Water rippled in the glass on the table. Mrs. Apple felt a tremor through the soles of her shoes. Through the window she saw a dust cloud billowing in the east over the tree line. She thought she heard a squawk. She knew she heard one now. She hurried to the door and pulled it open. A monster of a bird raced by and she slammed the door shut.

  Feathered drakuls.

  Shakily, she locked her door and stepped back to stare at the jiggling handle - her windows rattling, dust she’d meant to get to sprinkling the living room floor in a way that reddened her cheeks.

  She hurried for the dustpan but froze when she heard another squawk, this one a bellow so deep it tickled her ears to hear it and left them ringing.

  Another trampling, squawking tirade storming past in a gust of dust and spattering debris.

  And then stillness. Silence.

  She noticed her heavy breathing. In, out, her heart drumming thump, thump, thump.

  She stood there utterly still; and then, on impulse, she grabbed the ladle in her sink, clutching it tightly in white knuckles.

  Slowly, she headed toward the front door. She gripped its knob but stopped; she couldn't will herself to turn it. There, she stood in stillness. In silence.

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  Suddenly, the logs supporting her ceiling imploded in a splintering mess of wood shards and dangling beams. And there, on her floor, was the Flowers’ boy. What was his name again? The rotten bastard of a boy. The pest! The nuisance!

  She saw his eyes widen and, with her own, found the source of his sudden panic. A monster of a bird, all of twelve feet high, stood huffing and puffing at the doorway the impact left swinging ajar, his grotesquely massive, clawed feet and knobby carrot-orange legs visible up to the sticky under-feathers of his abdomen; his monstrous head was visible; he stared inside dead-eyed through a hole in the ceiling up above. The boy – Windston is his name! – hurled himself into the bird and they tumbled together down her beautiful porch steps, utterly pulverizing them.

  Suddenly enraged, the old woman hurried out into the sunlight and, with her ladle overhead, let out a squawk of her own as she rushed the nearest bird.

  Another bird saw her. It snatched her, and slung her, her ribs crunching, her wind gone, her mouth salty, her limbs tingling, her eyes all but bursting from immense pressure and a sudden fire in her belly, a gagging like she never felt before.

  The monster released its bite or she ripped apart, flew away, weightless. She could see the Flowers’ boy but he couldn’t see her. She could only hear her own screams, until, suddenly, they were cut short. There was a warm and tingling feeling from front to back, almost a tickle as her organs slid from her open upper half, her bottom half still tumbling – kicking, kicking, kicking as it tumbled.

  The last thing she saw, as she lay there, in half, bleeding out, was the boy’s face. Windston Flowers’s face. It was blood-smudged with drakul blood, feathers pasted to that one side, his cheek. It was otherwise neutral, if not disgusted or disturbed.

  But he was pushed aside. And as she gargled and gagged and choked, and the darkness as the world faded kicked in, the last things she saw, as they were close enough to see, were the nostrils of Bo Beeman's bulbous Beeman nose. He’d knelt to tell her she'd be okay.