“The birds are not what they seem….The birds are not what they seem… WTF spacemen. Way to be vague. How is that helpful?” She mumbles as she walks home from the grocery store. How could they expect that she and her colleagues were going to figure it out? It wasn’t rocket science…and that was the problem. They were out of their element. “Oh, well. Some other government agency can figure it out.” She eyes the seagulls feasting and fighting over french fries served a la sidewalk while she walks tentatively, trying to both avoid them and keep the peaches from getting swished. The fruit somehow ended up in the bottom of the bag since she left the store. When she tried to adjust, things had begun escaping from their tetris-like arrangement. The nearby ravens had quickly moved expectantly towards her when the cracker box busted open, dumping half of itself into the dirt. “Smart little creatures. They’ll probably all go tell their friends to follow me around. I drop food.” She concentrated. The ravens yelled overhead.
With everything safely stored, she curls up in front of her MacBook. Compelled by the feeling that she already knew the answer, she opens a new tab and starts to type in search terms. “Birds.” Her fingertips balance on the keys. “What am I even looking for?” Slumped in her chair, pushing urgency out of the way, she decides a distraction is in order. Her favorite websites which were now intent on covering only the actions of one now very powerful man. He was inescapable.
“That’s new” she thought, catching a title about yet another mandate. “How did I not hear about that?” One commenter suggested that the man everyone was watching was making an unprecedented number of simultaneous sweeping changes so no one could keep up. “To distract people!” the user declared. She asks the screen “Distract us from what?”
There are a few political cartoons embedded in the chaotic news and she pauses at one were the now very powerful man in charge is shouting. Twitter logos were floating in the place of words. She laughed. His obsessive need to express himself via the little blue bird was a popular target of ridicule.
Her smile turns to terror. She bolts upright, spilling tea in to the carpet. “Oh, s**t. They weren’t talking about the animals.”