In honor of Jason Sanford's upcoming reissue, Plague Birds: The Red Day Edition, we hosted a microfiction contest inviting you to explore the topic of AI. We got some amazing submissions, and after much trial and tribulation, narrowed it down to a top four. Our second place winner was "Augury" by Mikaila Ishaaya. You can read the piece and learn more about Mikaila below! Congratulations to Mikaila!
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"Augury"
By Mikaila Ishaaya
It’s the only way I can hear the birds. Over twelve thousand downloadable varieties, and a special sale for President’s Day on passerine files. A good deal, I thought, since that covered the songbirds; but only non-singing varieties of percher are included in the offer. “Rip-off,” I mutter. On another morning, I might’ve settled for a trilling grebe or the crackling gargle of an egret. But this Monday, the sky not yet dawning, up with my fourth hour of insomnia and staring at the concrete vista, I miss the morning birdsong with a grief that guts me.
I pay the extra fee. I can’t afford the packages, so I just download Northern-House-Wren #533. A little puff of feathers appears in full technicolor—a recent advancement—round and brown and faintly striated on the wings. It preens, fluffing itself further, and I pine to hold the tiny thing. My fingers would pass through it, but I try anyway.
Still a foot from my reach, it lurches into flight, its code having studied more than enough data on wrens to know they’d frighten at being touched by random humans. It perches on my bookshelf and cocks in head in that quick way birds have—almost glitchy, like an omen of what its entire class Aves would become. Its squat neck twitches toward the window, one black eye visible and blinking. I can see the subtle inflations of its back and belly, a near-perfect mimicry of breathing. Then all at once, it begins to sing. Its beak moves so quickly, throat fluttering, it's like a video stuttering. I see an afterimage of its bottom yellow beak. I shut my eyes and just listen, pretending it’s flesh and blood outside my window, like I’m a kid again, yet ignorant of the loss of its free music.
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Mikaila Ishaaya is a speculative fiction writer with a focus on the epic, the folkloric, and the Classical. After deciding to leave her path through law school to pursue her passion for storytelling and what it can accomplish, she received her MFA at Sarah Lawrence College. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Club Plum Literary Journal, Tension Literary, and Statement Magazine.