The Owl

Cam stared out the car window, she had never been more aware of how her lips felt just resting against one another. The sound of hands shuffling around the steering wheel tugged her back to reality, in the car with Jay. Usually, the drive to Cam’s parents’ house was accompanied by a fight, usually over a misunderstanding.

This time, there was nothing to miss. A rock that size on a ring can only mean one thing. Her silence could only mean another.

The car pulled up to the house. Cam turned to Jay, his thoughts weighing on his mind. He sighed and met her eyes. “Call me?” he sounded exhausted as if he had been arguing throughout the whole car ride. Maybe, in his mind, he was. She nodded and they kissed goodnight on instinct. His lips felt cold on hers.

Cam locked the front door from the inside and saw the headlights drive away. The lights in the house flicked on. Ed leaned on the doorframe to the living room wearing nothing but a woman’s silk robe, “I would have slipped into something less comfortable… but this is so silky!”

Cam chuckled half-heartedly and Ed’s face dropped, immediately noticing something wrong. “Are you ok?” he asked, then he worried “did you tell him?”

“No,” she said, “he... proposed.”

“Oh…”, Ed tightened the robe to cover himself, this was serious, “what did you say?”

“Nothing at all”, Cam walked past him into the living room, glad to find two full glasses of wine on the coffee table. She drinks out of one, and addressed Ed without looking at him: “You should go now”.

A soft meow catches Cam’s attention. Peter – who she was in charge of feeding – pawed at the fireplace cover. Cam picked him up looking for some comfort while Ed shuffled back into his clothes. Peter struggled to get out of Cam's embrace and ran back to the fireplace. Cam kept waiting for Ed to wrap his arms around her, he never did.

“Will you call me?” he asked from across the room. She nodded, then walked him out. They kissed at the door, their lips barely touched.

Now alone, Cam sipped on the second glass of wine, processing the fact that, on a night where she and her lover were going to kick off a week together, her estranged partner proposed. Though she tried, the incessant meowing kept her from focusing. There was something bothering Peter, and he zeroed in on the fireplace.

Cam finally got up and removed the fireplace cover. A white mass of feathers stumbled out under a cloud of dust. Both Cam and Peter yelped as the barn owl fluttered around trying to fly with its atrophied wings. When Cam jumped back, her leg hit the coffee table, knocking over the glasses of wine that shattered on the ground.

Peter focused, and pounced at the owl. The bird, in its frightened confusion, cut its feet on the shards of glass. It freaked out further, waving its wings up and down and letting out a high-pitched shriek of pain. Peter quickly hid behind the couch watching the owl flap its wings enough to land upon the mantel and peck at its injured feet.

Still standing where she was, Cam watched the bird in disbelief. But there was no time to be shocked, there was a whole love life she still needed to figure out and she couldn't it with the bird in the house. Cam wouldn't mind keeping the owl until it left on its own, Peter would.

With her eyes on the bird, Cam slowly made her way across the room. The owl immediately snapped its gaze toward Cam. The bird stared daggers as the woman opened a window and slowly stepped away from the owl's path, settling into a standoff.

"Look," Cam finally addressed the owl, after what felt like an hour, "I’m not going to touch you. I don't think you will let me, so--" she made a shoo gesture with her hands toward the window. Both Peter and the owl stared waiting for a better move. They are an unimpressed audience.

Cam let out a grunt of frustration, rubbing her temples. “Maybe I should have said yes to Jay,” she said leaning against the wall, “I always overfeed Peter, he would have been fine without dinner, but you? Looks like you have been there for at least a few hours. You wouldn’t have made it.”

The owl - mirroring Cam's indifference toward it - moved on to peck at its wings, opening them and knocking picture frames off the mantel. A photo of Cam's smiling parents hit the ground and landed unscathed. But when a photo of Cam and Jay hit the ground, the frame broke to pieces. Cam stared back at the owl as if it had chosen that photo on purpose. When Cam's father told the couple to smile at the camera, he had no idea that, just minutes before, a huge fight nearly ended his daughter's relationship.

She couldn't help but feel relief at the sight of the broken frame. But the owl wasn't done, it still had to knock a photo of little Cam playing with seashells to the ground. The glass shattered and Peter, watching from behind the couch, hissed at the sound.

Annoyed, the owl flapped its wings, warming up for flight. It took off and chased after Peter. Losing no time, Cam chased after the bird. And before the owl could follow Peter into the kitchen, Cam felt her hands grab hold of the owl's body. It furiously flapped its wings, hitting Cam in the face and getting feathers in her eyes. Half-blind and yelping, Cam managed to rush to the open window and throw the owl out, closing the window as hard as she could after the bird.

There was a brief moment of disbelief where Cam and Peter stared at each other at a loss. Standing in a mess of broken glass and owl feathers, all Cam wanted was a glass of wine.

Peter meowed from the kitchen wanting to be a part of the cleanup effort, not understanding his bloody little paws would make for an even bigger mess if he stepped on the glass. He quickly went back to his overfilled bowl of food, a welcome distraction as Cam continued to sweep up the living room. Her mind so absent she missed something, a twinkle in the rubble. Ed’s wedding ring. He always took it off when he and Cam were together, she had seen him place it up on the mantel at his own house before. He must have done the same thing there. And while the engagement ring hung on Cam's mind all night, Ed's wedding ring was lost for good when the owl brushed it off the mantel.