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Summer 1980, Owen Lake

 It’s a video. 


Shaky, rimmed with snowy looking static. Stones, water: a beach. Midday, maybe, with the sun hidden behind clouds by the telltale misty pale of a northeastern afternoon. 


The camera person is talking off frame, muffled, but it sounds like a child’s voice. Excited, and breathless, with the camera seemingly righting itself, as if the operator had positioned it toward the ground and was now bringing it up. Our operator is studying a particular stone. It’s been cracked open, split down the middle, and inside are a constellation of voids, empty markings that seem like artisanal carvings. It’s the outline of something. A voice, out of frame, calls out and the camera is up, disjointed at an angle again. 


Dark, mirror-still water to the left. Stone laden cliffs to the right. More half whispered excitable talking and then the camera begins to bump just slightly as it’s steered towards the cliffs. Three people, all children, are crowded together in a council that seems to radiate nervous energy. A young girl pokes up out of the huddle and ushers the cameraperson in with a hurried come here hand gesture, followed by an equally earnest  quiet! motion. 


Then, we’re in. It’s like being inside a Vatican prayer circle, quiet peering faces that seem so mature for people so young. The camera has become almost unnaturally still. Peering down into a singular set of clasped hands. Something chirps, wiggling inside small fingers. The hands open. 


It’s like a bird. It’s not like a bird. The body is so delicate and thin that at first that it seems toylike, a model. And then it moves, stirring in the comfortable nest of fingers and palm, stretching thin wings that are leathery but smooth, frosted only faintly with the slightest feathery dust. It cranes a long, pointed beak on its curving neck with an eerie grace for something so new, so small. Amber eyes peer back into the camera lens. It chirps again, clacking the long beak. 


Out of frame, something roars with so much violence that it vibrates the image. Someone in the huddle whimpers, and the thing cradled in the hands screeches in terror.

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