Oomi
“I hope all three of us make it out of this.”
He really is too kind for his own good.
I didn’t know how to respond, so I kept quiet. Then—
“I always thought birds were the ones we chase.”
Aochi-san suddenly changed the subject, his tone still upbeat.
“You mean like… hunting them?”
“No, not like that. You know, ‘the bluebird of happiness’ and all that. I thought birds were something you chased after.”
I like birds too. When I was a kid, I kept parakeets and finches for years.
“But that’s—”
“You’re about to say these ones aren’t so cute, right? Feels like a horror movie about killer birds. Even this morning when I left my place, there were black birds flying overhead—”
Suddenly, the spacious office went dark.
We were on the 35th floor of a high-rise building with glass walls on all sides, and the entire floor was covered in black birds.
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The building across from us, the pale blue sky, the thin clouds floating in it—everything vanished behind a wall of wings.
For about ten minutes, the swarm blotted out our view entirely.
And then, as suddenly as it came, the morning returned outside the window.
“That was insane. Are you okay, Oomi?”
“I’m fine. It was my first time seeing them up close like that, but they looked like black-tailed gulls or something.By the way… why are you in a suit when you're not even working today?”
Aochi-san just gave me a look that said, “Huh?”
“It’s just habit, I guess. But more importantly—think he’s okay? I hope he wasn’t attacked by that flock.”
He stood up from the white chair—more design than comfort—and walked up to the window. With the glass floor beneath him, he looked like he was floating in the sky.
“I think Oze-san is fine. Honestly, he seems like the type who could control birds.”
“That’s not the point.”
“Kidding. His place is pretty far out, right? Even if he caught the first train, it’d take him longer than us. That’s probably all it is. He should be here soon.”
There was a time I was alone with Oze-san and couldn’t think of anything to say, so I asked, out of sheer desperation, “Where do you live?”
He told me some far-off place, I think. I was too nervous to really catch it—it went in one ear and out the other.
“Come to think of it, he said he just moved. His closest station now is...”
Wait, how do you know more than I do?
Just as Aochi-san turned to me and named the station, something hit the window behind him with a heavy, sickening thud.
He stepped back. In that moment, I saw it—clear as day.The bird had a human eyeball in its beak.
There was no way I could say “Oze-san will be fine” after that.
The two of us bolted from the office and into the elevator.
“That wasn’t just me seeing things, right?”
I asked Aochi-san, who’d been closer to it than I was.
“It was an eyeball. That bird… it was eating someone.”