On the night of the red birds, the clouds were almost sinking into the gunmetal waves. I tried to follow them, trotting along the shore in my bare feet, relishing the cooling of the evening.

There was a pyre on the beach still fuming, chars sputtering finally in the gray mist. A forgotten mustard squeezy the only sign left behind of the barbecue. Beyond, two men entwined and sleepy on a big Jaws towel.

I stooped occasionally to pluck a small treasure from the sand, a sea star or a piece of smooth-worn glass and plain smoky pebbles which held their own kind of beauty on a night like this.

I saw them then, flickering from the mouth of the forest as the day grew away from me. Twin red boils boring out of the darkness. Then, another pair and another. Closer, their eerie calls like an oboe. Jagged crimson wingspans.

I’d known the bay for as long as I’d been alive, but I had never seen the red birds before. There were stories that went way back in these parts about restless spirits with embers for eyes, harbingers, scavengers that fed on carrion, tales of abandoned canoes and carnelian plumes sticky in the remnants of nearby carnage. A dark force was behind the flock, eager to keep the region free from infiltrators, commanding the winged army from a secret lair deep in the woods.

Though I’d long grown out of nursery rhymes, I felt uneasy. No doubt these were the same summer tanagers that gathered in my front yard birdbath, illuminated eerily by the last rays of the red sun sinking under the pines.

When I’d found my way to my boat around another bend, the pregnant moon was close enough to touch and the twinkling lights of my cottage beckoned on the facing shore.

I pushed off into the quiet depths, coasting out into the silence. From the lake I saw one of the men stand and brush sand from his sunburned face, the beautiful long lines of his body glowing in the lunar light. His lover stretched out, catlike, then shimmied into wet shorts and rolled up the towel.

The motor sputtered, then caught, and I was off.

Looking back, there were more and more red birds gathering in the clearing, the spot before the bay was swallowed by the woods. They swooped and looped like bats in the twilight, velvet wings streaking blood across the spattering of stars.

I never felt as alive as I did when I was out there in the wild, in the place I was born and raised. I was never afraid. But now I felt something dark and ancient in the air. The ululating trill of their calls felt savage and ominous. I was spooked. I chided myself for being childish, but even so, I was relieved to see the lovers ambling back to the road where I’d seen their jeep parked.

When I pulled up to the dock at home and cut the motor the world was silent but for the gentle lapping of the lake. The requisite barking of excitement began, and our Lab ran down the slope and plunged into the water to greet me. I could smell trout on the grill and Jim waved as he followed Daisy towards me.

I didn’t get the news for a few days, when we went into town for sundries and stopped for iced lattes at the local café. A leftover newspaper on the table had headlines about a car crash. Two men from the city drove off the road at a hairpin turn, their jeep found upside down in flames in the ditch. The paper said that their burned bodies looked like they’d been pecked at by buzzards, but they had identified the driver and passenger from the license plates on the vehicle.

I stood abruptly and Jim looked up, startled, then rose to pay for our drinks. The barista gave me a sympathetic glance. Shame, isn’t it? she said. We so seldom see outsiders here. They must have been drinking. I stumbled to the car, clutching the paper, with Jim behind me. The grassy walkway was covered in yarrow and scarlet feathers.

*Publisher’s Note:

Daria Petrilli (born 1970) is an artist and illustrator who lives and works in Rome, but her award-winning works are exhibited internationally. The enchantment of the Italian Renaissance and the underground language of Pop Surrealism meet in her paintings, which feature surreal, ethereal, and unattainable female figures, often portrayed with animals. The Lady of the Ibis may be viewed at LUMAS Art Space.

See also Petrelli’s website; under Artworks, click on the “Load More” button, scroll down about eight rows, and the painting with six red birds appears on the right: https://www.dariapetrilli.eu/

Lorette C. Luzajic

writes, edits, publishes, and teaches prose poetry and small fictions, usually ekphrastic. Her own fiction and prose poems have appeared in Bending Genres, The Citron Review, The Disappointed Housewife, Flash Boulevard, Ghost Parachute, MacQueen’s Quinterly, New Flash Fiction Review, Trampset, Unbroken, and beyond. Her works have been nominated for Best of the Net, the Pushcart Prize, Best Microfiction, and Best Small Fictions. Two of her flashes were chosen for Best Small Fictions anthologies.

She’s also the author of five collections of small fictions and/or prose poems: Disgust; The Rope Artist; The Neon Rosary; Pretty Time Machine; and Winter in June.

Lorette is the founding editor of The Mackinaw, a journal of prose poetry, which debuted on 15 January 2024. She is also the founding editor of The Ekphrastic Review, a journal established in 2015 and devoted to literature inspired by visual art. Her ekphrastic journal’s first print anthology, co-edited with Clare MacQueen, was released in March 2024: The Memory Palace.

In addition, Lorette’s a teaching artist, and an award-winning neoexpressionist artist who works with collage and mixed media to create urban, abstract, pop, and surreal works. She has collectors in thirty countries so far. She is also passionately curious about art history, folk horror, ancient civilizations, artisan and tribal jewelry, and culinary lore, to name a few.

Visit her at: www.mixedupmedia.ca

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ The White Rooms, ekphrastic flash fiction by Lorette C. Luzajic in Issue 27 of MacQueen’s Quinterly (March 2025); nominated for the Pushcart Prize

⚡ Southern Soul, flash fiction and visual art, an homage to Lucinda Williams by Luzajic in Issue 26 of MacQueen’s Quinterly (January 2025)

⚡ Patience, and Other Virtues That I Lack, CNF by Luzajic in the Gratitude Issue (20X) of MacQ; nominated for Best of the Net 2025

⚡ Blue and Gold for Ukraine, mixed-media painting by Luzajic in MacQ (Issue 18, April 2023); nominated for Best of the Net 2024

⚡ The Triaminic Man, flash fiction by Luzajic in MacQ (Issue 14, August 2022); reprinted in Best Small Fictions 2023

⚡ Two Must-Read Books by The Queen of Ekphrasis, commentary by Clare MacQueen in Issue 9 of MacQ (August 2021), with links to additional resources

⚡ Featured Author: Lorette C. Luzajic at Blue Heron Review, with two of her prose poems (“Disappoint” and “The Piano Man”); plus “Poet as Pilgrim,” a review of Pretty Time Machine by Mary McCarthy (March 2020)

⚡ Fresh Strawberries, an ekphrastic prose poem by Luzajic in KYSO Flash (Issue 11, Spring 2019), nominated for Best of the Net 2019 (selected as a Poetry Finalist) and the Pushcart Prize