Birds of a Feather

No one ever meant to end up on Flaming Dingo Road. It wasn’t on any map, at least not the official ones. It was the kind of place that found you when you were lost, or when you were looking for something you shouldn’t be.

The road began just past the dry hills outside Barrow’s Crossing, a single strip of cracked asphalt that vanished into orange dust. The locals warned travelers to turn around at the first rusted sign: KEEP DRIVING OR STAY FOREVER.

Most folks laughed. But then, most folks never came back to tell the joke twice.

A pale sky hung overhead that evening, the color of watered-down milk. The sun was sinking into the horizon, yet no shadow stretched long; the light faded, like a breath held too long and released too slowly.

Darla Winstead was the first to see them, birds. There were thousands of them.

They lined the telephone wires like beads on a string, motionless, black against the dimming sky. Darla stopped her truck and leaned out the window.

“Starlings?” she asked herself.

But they didn’t move, didn’t chatter or shift. They were silent, still, identical, every wing, every eye, every curve of the beak the same.

A ripple of unease passed through her as she began to drive again. The road wound deeper into the valley, past abandoned trailers and a junkyard half-swallowed by dust.

The birds followed. No matter how far Darla went, they clung to the lines above, a perfect mirrored formation, stretched beyond sight.

By the time she reached the old roadhouse, a squat building with flaking paint and a flickering neon sign that read The Flock, the night had thickened. The air tasted like rain, though the ground was bone dry.

Inside, a few patrons sat motionless at the bar. Each one turned to look at her in the same slow, deliberate way.

“You new?” the bartender asked. His voice was friendly, but his smile didn’t touch his eyes.

“Passing through,” Darla said.

“No one passes through Flaming Dingo Road,” he said softly, polishing a glass that didn’t need it.

The other patrons echoed his words, not quite in unison, but close enough to make Darla’s stomach twist. She tried to laugh it off, but the sound came out lean.

“Sure,” she said. “Well, maybe I’ll make an exception.”

Outside, the wind began to hum, a low vibration that seemed to crawl up her spine. The birds screamed all at once, a shrill, metallic sound like tearing sheet metal.

Then, silence again.

She left the bar and hurried toward her truck, but the air was different now, thicker. The road no longer looked like asphalt but something darker, slicker, as though it were breathing.

A figure stepped from the shadows. It was a man, at least, it had the shape of one.

His clothes were decades out of date, his eyes reflecting the starlight too brightly. When he smiled, his teeth glinted like polished stone.

“You’re one of us now,” he said.

Darla backed away. “I don’t even know what that means.”

“Birds of a feather,” he whispered.

Behind him, the flock stirred again, thousands of wings folding in the same rhythm. The telephone wires shivered under their collective weight.

“Birds of a feather flock together,” the man continued, his voice blending with the wind. “And the flock always grows.”

The world tilted. The ground liquefied beneath Darla’s feet, replaced by something that pulsed, alive, vast, incomprehensible, and the stars above rearranged themselves into spirals, into eyes.

She saw faces forming in the constellations, each one the same, each one hers. She screamed, but no sound came, as the air tore open.

When Darla woke, she was standing on the road again. The sky was pale, the sun bleeding weakly through the haze.

Her truck was gone. Darla’s skin felt too tight, her heartbeat distant and mechanical.

She turned toward the telephone lines. The birds were still there, watching.

One tilted its head, and so did she. Another blinked, and her eyelids twitched in perfect rhythm.

She raised a trembling hand and saw feathers where fingers had been.

The others arrived soon after, unlucky travelers, stragglers, wanderers chasing a shortcut or scenic routes. They all stopped at The Flock, and they all stayed.

The bartender poured drinks for newcomers with the same empty smile, the same steady eyes. No one noticed how the patrons sat at the same stools, night after night.

No one noticed how the birds multiplied, or how the air shimmered faintly, as though reality were a thin film stretched over something immense and breathing beneath. And above it all, the birds watched, hundreds, then thousands, each one a reflection of the last.

When the wind blows across Flaming Dingo Road, it carries a faint whisper, a thing between a rustle of wings and a human sigh. Birds of a feather flock together, it says.

And somewhere beneath that endless sky, they still do.