To Whoooooom it May Concern

“To Whoooooom do you refer?” the barn owl asked himself aloud, as he did nearly every evening at precisely midnight.

It was an odd, open-ended question, as forever he knew it would be. Although he asked thrice, each time in crescendo, he knew that no one dared answer. His crimson-lined heartface impressively rotated over his broad chest, expanding in all directions, looking for the slightest movement: a rustle, a breath, an irregular heartbeat from under the snow. A children’s taunt, sing-sung in feathered moonbeams, focused for a moment in his mind, ”thrice a night entice the mice…a meal of two will never do…..”

How silently the darkness swallowed his question, how quickly his words dissipated into the deep snow. His frozen eyes caught a side-shadow, revealed only by a slight quiver in the air, the single sign of a successful escape of one of his houseguests into a crevice etched in the wall of his home.

His mind wandered again to a long-ago time of nursery rhymes and open skies; fragments of color and movement and primal cries, creating concentric circles of memories that swirled in shapes and patterns both strangley familiar and inexorably inaccessible to him anymore. He summoned his voice.

“To Whoooooom do you refer?” the barn owl asked his question a second time, noticing that if possible, the stillness had become stiffer, more taught with tension— a spiderweb being slowly stretched apart, stopped just shy of snapping.

The starless night sky responded to his question with a slight shudder, imperceptible to most. Even the wind drew a long deep breath and withheld its exhale, exposing a moment in time without movement; the excruciating impossibility of now—forever rebirthing itself, forever dying unto itself, present only to the ever- present.

The owl’s question loomed in the pregnant air, which rearranged itself in receding waves, as if to distance itself from the silent, inevitable answer. At attention stood every living creature, even in sleep-state remaining as still as a single frozen teardrop, fearful of falling and creating splinters of broken ice and shards of glass. At stake their very existence, this moment in time, this deadly invitation.

The owl steadied himself and allowed the ancient knowing to fill his senses with clarity. His head sharply turned toward the space in between the silence–where fear lie in wait–suspending into thin air his dare, dangled into a space devoid of time or even a gossamer of light. Now, he detected one small, syncopated stroke, deadly out of place.

“To Whoooooom do you refer?” the barn owl asked again, this final time a screeched offering to his prey, a spraying of grace before the violent swoop of his talons dug beneath the sacrificial dirt to the exact coordinates of his dinner, finding purchase in the trembling sinews vibrating the snow above, connecting and betraying at once a tiny heart to its benefactor. A gasp of surprise before its sudden stopping. A clock strikes.

This moment, a truth as real as death, as life itself, softening the edges of uncertainty, these fingers caressing chaos into one timeless pulse, until illusion and reality become as one. Weightless and wordless, the space between is, was and will-be disappears; this moment becomes all, breathing in and out within its perfect fullness. This moment, ever becoming now, and ever immediately unbecoming.

As if given permission to breathe again, the ground itself heaved a slow sigh. Shadows re-threaded their patient pilgrimages, and a tentative flapping of far-away wings echoed in the darkness. As the wind finally exhaled, the barn owl replied with satisfaction to himself, as he did nearly every evening, ”To Whooooooom it may concern, of course.”