The Birdcatcher of Rockers Avenue by N.S. Ahmed
Associate editor Alex Watanen on today’s short: The dystopia in N.S. Ahmed’s “The Birdcatcher of Rockers Avenue” somehow manages to feel both bleak and hopeful at the same time. Readers find themselves at the intersection of bureaucratic cruelty and human altruism, where they’re treated to a piece of speculative fiction that expertly explores interspecies empathy with striking brevity.
The birdcatcher of rockers avenue
At the witching hour, two men exit their black Chevrolet to arrest the Birdcatcher of Rockers Avenue. They ring the broken bell of an old house, certain there are illegal flocks of songbirds inside. Find them, they were ordered. Cook those bastards until they’re bone clean.
Many years ago, the Department of Sadness proclaimed the domestic removal of all winged creatures—for they were a nation built on the stones of unhappiness, and bird lungs brimmed with threatful music. Trills, warblings, cheepings, twitterings, these were hazardous concerns of joy that required rapid intervention. Men were deployed overnight across cities and states, and soon, the world started to quiet. Northern cardinals were tracked and torn from roosting in their nests, swallows were silently sniped mid-migration, and common blackbirds were no longer common. The sky hollowed from extinction.
The same sky that the two men huddle beneath, losing patience with ringing the ancient bell of an ancient house. In the cold waiting—their trenchcoats collecting up snow—a pigeon swoops wildly out the second-floor window, its iridescent plumage flirting with moonlight. A parrot reciting “I love you” quickly follows. Then an orchestra of skyward species spills from that little square. All airborne again in the shadows of Paradise Heights.
The two men, witnessing what will surely be a reporting nightmare, unlatch their tasers and shoulder-slam the door. Sharp exclamations of wood creak from the poor house. It surrenders. The men enter into a static darkness and blindly follow the faint silhouette of staircases. They arrive at another door, one less fragile.
We know you’re in there, we saw what you did. Open or we’ll— before they could finish, they notice the knob is unlocked. They enter and see the perpetrator on his knees.
The Birdcatcher—a slim jiddo with a gray, unshaven beard and a proud smell of Bauducco Vanilla—raises his hands above his head. One man tackles him to the ground, the other studies the room. It’s a bedchamber remodeled into a makeshift aviary. Bird feeders dangle like Christmas ornaments from the ceiling, and the carpeted floor is spattered with golden wisps of straw. There is nothing left of the birds, only empty coops full of molted feathers, cracked eggshells, and dried droppings.
You’re aware that bird releasing is considered treasonous? one man asks.
I’m quite aware, the Birdcatcher answers.
Then why do it? the other man asks.
The parrot said to let them go.
Ahmed is a first-generation Egyptian-American fiction writer based in New York City. His writings have been featured or are forthcoming in publications such as The Margins, The Offing, The Lumiere Review, New York Public Library, and PEN America. Currently, he is a CUNY Pipeline Fellow, a CLS Scholar, a TEDx speaker, a Periplus Collective Fellow, and a graduate student and Hertog Research Fellow at Hunter College’s MFA program for creative fiction. He tweets @anesahmed99.
