I am a journalist living in a rge city with my partner who is a doctor. Our rent is surprisingly cheap for the area, but to get to our door you have to pass through sawgrass that will shred your legs if you’re not wearing long pants. Our ndlord refuses to remove the pnts, citing “legal reasons.”

  My partner has something of a reputation for providing care to those who get denied or turned away elsewhere. They tell me about their most recent patient, a woman who cims to have been attacked by a rhinoceros. No one else believes her, but the two of us have seen a number of strange things involving out of pce animals tely.

  The sky goes dark with millions of birds and a million more crash to the ground and die. Walking out into the streets filled with bird corpses, the city suddenly feels oddly empty. I would think more people would be wandering out to gawk at the morbid spectacle.

  Time passes and it becomes clear that many, many people have gone missing and that the birds that appeared are previously-extinct passenger pigeons.

  Another journalist of my acquaintance helps me sneak into a cndestine meeting of scientists and government officials by causing distractions and holding open elevator doors. The how and the why are still baffling, but as I listen in on the discussion my own nagging suspicions are confirmed. It seems that the passenger pigeons all used to be the people who have gone missing. It’s hypothesized that the ones who crashed and died in the initial minutes are those who were too disoriented by their newfound state to figure out how to fly properly before hitting the ground.

  I wonder who the rhinoceros used to be.