you_can't_rake_a_rock ovenbird On a Sunday stroked by a strengthening sun, Geraldo thought it was high time to shuffle things around in the yard. He did this regularly as a way to assert his dominance over the tentative ecosystems that tried to emerge there. He believed strongly that yards should be built to shut out anything that might be deemed “nature.” He was a great fan of privacy fences and concrete patios and little bits of overfertilized grass that could be mowed into submission. He would accept planters full of tidy, low maintenance flowers, but he became enraged by the wild encroachment of things like dandelions or creeping buttercup. He liked to rip them up and leave them to wilt, pretending they were the corpses of his vanquished enemies. On this particular Sunday he thought he might do a full perimeter scan of the yard. He liked to stomp on the ground aggressively just to remind the worms and snails and isopods that they were at his mercy. He was also a fan of digging holes because he thought driving a shovel into the earth was a particularly masculine thing to do and he enjoyed the way the insects (who were possessed of far too many legs and eyes to be allowed to live) ran for their lives as the shovel’s blade turned over their homes, dragging them into the scorching light. When he grew tired of digging holes he raked rocks. This was a pleasing task because it had the effect of making industrious noises (the metal tines of the rake scraping unyielding granite) while not actually resulting in any specific results. Geraldo found this meditative. He was human, and a human MAN at that, which meant he had dominion over all the plants and animals (didn’t God say this directly?) and quite possibly over rocks as well, so he liked to reinforce his status at the top of the earthly hierarchy by giving the rocks a good raking now and then. It’s never good to let rocks think they have any agency so Geraldo made a point of shaking them up and showing them who’s boss. As he was raking a particularly snarky rock in the corner of the yard he caught movement in his peripheral vision. Something feathered, perhaps. A chickadee, maybe. Geraldo hated birds. They could fly, which he took as a personal affront since it was a skill he didn’t himself possess. He also didn’t trust animals without bladders, just as a matter of principle. It wasn’t a chickadee, though. It was something bigger. Iridescent. It landed on the fence post. Geraldo wasn’t very good at bird identification and mistook it for a crow at first, but then the name came up from a place inside him he didn’t know existed: Starling. Yes, a starling. Noisy, bossy birds with a propensity for talking back. This one looked smug. Geraldo threw a stone at it. The bird was unconcerned, side-stepping the projectile easily. Another starling joined the first. Then another. Another. They made alien clicking sounds from deep in their throats. Geraldo began to get nervous. He’d seen that movie, The Birds, by William Hitchspeare or Alfred Shakecock or something, and he never really got over the scene with the eyeballs missing. His own eyes began to feel itchy in his head. At this point there were at least two dozen starlings. Starlings are incredible mimics, able to recreate human speech and car alarms and cat’s meows. They, like Geraldo, were rather fond of the sound the rake made on rocks and they began to imitate it with their harsh voices, so that Geraldo was listening to the metal scrape of rakes in surround sound. It was disconcerting, to say the least. He backed up towards the gate. What happened next is a bit of a jumble. The neighbours reported hearing screams but no one admitted to seeing anything. I suspect Geraldo got a good raking. The starlings said they liked the way their claws sounded scraping against the hard bowl of his skull. It was meditative, they said. Unproductive, perhaps, but that isn’t always the point of a thing. Sometimes you just need a reminder of your own power. You need to prove that you’re not as small as you seem. 260517 what's it to you? who go blather from