* Author : Ruth Joffre

* Narrator : Julia Rios

* Host : Matt Dovey

*

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PodCastle 916: Woodpecker, Warbler, Mussel, Thrush is a PodCastle original.





Rated G

Woodpecker, Warbler, Mussel, Thrush

by Ruth Joffre

 

 

Yesterday, I was a bird. A slender-billed curlew, to be exact. My girlfriend helped me ID the bird. Took photographs of my decurved bill, the flash of white under my tail, the small brown speckles on my cream-white breast.

“Some of these spots look like hearts,” I said this morning, once I was human again and able to compare her pictures to the one in an article I found: “The Slender-Billed Curlew Is Declared Extinct.”

It always happens like this: a species disappears once and for all, and I transform into a replica of it for one day. Thirteen hours, at least, maybe more if I wake up especially early. It takes about an hour each way for the metamorphosis to be complete — long enough, in theory, for me to prepare. To lock the doors, rush to the bathtub if I feel gills opening in my throat. I often track the process in the mirror as it unfolds. Watch scales harden over my flesh, feathers push through my pores. It never stops feeling like magic.





 

My parents were frightened, of course. The first time it happened, I was just a baby. Not yet three weeks old, and already my skin was turning gold. My mother thought it was jaundice. One of her parenting books mentioned it. Something about a buildup of bilirubin. A newborn’s liver couldn’t process it fast enough. She called the doctor’s office to ask what she should do, did I need to visit the emergency room, was it something in her breast milk, but the nurses said it was fine; this just happens sometimes.

“Babies are weird. That’s what they said.”

By the time she returned to the crib, my first transformation was complete. I was the golden toad, Incilius periglenes. “I came back in, and it was just sitting there, in a puddle of your clothes.” My diaper was clean, thankfully, or else my toad self would have hopped away and left my mother to assume I’d been kidnapped. Was this a curse, she wondered. Or a particularly weird case of post-partum depression? When my father got home, he confirmed she wasn’t hallucinating. There was indeed a fiery orange toad in my room. Practical man that he was, he assumed she just misplaced me, put me down somewhere, then forgot.

He kept asking, “Where did you go today? Think. Did you go to the store?”

And then the toad grew a human foot.

 



 

My girlfriend asked me once what it felt like. If I remembered myself while I was a Guam flying fox, hanging upside down from the pipe of the showerhead. The simple answer is no. My brain is different. My memories of her and of us are gone, and all that remains is a vague, primal sense of comfort. I didn’t bite her as a bat. I didn’t peck her as a bird. When she offered a palmful of feed, I landed on it happily and picked through all the seed to find the dried berries, just like I do when she pours me a bowl of granola. Was I myself then? She didn’t think so. For her, it was as if I had been possessed by the vengeful ghost of a Bachman’s warbler seeking retribution for the loss of its loved ones; but for me it was as if I had been gifted new eyes, new senses. When I flapped my wings, I detected the Earth’s magnetic fields and knew I could follow them all the way to Florida and across the strait to Cuba. That isn’t suffering. That’s wonder.