What Archie said … the two words that struck far more terror into our hearts than an attack from a thousand Terror Birds … were these: Where’s Daffney?

We found out

Daffney was dead.

A makeshift … I don’t know what to call it. Surely, not a morgue. Just a place where the medics had assembled the wounded and collected the … the …

I can’t say it. Not about Daffney. Not about that little pistol of good cheer. That indomitable explosion of bullet-proof joy. That effervescent babble of words and songs and dances and … and …

The experience of finding her little body laid out on a tree stump in the meadow behind Park Department headquarters was incredible. Literally. As in exactly what the word means: Not Credible.

Having spotted her from afar, we moved in her direction silently, eerily. Like mummies. Our movements echoing creatures swathed in bandages from a 1930s horror movie. I was to Clay’s right. Archie rode on his left shoulder, his claws gripping the fabric of Clay’s shirt as if holding on for dear life. We walked forward without saying a word.

When we arrived at the tree stump, Archie hopped down and stood on its flat surface, right beside his beloved. But something was wrong. Terribly. Terribly wrong.

Whoever had brought Daffney to the meadow from where she had fallen at the Pickerell Lagoon had laid her out as if she had been a regular, normal, standard-issue chickadee, with boring straight legs, and had extended them flat against the tree stump. It was horrible. Horrible. As if a purveyor of perversion had yanked the branches of a weeping willow tree up instead of down, so that they reached vertically toward the sky like cheerleaders with pompoms, instead of flowing gently downward, as weeping willows do.

A distortion. A miscarriage. A fabrication.

Archie bent his head and gently … ever so gently, he touched his beak first to one knee; then to the other. He quickly jerked his head out of the way as if knowing beforehand that each knee was going to spring up and bend backward. In recalling that moment, we probably should have been shocked into thinking that maybe … just maybe … Daffney was still alive or had come back to life.

But it didn’t.

We knew that it was a post-mortem reflex. Nature reclaiming itself. A tree branch swinging back to its original position after a hiker pushed it out of the way.

At the same time that we were trying to absorb the dismal reality of Daffney’s death, other birds … thousands and thousands of songbird-warriors from the Avian Airforce … were doing the same for those who had met the same fate as Dafney. They had fought as a cohesive flying unit, but they were mourning the members of their own flocks as individuals. Just as were we.

Do you know what the word requiem means? I had to look it up in the dictionary.

“re·​qui·​em: a noun that can mean a Mass for the dead, or a musical composition based on, or any literary work inspired by it.”

Sad, huh?

Well, as we stood looking down at our dead lost friend, off in the not too far distance, thousands upon thousands of songbirds joined their voices and were singing their requiem. While they sang theirs, we thought ours. How to describe the … the … paean to their teeny, tiny, wisps of feather-and-bone, brave and bold companions? Their requiem did not have a melody. Not in the conventional sense. But the way their warbles, twitters, chirrups, and voices joined and parted, rose and fell … it was so beautiful. So poignant. So catastrophically expressive of everything from grief to joy to pride to strength to loss to celebration to … some celebratory sort of sad exhilaration, that it broke one’s heart.

As we stood there and listened, we did not at first realize that Rochester and Stella, our goldfinch friends, and Nigel and Gwyndolyn, our tufted titmouse friends – valiant leaders of their respective Avian armies -- had joined us and were perched on nearby shrubs. Rochester … or perhaps Stella … and gone back to my house to get Florence, our itty, bitty cherished swan. She, whose job it was in our fight against the Terror Bird, to represent all that we were fighting for: the right to live a safe and secure life, free of hostilities, in our own homes.

I don’t remember (if I ever knew) when Byron, our heroic and injured dragon fly, joined us at the tree stump. But he did. One wing bandaged. The other three glistening like magical crystals in the sun.

Nobody said anything. That was the weird thing. By then, I perfectly understood the language of chickadees, finches, tufted titmouses, dragonflies, and even swans. But … how did five songbirds, a swan, and a dragonfly come to agree on what had to be done? By what strange medium had they communicated? With the blink of an eye? With a flutter of wing tips? With their minds?

Certainly, not with words.

They had loved Daffney, the chickadee with the joyous heart and backward knees, as much as we did. But we … Clay and I … were not part of their mixed flock. Perhaps we felt as if we were, but … not really. So, it was not for us to dictate, or even contribute to their plans.

All we could do was be awed by them. Awed. Dumbstruck. Inspired. And ultimately, feel that our hearts had been wretched out of our bodies and that our spirits had been reborn. Both at the same time.

What happened was this:

While Archie still stood beside her on the tree trunk, Rochester and Nigel gently lifted Daffney onto the Giant Chickadee’s back. They fell away so that Stella and Gwyndolyn could arrange Archie’s feathers around Daffney’s little body in such a way that her backward knees would not be disturbed while her little body was held firmly in place.

Then, just like that, without a twitter, a tweet, or a dee-dee-dee, Archie stretched out his wings and soared up, up, up into the air. Higher and Higher in the late afternoon sun.

Byron the dragonfly, with as much speed, but gracelessly, because of his damaged wing, also rose skyward.

We all craned our heads upward, the songbird requiem filling our ears, minds, and hearts like a weird and wonderful aurora borealis of sound.

And … high … high overhead. We saw it. Frame by frame. As if it were a slow-motion movie. First, Byron caught, grabbed, and concentrated sunlight onto the glistening surface of his good upper wing. Simultaneously, Archie released Daffney’s body into the air in such a way that instead of falling, it seemed to have been caught by a current of air, and flew … flew … like a fairy spirit instead of …

I can’t say it.

Just then, Byron steeply angled his wing and he aimed a white-hot beam of light right at Daffney. Aimed it quickly. Aimed it surely. And aimed it so exactly that we could barely distingue the light beam from the explosive, bright, burst of fiery white light that resulted when Daffney burst into flames.

A bright, white ball of fire that lingered against the blue, blue sky for a long moment, like the explosive burst of Fourth of July fireworks.

And then. Like our precious little Daffney … disappeared.

Copyright © Shelly Reuben, 2026. Shelly Reuben’s books have been nominated for Edgar, Prometheus, and Falcon awards. For more about her writing, visit www.shellyreuben.com