on the TV."
"I have no desire to watch fat people lose weight."
"I'm not sure they're people," he joked, but regretted it at the look on her face. "How about a movie?"
"Things in space that blow up? I think not."
"What do you want?"
"Heroic tales! Love and betrayal!"
"Not soap operas again," he said. "Besides, they're not on right now."
"You have that device. You could tell it to play pictures out of time."
He looked at the TiVo, and back at her. She had the strangest assumptions about how things worked. "I never programmed it to record soap operas."
"It does only what you say? Will it not obey me?"
"It's a machine," I shrugged. "It will obey you fine if you get the remote and know how to program it. Considering what you did to my iPod, I'm not letting you near it."
He bent his head down and pinched the bridge of his nose. Every variation of it seemed like a good idea at the time played through his head. "Note to self," he thought. "Do not pick up glowing golden eggs found in the remains of a large bird nest." He had incubated the egg under a lamp, and fed the fledgling on lit matches and raisins. Somewhere it had imprinted on him and changed its form, growing into the humanized hybrid glaring at him now.
It had been a very strange week. He caged her on Wednesday, after she bit him with a beak that belonged on a full-sized eagle. After that, she had begun to lengthen and curve, her feet reshaping from talons to toes, but skinned in a hide like bird's feet. By that point, matches were not enough for her to eat.
He got up and stepped out from the basement to the patio, where the grill held charcoal for her dinner. It was getting more use than it had all summer. He picked a few pieces up with the tongs and put them in the fire bucket to take back inside.
"You hungry?"
"All ways," she said, or at least that was how he heard it, in two distinct words. He watched to make sure she would stay back from the door and put the bucket down on an asbestos pad. She took a piece of charcoal, and her mouth opened too wide for her tiny face. He heard the coal break between her teeth, and then her complaint. "You let it get too ashy."
"Do you want anything else? Trail mix? Snickers?"
"For dessert, a Snickers, I think. It satisfies."
"You can't believe everything you see in commercials. They're designed to make you want things."
"Sometimes commercials tell the truth," she shrugged, and picked up another coal with her fingers. "I want chocolate, peanuts and caramel."
"Okay, okay." He heard a knock on the back door. "Wait a second, and please keep quiet." He grabbed a sheet and threw it over her cage before opening the door.
Dan stood there, the normality of his usual polo shirt and chinos was almost shocking. "If you're going to grill something, I think you better do it now," Dan said. "The coals are more than ready."
"Yeah, thanks." He stood aside to let Dan in, not able to think of a way to keep him out.
"Kind of early for barbecue. I'm not interrupting something?"
He wished he'd said he had a date. He hadn't slept well in the last week, and was thinking slowly. "No."
"What's over there? Your latest invention?" Dan reached for the draped sheet.
"Don't!" At Dan's questioning expression he added, "It bites. I, uh, I'm looking after someone's parrot."
Dan pulled the sheet up, keeping his hands away from the bars. They could see only her hunched back, and he was sure Dan would mistake her for a bird."
"Wow, that's a big one. Is it asleep."
"I hope so. It's been keeping me up at night. Can you just, y'know, please?" He made a vague guesture that he hoped meant to drop the sheet.
"Polly want a cracker?" Dan said before he let the sheet fall.
From the cage her voice said, "No."
Dan looked at him, eyebrows raised. "Wow. Well, I was in the neighborhood. We missed you at the HuSi-meet. Everything okay?"
"Yeah. It's just, well, she's taken up a lot of my attention," he said, gesturing at the cage.
"Yeah, I've heard that about parrots. Is something burning in here?"
"Must be the charcoal outside," he said.
"Yeah," Dan said. "So?"
"So I'm beat and not feeling social." He felt like a jerk, but he didn't know how else to get Dan to leave.
"All right, then. How long will you have the bird?"
"I'm not sure," he said, and sighed again.
A screech issued from the cage, a bird noise laced with human anger. He couldn't risk Dan's curiosity.
"I have to deal with the bird, and it doesn't do too well with strangers."
Dan gave him a funny look, then wiped it off his face before giving a neutral, "Sure. Let's get a beer some time.
"Sure thing. See you."
"Watch those coals," Dan said on the way out.
He closed the door and pulled the sheet from the cage.
"Sorry about that."
"Sorry about that," she repeated, and the avian coloring ran thick her voice.
They looked at each other, and he blushed under her stare. She had caught him late last night, sitting on the stairs where he thought she wouldn't notice. Jacking off to fantasies of her was not satisfying when the real thing was nearby. He had snuck down as quiet as he could, nursed his hard-on through his pajama pants until he was sure she was still asleep, then stroked himself while looking at her red-gold curves. She slept stretched, her feet curling more than any human's, but not as much as a bird's. He imagined how the feathers between her legs would feel under his hand, around the base of his dick, how the slight spur at her heel would dig into his thighs.
She had not been asleep, and she had not been amused.
"Let me go." She interrupted his remembered embarrassment with a statement that sounded straight, uninflected, lacking the emotional screeching and the detailed threats that had kept him up until very early in the morning.
"I can't." He sighed. "You said you'd kill me."
"I won't if you let me go."
"Where would you go? What would you do? You're here and like this because of me. If I'd left your egg in the woods, you'd just be a bird. You can't fly, and you can't exactly pass for human and have a normal life." He knew his anger was misdirected, but he didn't know what else to do.
She looked away, and as he watched, she aged. In twenty seconds she had become thin and wizened, her feathers falling to the floor of the cage. He realized what was happening, and backed toward the door, but she was too fast.
He heard the explosion behind him, stopped the car, and got out to watch the ball of smoke rise, raining debris. "Holy shit." He reached instinctively for his cell phone and dialed 911.
He stayed through the arrival of the fire trucks and the rescue units, posting pictures from his camera phone to the Hole, and updating the rest of their online community about what had happened. He told them, and the police, that he thought maybe it had been an accident with the grill. The online responses mostly came in single words and short phrases, all some variation of, "Oh shit."
The next day he drove to the house, unable to let go. Walking around the edge of the charred wood and melted electronics, he noticed something gleaming. He picked his way through wreckage and cleared off the soot. It looked like a large egg, and as he put his hand down to pick it up, it moved.
He grabbed it, then, and carried it back to his car. He had a box in his trunk, and some towels left from a trip to the beach, and he made a nest for it, the soft gold at odds with the garish colors of the towels.
He took it home, intending to rig a lamp to incubate the egg, but the police were waiting for him. An unmarked car pulled in behind him, and he realized it had tailed him home from the house.
"Daniel Barton MacIntyre?"
"Yes."
"We'd like to ask you a few questions about the fire yesterday."
They found his answers unsatisfying, and implied that his fascination with the scene of the fire had unhealthy implications. He refused to open the trunk of his car, part of him unable to understand why. Despite his protestations of innocence, they took him in to the police station and called a city tow truck to bring in the car.
It was warm in the trunk of the car. The egg rocked.