(no subject)

"Is little one still alive?"

"She look dead."

"No, she breathes."

As the voices gradually become clearer Mitzi opens her eyes. Several flamingos look down at her curiously.

"Not dead." One observes. Mitzi looks up at them.

"What happen? Why pain?" she asks, suddenly coming to terms with the fact that her vocabulary has been significantly reduced. For an ordinary flamingo, complex thought is not required.

"You one of the odd ones. Now Kyk make you normal. Except you little."

She scrambles to her feet, remembering what happened. A few flashes of advanced thought pass through her brain, but she cannot make any sense of them.

"My hatchlings. They okay?"

"Kytr, Tyrkx dead. Not wear silver thing. Kyk, Yxyx, Kcar okay."

Mitzi digests this slowly, taking in the fact that she has lost a brother and a sister, the two strongest of the siblings. Her agony at their loss is helped a little by the fact that her other brother and two sisters are safe, but she cannot help wondering why any of them would risk their lives for the sake of pride. In some ways, she is not surprised that those two were the ones to perish. They had always been drunk on power.

"Who you?"

"Ax, ‘the noisy one’"

"Kekra, ‘the motherly one’."

"Xkxz, ‘the one who does not have the right figure to sit on more than three eggs.’"

(Now is probably the time to mention that in flamingo, X is a vowel, and that also there are many words that simply do not have an English equivalent. For example tkkxz, meaning a place where algae is found and is safe from predators. The disadvantage of any humans attempting to master a language where the most common letter is K and most common vowel is X is that it is more or less completely unpronounceable.)

Mitzi looks at Xkxz with curiosity.

"What you do when four eggs?"

"Give one away. I give you one next lay. Kyk say you odd ones not able hatch chicks because you half greater half lesser."

"Really! Thank you."

"You be with egg club." Kekra adds. "We think you be member of flock. We three have egg-sitting circle so can squawk while sitting. Now you come with us. You need special alga, Kyk say. What you say name was?"

Mitzi thinks about this for a moment, her mind slowly remembering.

"Mitzi. My name Mitzi."

The three females look at one another.

"Cannot pronounce that. Call you Xydghnytnakzya, ‘the little one’, Naz for short".

"I think that’s what it was originally."

"Good, good, member of flock. We go now."

The three females lead Mitzi towards the lake, her thoughts and memories still slowing down or disappearing. Already, Guppy is just an old first of flock, a face, and a kind friend. She no longer feels his mind nor understands his humanity. Ray and Xzygk are members of flock, Asar-Suti… a face without a place. For a flamingo, everyone else is either flock or not flock. Not flock is equal to enemy. But Mitzi knows that Asar-Suti, Behrooz, Chase, Lucca and Gaspode fit somewhere into a different category. She just can’t think of what that category is. Eventually she attempts to file them under friend of flock.

The lake is warm. She has flock, and soon, she will have a chick. She cannot remember what the magic felt like. It is no longer important.

She is happy.