2025 PARANORMAL FLASH FICTION CHALLENGE RUNNER-UP

and the runner-up place goes to…

Sylvia Hall Andrews

BIRDSONG

He knew Jenny would have hated all of it: his loneliness, his credulity, his pathetic search for corroboration from wide-eyed true believers, and, most damningly, the feeble sentimentality that had kept him going back to the woods with his microphone for three years now. 

Jenny would have especially hated the Saturday night speed-dating event. His sister had told him he needed to get out there, start meeting women. Six dates in, he was hating it himself. He’d met a woman who could see his aura (which consisted of translucent swirls of blue and black); one who could transmit healing energy through her hands (although there was not enough time to heal him); one whose child was demonically possessed; one who had been both Cleopatra and Beaudelaire; and two young ladies who were vampires (each of whom was, indeed, exceptionally pale). Perhaps he should have tried a birder-themed gathering.

On Sunday, he hiked to the peak he and Jenny used to climb together, where whiskeyjacks would land on their scarecrowed arms. He recorded the chirrs of jays, the whistles of chickadees, and the single high scream of a hawk as it drew a lazy circle above him.  At home that evening, when he adjusted the gain, and applied just the right filter, and listened intently, Jenny’s voice was there – stuttering and hissy, but to him, clear: This is how you’re going to replace me?  It was just the words how and place, but he could fill in the rest. He tried making a few more tweaks to the recording, but Jenny had no more to say.

Her messages had no obvious motive. The first one had come a few months after the accident, and had required no adjustments at all to for him to hear it: Me, it said, five times during the nighttime recording of a barred owl in their yard. Me me me me me. The next night, he stood out there for an hour, trying to cleave the darkness with his eyes and find her in the spaces between the trees, listening for her words amidst the sighs of the cedars. He heard only the voice of the owl. “Who cooks for you?” it asked. On the recording, though, Jenny’s voice was there.  Ever it said. No end. 

It was puzzling that Jenny, who was teeming with scientific method and instant facts and iron-clad refutations, who ruthlessly disparaged anything that had even the faintest taint of illogic, had chosen this avenue of communication. To be fair, he would have understood if the voice had said Dead is dead, a joke that would have been utterly up Jenny’s alley.

On the days that he would go bereft and hollow and echoing to their old coffee shop, he would read at the table for two they had always chosen. One morning, as a woman walked past his table, he glanced up to see her peering unabashedly at the title of his hardcover: Voices from the Other Side. She caught his eye and held it. She didn’t look like Jenny at all: ginger hair, no glasses, curvier physique. She threw a single word at him, with a sly almost-smile: “Bunk.” 

He asked if he could buy her a cup of coffee. 

That evening, as the colours funneled out of the world and the sky and grass and trees dulled to grey, the birds began their twilight coda. He rose and found his birding microphone and put it in a box and put the box in the back of a cupboard in the basement, and closed the door.

And that was that.

Assigned Phenomenon: Electronic Voice Phenomenon
This story was written as part of our recent paranormal-themed contest, in which each participant was assigned a different paranormal phenomenon.