Why I Didn't Write

An introduction from the author: The following short story is the result of an email chain. A friend of mine from the summer camp I attend yearly emailed me one day. She stated that it had been over a month since I had emailed her last. She didn't know if I had gotten hurt, or worse. I know her as having a great personality, and I customarily try to answer such emails in the funniest way possible. So, I sat down, and wrote out the first email. Then I wrote out the second, third, fourth, and so on until the ninth. I ended my story there, and got a very positive and uplifting response from her. I thought that it might look good as a Microsoft Word document, and I was pleasantly surprised! Not only did it work seamlessly as a standalone short story, but also it was upwards of 10 pages. So, I edited it, divided it into paragraphs, and then turned it into what you are now reading. Ladies and gentlemen, Why I Didn't Write.

I will tell you my story. This is what actually happened. I was lying in my bed when suddenly I was kidnapped by the local blacksmith for no reason and taken into a dark, damp room for questioning about a tugboat named "Gully". I didn't know the answer to this question, and so they tied me up and made me endure ten horrible minutes of a live lizard crawling around the top of my head. He even bit the top a little, which is why I will continue to have headaches to this day. However, I did not give in and I refused to talk (what was I supposed to do? Tell them the whereabouts of a boat I had never even begun to hear of?). They gave me an hour in my cell, which had nothing but a chair and a grimy window taking up half the wall. Those idiots! I kicked open the window and ran as fast as I could. But, not before I was suddenly flying twenty miles in the sky, for I had the luck of the devil. A gigantic bird, I believe it was a toucan, swooped under me as I was making a break for it and picked me up in the process. I was carried away at a startling speed, leaving the blacksmith cursing below.

The toucan took me to an underground cult club, where the manager smoked and drank. One night only a few days after my escapade with the bird, when I was crawling in the alley, avoiding cutthroats and hookers everywhere I went, I came upon a man in a trench coat who offered me a very bizarre medallion. It was carved into the shape of a rat, except instead of eyes, it had bags of French fries sitting there. It was made of pure gold, the man said, although he was probably lying. But, he offered it to me for dirt cheap, so I took the bait and forked out my last seventy-eight cents out of the grimy centerfold of the rag that my previous captors forced me into wearing. So then the manager noticed me, and being as stoned as he was, thought that the medallion was a lot more than it actually was in the end. He told me that as long as he could have that medallion in the end of things, I could stay for as long as I wanted at his little nightclub. So I did. I stayed there for about five weeks, and let me tell you, what an experience. I learned how to survive within the confines of those walls. You couldn't be caught dead in that area without getting yourself caught at least once in some of the bloodiest bar battles in all of Connecticut. Well, actually I can't say that. I didn't know where I was. But I guess I made some friends there, even if the lot of them all had dirty jobs and reputations, and for their extensive warmth, I am forever grateful. Well, I spent a long time down there, and a lot of things happened. The manager got so drunk he danced with the owner of the rival bar and even kissed her. My friend Mooney drove a car onto the middle of the table and drove off with a bang. Terry, a waitress, reenacted half of a Shakespeare play.

Well, life was okay, and I never did give up that medallion even though the manager had wanted it at first. But all those nights he got so drunk that he would just insist I give him the darn thing and I never did. One day, when we were all down there and I was this close to having my second beer and not passing out, a guy brought in the local newspaper. Apparently, the guys who had questioned me just weeks before had been caught and put in jail, but then they escaped! I also slowly, but surely, decided that I needed to find out as much as I could about this tugboat "Gully". Well, it was shocking. What had happened, said the guys and the sources I talked to, was that Gully was one of the most prestigious ships in the world while it lasted and the owner was not very well known, but he was the only trillionaire in the world. Why he kept this secret, nobody knows. He was riding on his tugboat one day when a boy exactly my age came and made him crash the boat into his island as a suicide. This happened and the boy escaped. They thought that I had done it, and the newspaper which the man had dropped on the bar counter top so many days ago suddenly took on a new meaning when I read it again later and found the very words I had been dreading to hear: The criminals are still on the search for this unidentified boy killer, and will continue until he is located. I gasped.

The next days were utter hell for me, especially because I had to at all times act like I was being watched. If there was a visitor, I hid for five straight minutes until one of my colleagues could come to my side and tell me it was okay for me to step out. Well, one fateful morning, they did come. And they were heading right for my hiding place. Well, I needed a way out. I wasn't just going to sit idly by while these two trashed the place, tortured my acquaintances for information about me, and then moved on. I was going to escape! Well, as quietly as I could I snuck out of the back door in my room, and to my surprise the local shopkeeper had left her Ducati 2000 motorcycle outside and unlocked. I didn't know how to drive; it was going to be a lucky shot or bust. Now, the back alley I had entered was about two miles long, and on a fully revved motorcycle it could all be traveled in under three minutes. This seemed hard to believe but I had seen it done; I was confident. At the end of this stretch, there was a long ramp leading up to the outside world and away from the underground utopia that was my current home. I jumped on. I did not know how to drive. So, I clicked the "on" button, twisted the handlebar to full speed, and...

I unlocked the break, and shot forward in one sweeping motion that would have made me puke if I had not been driving just straight ahead. However, my ineptitude with motorized bikes soon showed, and before I knew it I was swiveling dangerously close to the very buildings I had most avoided in my time down in that hidden wasteland. I suddenly turned the wrong way, and slammed into the brick wall of the prostitute house, which made me graze my knee and rip part of the grisly clothing with which I had previously been provided. It started as a tiny dot of blood, but soon grew into a mighty stream. It hurt, and I clutched it with one hand for as long as I thought I could, but I had to keep going if I wanted to escape. One thing I never understood about my clothing is that they would not let me go anywhere without a switchblade knife in one of my pockets, matches in the other, and a really abnormally big coat which I had stored in the small trunk of the Ducati before launching off. I never needed any of these things and God knows what was in the coat, but as I rocketed forward, I had a creeping suspicion that these objects were probably meant for life and death situations along the lines of this one. I had only covered around 500 feet in around a minute. I was really, really awful at driving.

Suddenly, the wall in front of me shattered, and I stopped my bike abruptly and yelped with fear. There before me stood the two criminals, riding shotgun and holding machine guns in a black Jaguar that was missing its windshield. They were aiming at me, and I didn't know what to do. Slowly, the first guy stepped out of the car, keeping his semi - automatic AK - 47 trained on me at all times. "Hands up, kid," he said. And I did just that. The other guy stepped out of the car, and held up his weapon of destruction. I put my arms down and revved up the motorcycle. If I was going to die, I wasn't going to die a coward. The motorcycle suddenly bolted ahead, and persisted to mow down the guy in front of me. Oh, it was gross. I didn't stay to see what his remnants looked like, but I gave a yelp of triumph as I cruised on the shopkeeper's ride and miraculously did not crash into any other buildings. Although I did swerve a lot and at one point I almost let the motorcycle crush me under it, but I got to the ramp. The other guy I didn't hit was shooting after me, but in his surprise, he had lost a lot of time for aiming and missed almost every round he spat out of his gun. Well, I burst out of the concealed life that for just over one month now I had continually led. I was finally free.

However, my excitement was short lived, for just then the motorcycle broke down and I hit a tree. My leg was now in horrific shape, and I needed to do something about it. Luckily, people are litterers. My results from looking through almost every garbage can within a mile of where I had appeared on the surface of the world proved successful. I found a roll of toilet paper, some delicious takeout Chinese, which I was sure would last me a good three days if eaten in small quantities, a broken tape dispenser, and a needle. I couldn't believe how thankful I was suddenly that Americans are so wasteful. Well, I sat down near my motorcycle and bandaged up my leg using the toilet paper, the tape, and painfully, the needle. To my utter amazement, it made a very impressive temporary stitch for my scraped limb. I went back to the wreckage of my vehicle and found the coat in good shape. Guess what? It wasn't a coat. As it turned out, it was a tent.

The fact that my manager and company had provided me with the exact sleeping quarters I would later need came as both a surprise and an understanding. The people I had lived out the better part of thirty - seven days with knew that I wanted to get out, and they were mindful of it. They had forced me into carrying a knife, matches, and a tent. This made me both happy and sad. I couldn't believe what friends I had had, and it was only then that I realized it with melancholy reminder that there was almost no chance of me ever seeing them again. Well, there was no time to look back. I set up camp in a forest that was nearby to where I had dumped my now useless transportation. It was a scenic place, lush with vegetation and possibly one of the only places I have been in that didn't bear any signs of human development whatsoever. That is, except for me. I erected my tent in a sunny patch of land, where long grass was the only thing growing. I spent the next two weeks in that spit of land, dwelling in peace with nothing to do and living off the land. If there was fruit, I ate fruit. If there wasn't I went to the garbage cans of the city and scrounged until I found something good. The knife and matches - mind you it was a pretty big box of matches - proved perfect for my stay. In the night, when the temperature would drop and things sometimes got a bit chilly, I would gather up as many dead twigs as I could and I would light a fire outside. When searching for nutrients, I slashed my way through dense underbrush with the knife, and usually found my way back. It had a very distinctive blade shape, and I could usually tell by the marks on the surrounding plants where I had been and where I was going. It became a lifestyle for me.

Every day I would wake up late and skip breakfast, occupying myself instead by drawing in the dirt or trying to plant apple trees by picking out the final seed from a core I had just tossed in back of me and burying it in the soft ground. When lunchtime came, I scavenged in the wastebaskets of America and ate anything I could get my hands on which didn't look like crud. After that, I would walk around a little and then return home, and eat the food. Then, I would go searching for animals until late hours. At dinner I ate the plants and the fruit and the things I found in the vicinity even if they were poisonous. Afterwards, I would talk to myself and make a fire and then go to bed and repeat the process when I woke up. It didn't rain much, but when it did, it was a maelstrom. However, I cannot stress it enough that I wouldn't have been able to carry out the routine living I did had it not been for the supplies that my manager so long ago gave to me. However, as uninhabited that my quarters may have been, the streets were never empty. I saw so many different people walking by, and I heard so many different things. I learned that I was in Virginia, and that there are a lot of jerks in Virginia. Well, one day, I decided to try out hitchhiking. For hours at a time I stuck the thumb of my left hand out in the road, and walked along the surrounding highways, just trying to find passage back to my house in Connecticut. But then again I probably didn't look all that impressive, being that I was crudely bandaged, dirty, tired, bruised up, had crashed a motorbike, was young, and carried a weapon.

However, it didn't really help on the night of the Big Storm, as I continue to call it for lack of a better title than to justify it as exactly what it was. I was just lighting my fire, when out of nowhere, lightning struck my tent, completely obliterating it in the heat of the blast. The wind started to blow, and rain poured down in heaps. People on the street were frantically scrambling to get inside their respective homes and apartments, and I was stuck in the middle of a catastrophe without warmth, a home, or a friend. The wind was a-blowing, and I figured that the only thing there was left for me to do was to stick out my thumb and hope against all hope that there was at least one kind person driving their car on the roads that would care enough to pick up a miserable case like me. Well, I stood there, and luck hit me like a thunderbolt when no less than five minutes after I appeared from the forest home a drunkard in a beaten up old truck told me to hop on. I didn't need to be told twice. I gathered my things as fast as I could in the storm, and jumped into the car before any other damage could be done on my body and my few possessions. I could have ridden with a murderer, a thief, or even the executive officer of some major company, and I could have ended up in one of a number of bad positions for doing it, but I didn't question a miracle.

The man seemed nice enough, but he never told me his name. We talked about a lot of things which I knew nothing on, like which celebrities were the most attractive, and who sold the best rum. He may have been under the influence, but at least he still had enough brain in him to drive correctly. The only reason I didn't offer to drive was because I had had a previous driving experience with a motorcycle that had not gone well. Well, for hours we drove and I asked him to drive me to Connecticut. He said he would do just that, but he had to make one stop first. It was already late at night, so after having a practically empty chat with the man for an hour and a half, I crawled into the back of his car and dozed for as long as I could. When I woke up, we still had about ten minutes to cover, but I could see the brilliant grey skyline of the Empire State looming before me in all of its splendor. I don't think I have ever been as happy as when I arrived in the middle of Times Square with the strange man. It's funny, because the minute he got out of the car and walked around the corner, an idle policeman spotted and apprehended him. Apparently he was arrested on charges of child molestation. Thinking back on it though I wouldn't have guessed he was a pedophile. He was actually pretty nice to me. Well, I soon forgot about him in the midst of the city. However, I rounded a corner when suddenly I had two realizations. One was that I was stuck in New York City without a ride to take me home, and the other was that the "Wanted" poster I was staring at on a streetlight was a picture of me!

Suddenly, Gully, the murderers, the motorcycle endeavor, it all came back in a flood of bad memories. The news had spread. I was one of America's top Wanted criminals, on charges of felony murder two times. One for Gully, and the other for... I gasped. The man I had trampled in the tunnel. I was a murderer. I couldn't believe my eyes at what I was looking at. My face was on a government - distributed public document, and I could do nothing about it. Immediately my first instinct was to hide. But where? Everyone in the city knew who I was and what I had done, and not a single person within miles would want to have a murderer looking the way I did in their house. I considered going back to the underground town, but I had no idea where it was. I had left it all the way back in Virginia. I couldn't just camp again. There was no forest to hide in this time and I didn't have a tent. And nobody in their right mind would pick up a killer if they knew who it was, and considering I found about ten more of these signs within half as many blocks, I didn't think that there were a lot of people in New York who didn't know about me already. Oh, how I wished I could go home. But wait. Just as I was walking by the Virgin Records store in Times Square, I saw someone: MY DAD!

He was in the store, attracting attention and chortling my name over and over again. He looked a wreck - unshaven, sunken eyes, and a permanent frown frozen on his face. I saw him for just a second, but them he disappeared among the masses of people shopping there, and I lost all hope. I looked around. Not many people noticed me. Then again, considering the amount of hobos and homeless and poor saps you see in the Big Apple, I blended in well. I decided then and there I was going to die trying. I was going to find my dad and go inside the store, even if it meant being seen in plain sight by every cop with a firearm in the giant two - story shop. I entered through the doors, with a slight tinkle from the automatic entrance bell to signify my presence. I walked cautiously, and carefully - as it turns out, acting like you are being watched at all times in a secret society that is rooted below the city is an incredibly good skill to learn for later in your life when you are a national pariah like I was. Well, I slid into the crowd and made my way through the hundreds of people milling about, just trying to get the newest CD from their favorite artists. I finally saw my father closer. He was worse than I thought. In addition to his already grotesque features, he was sleep deprived, and he held an as - of - yet unlit cigarette that was currently trembling in between two bony, shaky fingers. I approached him, and I think he saw me, but looked away. I don't think he recognized me. I was just about to tap him on the shoulder, when I got tapped on the shoulder by someone standing behind me. I whirled around, and my jaw dropped.

It was a policeman. He was holding a gun that was pointed at my head, and he meant business. He grabbed me by the scruff of my neck and started pulling me away, into a back room with whitewashed walls and a steel chair in the middle. "Gabe, you are up for charges of the murder of a blacksmith, and a trillionaire. You are now going to walk silently. You will be shot." Instantly, fear bubbled over in me. I kicked and punched and tried to escape their grasp, but it held as strong as ever. I yelled out to my dad, and I yelled that I did not deserve to die, and that I was only a boy of thirteen, but all of my protests were muffled in my throat by my collar, which every second of being pulled by the security guard threatened to suffocate me. He backed me into a wall, and I felt something hard against my back. I reached into my pocket, and pulled out a silver coin thing. My medallion! I still had it! I looked at it, like I had never seen it before. It glinted a lot in the dingy light of the record store, and I slowly slipped it back into my pocket before the officer could notice it. I still had my switchblade, I realized, and then suddenly I had an idea. It was a crazy one, but it would have to do. I asked the security guard if I could look at the Virgin motto for a few seconds, because supposedly I thought I had seen a bird land on it. My dad was standing right near a glass exhibit promoting the T.I. album "Paper Trail". Well, the police officer reluctantly agreed. As invisibly as I could, I pulled the knife out of my pocket, and plopped it into my left hand; my good hand. The police officer looked away, and I did the unimaginable.

I ran forward and threw the knife as hard as I could at the display while yelling, "DAD!" The promotion shattered in a thousand different pieces of colored glass, and my dad for the first time noticed me, and I started to run toward him. About twenty other shoppers had taken notice, and one yelled, "It's him! It's the killer! Get him!" In one instant every cop in the place was running full speed at me, pointing revolvers and rifles like I was some sort of human target. I ran as fast as I could, tugging on my dad to get the hell out of there. Although he was stunned, I kept on dragging him along until we were out of the store. Behind us burst fifty angry uniformed men, and ten equally angry customers hoping to get rewards for turning me in. They were all yelling and cursing at the top of their lungs, and I was more scared than I have ever been in my life. The alarm systems started blaring all over town, and pretty soon I had over two hundred people on my tail, half of them shooting wildly. I ducked, and my dad said, "I'll meet you at the other end of the tunnel!" I agreed and hastily went down a small opening that lead off of the tunnel and into a sewer line. I bolted down some gritty metal steps and onto the stone and ran along at an increasingly rapid pace. My pursuers were gaining, and one had almost gotten my shoe. I looked ahead; I needed to improvise. Suddenly, there was an explosion behind me and I realized with horror that somebody had shot one of the oil tanks they stored down below. Suddenly, I stopped in my tracks, along with the rest of the people. All hell broke loose in the space of six seconds.

We all heard a tiny but resonant cracking sound, as if stone was breaking. We looked above, and my worst fear was confirmed: The explosion had been so powerful it was going to cause a cave in. There was another row of steps leading back up, and the people were now more chaotic than ever before. I was just about the mount them. The streets was showing above, and chunks of rock were falling and crashing down in a spine - chilling rhythm that was growing more and more consistent. Horns were honking above, people were screaming, and it almost seemed as if the sky was falling. However, one man grabbed one of the loose tassels of my torn coat and pulled me down. He was holding a dirty crowbar, with which he planned to beat the life out of me. I knew that this was the end. This was my final stand. I told him to go ahead and hit me. If I was going to die, I was going to face my death bravely. Suddenly, a familiar voice piped up "Not on my watch, jerk!" and the man went flying into the wall, hitting it with a crack that echoed through the dim waste tunnels.

A metal bat revealed itself, to belong to the one man I thought I would never see again. Mooney! I almost burst into tears at the sight of my old friend, who had come back to save me at the moment of my defeat. "Go, Gabe! I'll hold them off!" he told me, and he did. He defended the stairs as I pattered up them as fast as what was in my abilities. Mooney did not let anyone through the railed escape route, and he batted down those that tried. He got hurt. The ceiling was now worse than before and it was steadily caving. I reached the top, but looked to the bottom for a few seconds. Then, the roof fell, and there was silence. I stopped dead in my tracks, and slowed down. I couldn't hear anything from below, but on the top I could hear a horrible racket. Cars had crashed into each other, people had been hit, sidewalks had caved, buildings had tipped, shops had split in half, and the remains of the explosion had started a small fire in the middle of the street. I turned around suddenly, eyes wide with a mix of fear, and disbelief.

Everyone was dead. Two hundred people had just died trying to kill me and countless others had gotten injured above. My dad had eyed the scene with the same openmouthed terror I now shared with him. I couldn't believe what I had done. I stooped down for a moment, and tried to find a crack in the stone where I could peer down and see if my friend had survived. I leaned in to the road and yelled Mooney's name. I did this for about two minutes without an answer. When I finally found a place to see, I saw what had happened. Upon the very place where Mooney had last stood, there was a large piece of stone. I saw on the side, a glint. Mooney's red metal bat was crushed in between him and another person who held a knife. I looked away, not wanting to see the carnage ever again, and started to cry. Mooney had been my great friend, and he had sacrificed his life for me in one swift movement that only the bravest of men could have ever taken. He had let me live and saved my life with his own, and for that I swore I would avenge him and I would get him a gravestone. And finally I would be indebted to him eternally, and would try to pay it off as much as I could over the following years, I thought.

I wept and wept, and I was so sad, but there was a bigger problem at hand: I was now a killer of more than two hundred people, and I had to escape. I walked over to my dad, when suddenly, he screamed and pointed to the street, where a tank was crawling down the road. It was aimed at my father and I, and I didn't know what to do. I couldn't run from a tank, and I deserved to die. My dad tried to run, and take me with him, but I stopped him. "I deserve this for all who I have put to death," I said, and stepped toward the tank. The man on top cursed at me, and loaded the massive gun that was mounted on top of the machine. I spread my arms out, and took out the medallion of the weird rat with French fries for eyes one last time, and stared at it. It was probably worthless, but I still wanted to hold it as a final memento. A souvenir for my travels and my trips and my experiences and my memories, all of which were about to be gone with one blast of a cannon.

Before they fired, I rubbed it with my finger, and suddenly, it started to vibrate. I mean, it started to vibrate a lot, to the point where I almost thought it might start jumping up in the air. I held fast to it, but it was causing my arm to shake, a lot. The tank people were a little befuddled at this, because they really didn't understand why at the moment of death a thirteen-year-old kid started shaking his arm like he was doing some sort of weird disco dance. Even though it was hard to concentrate and I had no idea what the hell was going on, I prayed silently that I might just go home one last time after more than two months on the run. To my great surprise, the medallion started emitting a piercing ringing sound unlike anything I had heard before. A brilliant blue beam shot out from my hand, and into the sky, and the medallion continued shaking, bounding up and down in my hand as if impatient. A burning suddenly coursed through my veins as if I had been incinerated from behind but there was no fire. Then, it stopped. The medallion just randomly subsided its tremble. Then, something bigger began.

A rumbling started in the ground shaking everyone and everything. Cars slid further into the caved - in section of the avenue. Clotheslines fell to the ground. Pots and pans clattered to the linoleum floors of the surrounding apartments. Suddenly, out of the caved area, the rock began to shake. Then, suddenly, it burst in the biggest explosion I have ever seen, with rocks smashing into houses and offices, crushing all. There was suddenly a loud caw - and out of the blue, the toucan which had brought me away from the blacksmith's lair in the first place flew out from under the rubble, and once more swept me off of my feet and carried me on its back with my dad. We both gasped in surprise, but before the people in the tank could do anything, we were gone, rising higher and higher into the sky above and finally heading back home, to 110 East Overshore Drive.

The journey was long, and it was in many ways saddening for both my father and I. We finally got a chance to exchange what had been going on in the past two months that we had been separated, and not much had changed at my house, but my mother had been worried sick for the last few months and had almost resorted to suicide many times before my dad finally agreed to go out and look for me. The only reason he was in New York that day was because he was going to go to a business meeting, the first one he had decided to attend since my disappearance, and he was going to buy a CD for one of his friends at the meeting, who was celebrating her birthday in three days time. It was only fate that our paths had crossed. I slept a lot of the time, on the steady and comfortable and furry back of the humungous bird that was now bringing us back to our starting destination. We arrived around three hours later, alighting peacefully at the edge of our street.

It seemed that nothing else was wrong in the neighborhood and not a lot had changed. A house they were building looked more complete, a dog looked older, my neighbor had had a baby girl named Sylvia. I walked down the street with a light mood. However, internally I knew I was weighed down by the immensity of my adventures and what had become of them. I was wearing a ripped black jacket. I had matches in one pocket, and I was wearing singed pants. In my palm rested a burnt gold circle that had an animal with bags of food in front of his eyes. Why? I don't know why. I had a badly stitched knee. I was bruised, and dirty. I had lived in a forest for two weeks. I had lived in a bar for a month. I had taken a trip with a man who was sexually attracted to kids and I had driven a motorcycle into a tree. I had eaten out of garbage cans. I had heard of the newest labels in brandy. I had summoned a giant bird and gotten in so much trouble a tank was going to deal with me. I had even thrown a knife into a glass advertisement at a public megastore in New York City. I had lived an adventuresome life that some can only dream of, and I have come out of it alive. As I opened the door and rushed into my mother's shaky arms and acted as the towel on which she would sob, I knew that I would never be doing anything that crazy ever again. I knew it was good to be home. But at that moment I remembered something.

When I had gotten off of the toucan, I had said, "Thank you." The toucan stared into my eyes, and then nodded like it knew what I was talking about. Then, I swear I heard it whisper "Goodbye, Gabriel." I remember turning around as my dad was beckoning to me to keep walking up the road, and then turning back to the toucan. Just then, it faded into nothing. I looked at my medallion once more. It was permanently scorched, but I could still make out the etching of a rat. Except I could see its eyes now. The bags of French fries had disappeared! I turned it over for the first time in my life, and instead of just being a blank backside, there was a message inscribed there: Only the street rat who can see past what he wants will be able to summon the Invisible Byrd. It reflected the sunlight for an instant, and then the saying was gone. I flipped the coin around to find that it had turned into just a plastic poker chip. I put it in my pocket. Invisible? I remembered walking up to my house and my neighbor waving at me. Then he came up and asked me, "How did you get here? You just came out of my house." I answered, "No I didn't! I came from a bird." The neighbor replied, "Um... I didn't see any bird." I said back, "Oh." Then kept walking. The Invisible Byrd. Seen only to the street rat who can see past what he wants. I kept on walking.