A Perjury of Owls by Michael Angel

Author:Michael Angel
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Banty Hen Publishing
Published: 2016-04-13T21:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Five

Perrin’s eyes glazed for a moment with pain. He waited, his breath coming in short, quick pants, and the moment finally passed. The owlet then leaned forward and spoke again in his little boy voice.

“Would you put your hand on me? I’ve never been touched by a monster before.”

Slowly I put my monster hand out and gently stroked him from his head down towards the feathers on his back. A satisfied burble of sounds came from his beak. I did my best to be gentle. The young owl felt like a bundle of sticks wrapped in a thin coat of feathers. Under his ratty plumes, I felt nothing but solid angles and knobs of bone, as if his flesh had melted away. If I clenched my hand into a fist, he would crumple under my grasp like a fistful of feathery tin foil.

“That feels so nice,” he sighed. “Everyone but my parents and the healers have always been afraid to touch me. They were always afraid my madness could jump to them. Like fleas or lice.”

That puzzled me. “Madness?”

Perrin nodded miserably. “That’s really how I’m sick, you know. My body’s giving out now. But my mind…it’s always been this way. They can’t understand me. Not really. And I can’t understand well right back. My head hurts when I try. That’s why my parents talked about asking you, ‘she-from-another-world’, to come. It’s so good they did that. To get you to meet me here, at my end. To know that someone has the same madness as I do. I feel…less alone.”

My puzzlement vanished as everything fell into place. The dam holding back my emotions began to crack. My eyes burned and I fought desperately to hold back the tears as I finally understood.

Perrin had the same ‘affliction’ as me. The same one as Thea.

When he spoke, he freely used the word ‘I’.

I’d thought that the Parliamentarians had some strange cultural reason for avoiding that simple word. That the Albess had somehow taught herself the trick of speaking to humans and other creatures so that she could make her people’s wishes known. But now I knew. The Hoohan weren’t abiding by some oddball tradition. This was how their brains were wired, from birth. Thea hadn’t figured out how to communicate with humans for the sake of the owls. She’d first had to figure out how to talk with her fellow owls, and somehow had been promoted to deal with humans as the Albess.

That realization finally burst the dam inside of me. Perrin had been isolated for all his short life, stranded all alone while in the middle of his flock simply because he knew no other way to express himself. That sort of social isolation bred a special kind of despair. It bred a special kind of insanity, one that could twist and annihilate a soul.

In the end, that’s what had destroyed Holly. I’d always wondered if there was anything I could have done to save her. To block the road she’d chosen to travel.

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