The Silencer

“You’re not a protected species, are you?” Casey asked the ghostly white figure in the darkness.

The Barn Owl, perched atop the chair at the other end of her kitchen dining table, peered back at her through keen black pearls.

Casey read from her phone, the glow cast onto her face exposing dark rings under her eyes that only hinted at her exhaustion.

“Hell, why not? Let’s make this even worse.” she sighed, as she switched her phone to torchlight and put it down on the table.

Casey was a pale, heavy set woman nearing forty, with a lone grey hair that caught the light, shining silver, determined to stand out from her unruly tangle of brown curls. The sleeves on her checkered flannel shirt were rolled up to her elbows.

On the table beside her there was an empty two litre CocaCola bottle, a roll of silver duct tape, a pair of scissors and an old, long neglected looking rifle.

She looked back at the owl, then she took the cap from the bottle and hoop shot it into sink behind her.

For a moment the owl bobbed its head from one side to the other in a strange dance, then it was still again.

“For what it’s worth I know my brother’s ideas about you are ridiculous.” she told the owl as she slid the long black barrel of the gun into the bottle. “I can’t even pretend they make sense to me, but I’m worried he might …”

The owl tilted its head in the silence of her unfinished sentence.

“Unravel again.” she said, pushing down the quaver in her voice as she started to wrap the duct tape around the mouth of the bottle, to fasten it to the gun barrel. “I need him to know I’m on his side no matter what.”

The owl watched her, motionless, its heart shaped disc face of tiny white feathers like a Greek theatre mask as it gripped the chair with sharp black talons. Its long wings, covered in soft, patterned brown and grey feathers, tucked in around its body.

“So if he says you’re some demon ghost who needs to be destroyed so he won’t be, I guess that’s what you are.” said Casey, resigned.

The owl puffed out its feathers, shook out its wings, then shook its head. It dropped its head, and seemed to nuzzle its white feathered belly for a moment before raising its head again and settling back into pose, feathers shrinking into place.

“He’s got it in his head that you 'know something’. It’s so nuts.” Casey found herself explaining to the owl, as she clumsily wrapped the tape around. “This whole thing about owls being wise is a myth anyway, isn’t it? I mean I’m not trying to insult you, I’m not saying you’re stupid. It’s just that at the end of the day you’re a bird and not even the smartest type of bird. Ravens and crows don’t bother him at all, and some of them can rival apes in studies of intelligence… “

Casey tried to pull back some tape that had creased and stuck together, without success. She roughly wrapped over it, then changed her mind, and pulled the tape back again. She frowned as her fingers got stuck in the tape. In pulling them out she also pulled away most of the tape she had just wrapped around the mouth of the bottle.

She sighed deeply.

The owl winked one eye at her.

“I’m sorry for rambling. I’m not keen to do this.” she admitted. “It’s not much of a choice. If I can just get this thing to work I’ll get it over with and send you to your beautiful afterlife, or wherever. I just don’t want to make any noise because …”

Casey closed her eyes. When she opened them again she saw the owl, without distraction, for perhaps the first time since she sat down at the table. The bird looked back at her, apparently intrigued.

“You know, you’re the symbol of Athena.” she told the owl, with a faint smile.

The owl turned its head one hundred and eighty degrees, looking behind, then turned its head back to Casey.

“So, really, it’s on her to save you.” she nodded. “But gods are pretty selective about who gets saved or not, aren’t they?”

Casey flicked a glance at the tiny yellow tulips on the peeling wallpaper. They matched the pattern in the netting curtains fluttering gently in the breeze from the open window behind her.

“I mean take poor Medusa. Poseidon rapes her in Athena’s temple but Medusa’s the one Athena turns into a monster, for ruining the vibe in her temple or something.” Casey shrugged. “There’s a school of thought that she did it to save Medusa from future harm. If nobody could even look at her without being turned to stone, nobody could hurt Medusa that way again.”

The owl brushed its head beneath the top of its wing, nipping out an imperfect feather.

“I don’t buy it.” Casey winced to the owl, as she cut a small piece of tape and placed it over the lip of the bottle. “I think Athena just knew better than to challenge Poseidon about what he did, so she blamed and monstered Medusa instead. If it was dangerous to look at her, nobody was allowed to see what was done to her. What else could anyone really expect from a Daddy’s girl like Athena anyway, am I right?”

The owl lowered its head and seemed to shake a disappointed “no”.

Casey cut another piece of tape.

“Athena, the goddess of wisdom and warfare, was born without a mother, conceived in the mind of her father Zeus.” she informed the owl. “That’s if you ignore the myths that actually do mention her mother Metis, who was swallowed whole by Zeus while she was pregnant with Athena. Some of those myths say he forced the pregnancy on her, too.”

Casey placed the tape over the lip of the bottle and smoothed it down with fingernails bitten down to the quick.

"Of course Zeus’ father Cronos also ate his own children. Zeus was the one who had to rescue his brothers and sisters from his father’s belly.” she said, without looking up from her task.

The owl let out a hoot, and regained her attention.

Casey smiled, with a tip of an imaginary hat to the owl.

“I hope you’re enjoying the benefits of my useless unfinished degree in classical literature, my friend. My studies confirm that all the greatest gods came from hopelessly messed up families, just so you know.”

The owl hooted again.

Casey started to cut small pieces of masking tape from the roll and line them up in a row along the edge of the table.

“It was, in fact, the Romans who gave us the word family, or ‘familia’.” she said, in a history lecturer tone. “Originally it meant the wife, children and domestic slaves - ‘famulus’ means slave - owned by one man. He had absolute paternal power over his children, including the right to kill them if he wanted to.”

She stopped dead, inadvertently struck by her own words.

She looked through the open door beside her, where a staircase stained in reddish brown varnish led to pitch darkness above.

The owl turned its head to the staircase and then back to Casey.

Casey took a breath then started attaching the pieces of tape to the bottle and the gun barrel again.

“The Roman patheon of gods is pretty similar to the Greek one.” she said, resuming her ancient history lesson for the owl. “Zeus is Jupiter, Cronos is Saturn, Poseidon is Neptune, Athena becomes Minerva. In Minerva’s version of the Medusa story, Medusa isn’t a rape victim. Minerva turns her into a monster after she sees Medusa kissing Neptune, dishonouring her temple. The rest of the story’s the same.”

Casey realised she had run out of tape pieces, and pondered for moment whether or not to cut more.

The owl tilted its head again, curious.

“Athena and Minverva were each known as the ‘protectress of heroes’, both of them worshipped for a military victory.” Casey went on. “And each of them also helped the young hero Perseus slay Medusa, the Gorgon monster in the end.”

Pain flickered into her eyes as she paused.

“Perseus, who had to kill Medusa to save his mother from a predatory king.”

Casey picked up her handiwork to inspect it more closely, then put it down again.

She started to roll tape around the join once more, but smoothing it down carefully along the way this time.

“The word hero comes from the Greek word hērōs, which means ‘warrior’, ‘protector’ or ‘defender’.” she said, cutting the tape and smoothing it a final time, finished.

For a moment she stared at the weapon, stock-still.

“My father was a war hero.” she revealed, tracing her finger over the the trigger of the rifle. “He was also the most terrifying person I’ve known in my whole life.”

Casey looked at her hands as a breeze from behind her blew across the back of her neck.

“I mean I’m not blaming him entirely.” she confided in the owl. “I know he was traumatised. That’s the part of the hero’s story they never really deal with, isn’t it? How he lives afterwards, with the war still going on in his mind. My father survived battle zones that claimed the lives of countless others, and saw horrors I can scarcely imagine. But he also became the greatest source horror in our lives. And the gods didn’t care, because we mere mortals didn’t matter to them. Nobody wants to hear the story about the brave warrior who is also the monster his own family must survive, do they?”

She looked at the owl, as it watched her passively.

“People say he lost control when my mother finally left him, but that’s not true. Or at least, not the way they think. He behaved the way he did because he’d lost control over us, not himself. His life only 'spiralled out of control’, once he could no longer be the one in control.”

The owl closed its eyes then opened them again.

Casey sighed. “You want me to just come out and tell you what happened, don’t you? That’s fair.”

She looked at the rifle again as she started to remember.

“He turned up at our new address, the one he wasn’t even supposed to know. He kicked in the front door and chased us upstairs, where we had nowhere to run from him. He was shouting at my mother, screaming like a madman, with the gun pointed right in her face. Yelling,” her voice dropped an octave and boomed with rage, “Who the fuck do you think you are, woman?! Did you really think you could run from me?!!’.

Casey started to shake.

“I’m ashamed to say it, but until that moment, in spite of everything I’d seen him to do to her in the past, I was on my father’s side. I blamed my mother for the way he was, for the way everything was. That’s how it works, isn’t it? Mothers get all the blame with none of the credit.”

She looked at the wallpaper again, wretched with regret.

“But now, even I could see what he was. I was only ten, but I knew he was there to end all our lives. Lives that belonged to him, not us. I was so afraid I couldn’t breathe.”

Casey’s eyes welled with tears as she was assailed by her memories, reliving the terror.

“And then my thirteen year old brother did the most incredible thing. He put his chest at the butt of the gun and started shouting back, all his fear turned into boiling rage. He screamed, ‘Do it! I’d rather be dead than be your son for one more second."

Casey broke out of her mental siege and noticed the owl again.

“My father froze, turned to stone. He went as white as your feathers. Then he turned the gun on himself."

Casey sat nodding quietly to herself.

“His own was the only life he took that night after all, and yet it wasn’t. None of us have ever fully recovered from it. Least of all my brother. He saved us in that moment because he was willing to die, and it’s taken me years to realise this, but the reason he’s struggled to stay alive ever since is because he had no plan to live beyond it. Not with the blast ringing forever in his ears, and the feel of his father’s sprayed blood, warm on his face. He’s so haunted by it. I mean we all are, but …”

Casey looked at the owl again. She laughed to herself.

“This is why I have to kill you quietly.” she said, tapping on the Coke bottle. “And by the way, I wouldn’t have to kill you at all if you’d had the sense to piss off somewhere else or at least keep your goddam noise down. We both know how hard I’ve been trying to shoo you away from here, without success, don’t we?.”

The owl yawned.

“Do you have any idea how much trouble you’ve caused? Your eerily well timed hoots and screeches have been driving him batshit crazy. I thought he was paranoid and out of his head when he was still doing drugs, but this has been taking things to a whole new level.” Casey shook her head. “Somehow he believes that you’re our dead father, or sent by him or both - I’m not even sure what he believes, to be truthful. I just know he absolutely loses his mind every time he sees you.”

The owl closed its eyes and wobbled its head, rubbing its beak on the edge of the table.

“So you just had to go and fly into our house, didn’t you?” she said incredulous, as she gestured to the open window. “Seriously?? Even I was a bit freaked out by that one, but my brother’s hysterical over it. He’s locked in his car, hiding from you, right now. He won’t come back inside until … I’ve defeated you.”

Casey reluctantly picked up the rifle.

The owl straightened up again, poised on the chair, staring at her.

“What else can I say, my friend? You brought this on yourself.” she said, as she moved in slow and close to the bird, and took her final aim.

The owl did not move, completely unperturbed.

Suddenly, Casey burst into sobs, overwhelmed with shame.

“I’m sorry. I know it’s shitty to to target you instead of forcing him to face his real demons, I just don’t know what else to do. He’s been hanging by a thread for so long, and I’m really afraid. I have to save his life, because he’s the only thing left in mine. He was a hero when I needed one, so I have to be the same for him. It’s our job to protect each other. Even from the mythical threats. You understand, don’t you?”

The owl looked back at her in serene stillness, and Casey pulled herself together again.

“I knew you would. You’re very wise.” she said reverently.

Then she fired a single shot.