The streets are dark and empty but I’m still careful. I walk around the stonewalled courtyard to the back entrance where Zosi waits. The windows are black and the private quarters steeped in something like sleep. It reminds me of heading to the pharmacist’s office in the middle of the night. It reminds me of the underground subway tunnels with their smell of charred rubber.

  I tap my nails lightly against the wooden gate. The latch creeks upward and Zosi slowly pulls it open. He’s pale in the moonless shadows of the overgrown garden. He leads me down an unmarked alley - only the tall grass is slightly trampled here and there, and I hear the shuffling and heavy breathing of animals. I hear them shifting their heavy bodies and blowing air through flaring nostrils.

  Before unlocking the backdoor of the kitchen, Zosi pauses with a finger raised to his lips. He listens carefully and twists the key in the lock. It clicks open and doesn’t creak. He lights a beeswax candle and it throws tall and angled shadows of the aged furniture against the white walls.

    “Hopefully she won’t make much noise.”

  He tugs at the blanket and it slides off the round cage. The bird takes a bit to wake up and even when it does, it blinks its eyes languidly, inspecting the room. I notice the awareness in its gaze, the vibrating cunning.

    “I’ll bring you her things,” he says, folding the blanket and leaving it on the kitchen table.

    “Zosi,” I grab his arm and he turns his head. Yellow light moves across his face and his eyes grabs onto mine. “You knew better than to clean up everything by yourself.”

  The garden is dead quiet outside except for a nearby cricket who launches into trills every few seconds.

    “I’m fine.”

  I let go of him and I put on a pair of medical gloves. He returns with a bag and it reeks of someone else’s inspiration when I unzip it. Smells like roses grown in a shadowy ground-level apartment surrounded by too many trees. Smells like dresses buried at the back of the closet.

  I decide I’m not willing to risk it. If I look through her things here, how do I know it’s safe for the nuns? How long after metamorphosis are clothing and remains still contagious? How is this contagion defined, really? Is it contagion as we know it, in the first place? Who’s most likely to be affected by it? Is there a spectrum of severity or is it always full-blown? I zip it back up and place the bag on the floor. It leans against my leg. I’ll take a look later at the Holygrail when I’m alone.

    “I didn’t know what to do with them,” he says, sitting down.

  He’s breathless but not astonished. I ignore the sinking feeling in my knees.

    “I’ll take them.”

    “Say, philosopher.”

    “Yes?”

    “Do you think you’ll fall prey to it, eventually?”

  I shake my head slowly. It’s not nonchalance or indifference, just habit. I’m used to witnessing disillusionment and unfairness. I’m surprised to find Zosi wearier than he lets on.

    “I don’t know.”

    “Why did it take such strong roots in her?”

    “I don’t think she lived the way she wanted to.”

    “I wonder what she was like just afterwards. I wonder what goes on through her brain right now.”

    “She couldn’t fly,” Zosi says bitterly. “She flapped her wings but she just beat around the parking lot in circles. I caught her with ease. She didn’t seem afraid of me.”

    “And she doesn’t seem afraid now,” I point out calmly. 

    “I hear her singing in the morning. Around sunrise.”

    “Has she seen herself?”

    “There’s a mirror to your left, by the window.” I look up. “You can take her with you, if you want. The nuns only know I was taking care of its wounds.”

    “You lied.”

    “I did,” he says with a hint of a grin and I'm hopelessly impressed. “But I lie more often than you think.”

  Maybe the bird’s very presence triggers the events in the more susceptible people. But if no one knows this bird wasn’t always a bird, I suppose there’s no tempting the curious mind. Ah, inquisitive minds. Sunny was the type to never stop asking questions and coming up with arguments and counter-arguments. She liked history and hunting down answers.

  I wonder what she was like before that night. When did her skin start feeling wrong? I take my leave from Zosi and I thank him. I don’t want to stay any longer than necessary. The last thing I would want is cause trouble for him in his refuge. Walking through the humid night, I circle back to my thoughts and wonder what he’s really given me.

  Maybe it’s nothing to be thanked for. Maybe it’s something nobody wants.

  Cage dangling from my fingers, I think about the singularity. The bird is silent. Symptoms of lunacy, they’d call them, on the verge of adulthood. Maybe there’s a period where the mind is more susceptible to it. Maybe it’s different for everyone. Maybe it takes years for some and a single revelatory night for others.

  Socrates’ mind was taken by its spell and he died and fulfilled the words of Apollo’s Pythia. There was no one wiser. It’s not rewarding. Metaphysics rarely gives anything back. It’s selfish and demanding and it descends into obsession. It craves it. The need for honesty is strong in our veins. Few can bathe long in the waters of contradiction. Unless you’re a saint. What do I know, maybe you are? But I’ve met saints and they wise up real fast and leave the world to isolate themselves from its tangible limits.

  It takes and takes until you’re nothing but spirit and if it could rob you of it, it would strip it away mercilessly. But if anything, it steals your capacity for equilibrium. I wonder then, if she slipped away and died on the very high of it, what did our sweet Sunny feel? Was she roaring with electric thrills fuelled by the fulfillment of her profound fantasy or was she at odds with her resurrection? Who was she, anyway? Was she at all, even? What did Rose and Alexei really witness?

  The girl, transfigured, herself reborn and materialized from within, or a collision of dualities wrapped up in one. Elevation of human nature or powerful sin.

  Happy ending or plain fucking suicide.