Seize the Night

amazing conspiracy of silence seemed to express and to inspire an odd sort of reverence, something dangerous lay under their performance, the same way that a sun-spangled blue sea could look so totally sacred even while great whites churned in a feeding frenzy just under the surface. This felt a little sharky.
    Although the nighthawks had climbed out of sight, Bobby and I stood staring at the constellation into which they had vanished, as if we were in full-on early Spielberg, waiting for the mother ship to appear and bathed us in white light only slightly less intense than God sheds.
    “Saw it before,” I told him.
    “Bogus.”
    “True.”
    “Insane.”
    “Maximum.”
    “When?”
    “On my way here,” I said. “Just the other side of the park. But the flock was smaller.”
    “What're they doing?”
    “I don't know. But here they come again.”
    “I don't hear them.”
    “Me neither. Or see em. But they're coming.”
    He hesitated, then slowly nodded and said, “Yeah,” when he felt it, too.
    Stars over stars under stars. A larger light that might have been Venus.
    One, two, three closely grouped flares as small meteors hit the atmosphere and were incinerated. A small winking red dot moving east to west, perhaps an airliner sailing along the interface between our sea of air and the airless sea between worlds.
    I was almost prepared to question my instinct, when, at last, the flock returned from the same part of the sky into which it had risen out of sight. Incredibly, the birds swept down into the street and past us in a helix, corkscrewing along Commissary Way, boring through the night in a whirr of wings.
    This exhibition, this incredible stunt, was so thrilling that inevitably it inspired wonder, and in wonder is the seed of joy.
    I felt my heart lift at this amazing sight, but my exhilaration was constrained by the continuing perception of a wrongness in the birds' behavior that was separate from the charming novelty of it.
    Bobby must have felt the same way, because he couldn't sustain the brief laugh of delight with which he first greeted the sight of the spiraling flock. His smile dried out as his laugh withered, and he turned to stare after the departing nighthawks with a cracking expression that was becoming less grin than grimace.
    Two blocks away, the birds twisted up into the sky, like the withdrawing funnel of a fading tornado.
    Their aerobatics had required strenuous effort, the beating of their wings had been so furious that even as the drum like pounding diminished, I could feel the reverberations of it in my ears, in my heart, in my bones.
    The birds soared out of sight once more, leaving us with just the whisper of the onshore breeze.
    “It's not over,” Bobby said.
    “No.”
    Quicker than before, the birds returned. They didn't reappear from the point at which they had vanished, instead, they came from high over the park. We heard them before we saw them, and the sound that heralded their approach was not the drumming of wings but an unearthly shrieking.
    They had broken their vow of silence, exploded it. Screeching, churring, whistling, screaking, shrilling, cricking, they hurtled down out of the stars. Their tuneless skirling was sharp enough to make my ears sting as though lanced, and the note of misery was so piercing that my soul seemed to shrivel around the cold shank of this wounding sound.
    Bobby didn't even begin to raise the shotgun.
    I didn't reach for my pistol, either.
    We both knew the birds weren't attacking. No anger resonated in their cries, only a wretchedness, a desolation so deep and bleak that it was beyond despair.
    Plummeting behind this blood-freezing wail, the birds appeared.
    They engaged in none of their previous aerobatics, forsaking even a simple formation, swarming gracelessly. Only speed mattered to them now, because speed alone served their purpose, and they dived, wings back, using gravity like a slingshot.
    With a purpose that neither Bobby nor I foresaw, they shrieked across the park, across the street, and rocketed unchecked into the face of a two-story building three doors from the movie theater in front of which we stood. They hit the structure with such brutal force that the pock-pock-pock of their bodies smashing against the stucco sounded like relentless automatic-weapons fire, combined with their shrill cries, this barrage nearly drowned out the brittle ringing of the shattered window glass.
    Horrified, sickened, I turned away from the