edited by David Steffen
The bay air felt strange on Domenico’s skin. He’d been here every evening for weeks, but this was the first time in a while — years, really — that he’d taken his body with him. He’d forgotten the kiss of breeze on flesh. The rental canoe’s heave and sway troubled his bad hip. His arms, at least, retained much of their strength from his youth, and paddling was not as difficult as he’d expected. In his early career he’d flipped sedated hyenas and wolves to implant trackers. He’d had Johan with him then, of course.
Ahead of him waves tumbled over the island’s rocky shore, water copper-flecked in the late-day sun. From the docks behind him came the low coos of a flock of eiders. Bioluminescent symbols flashed on the backs of his hands: blood pressure, heart rate, temperature, true north. He fished a pair of musty gloves from the pockets of Johan’s old bomber jacket and slid them on to block the blue glow. Being human here was enough trespass.
His daughter’s ringtone chirped on his wristwatch, and after a moment’s pause he accepted the call, regretting that he hadn’t set the watch to Do Not Disturb. But knowing Addie, she’d keep calling if she couldn’t reach him, or send the Coast Guard to bring him back.
“Addie.” His voice was clipped, a little breathless. “What’s up?”
“Before you lie to me, I can see you,” she said. “You’re in Dad’s green jacket and the knit cap I made you. You’re alone in the canoe like an absolute fool. If you’ve got any bait, toss it overboard.”
He’d given her tracking permissions after his fall last December. For emergencies. She’d always been the anxious sort, and she had far too broad a definition of emergency. The eiders were nearby, not fifty yards away. Of course she would have gone to the local ridealong listings and picked one of them. He retrieved a small bag of granola from his pocket and cast a few pieces in the water. Three of the birds approached, splashing after the food with eager ah-ooos. A large male plunged for a drifting morsel, revealing the telltale bands ringing his legs.
He chuckled. “So here’s my little albatross.”
“And the ancient mariner. Papa, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
Addie swore more than she used to. Since Johan’s death, she spoke more authoritatively to Domenico. She seemed to assume that, as a widower, he lacked not only partnership but a necessary measure of pushback. She seemed to have forgotten that Johan had always been the risk-taker, even if she did remember the Coleridge poem he loved.
“I can handle it. I’m sorry about the show.” His grandchildren’s music day camp was putting on a concert. He’d excused himself with the excuse that the folding-chair seating wouldn’t agree with his hip, which was true anyway, and promised them he’d hear all their songs at home. The terns would be leaving in less than a month, and he might not get another chance. At least he’d made it far enough that she couldn’t stop him. “Where are you? I hope you didn’t leave early.”
“I’m in the parking lot.” There was a pause of several seconds before she responded. She was shifting her consciousness back and forth between the neurochipped eider and her own body. “There were 17 hosts available tonight just in the bay alone when I hopped on. You want to tell me why you couldn’t just enjoy this from home — enjoy your own life’s work?”
It was his work, and that of many others. Like Johan. Their names graced a few patents of early models that helped humanity crack the mysteries of the animal kingdom, though the technology had progressed remarkably since they retired. Just as important as the patents were the research papers they’d co-authored, cracking the code of animal cognition and behavior. It was their research that demystified magnetoreception in deer and dogs and described how starlings choreographed their murmurations. But their scientific work was symbiotic with their relationship: from their meeting in freshman-year biochemistry to their early married days as they toted Addie on missions around the world to test prototypes on different species, Johan had been a part of every professional achievement he’d had. They were driven by the same narcotic thrill of experiencing an animal’s instinct, its world, firsthand. Not just through its eyes with a camera, but thanks to the technology they’d helped develop, through its senses. We’re much more similar to other creatures than we appreciate, and their education of humanity has only begun, Johan liked to say at the conclusion of his lectures. Far from strangers, they are our fellow passengers on this spaceship called Earth. A onetime English lit major and occasional poet, he’d always delighted in rhetorical flourishes, even to the end. He probably would have quoted poetry as his last words if he’d been able to, if Domenico had been there to hear him.
Addie was too old for “just trust me” or “none of your business,” and so, perhaps, was Domenico. “I’m here for me. And for your dad.”
The eider flapped its wings. He placed another piece of the granola bar on the bench opposite him to see if it would join him in the boat. It did, and so did one of its unchipped companions. Instinct, nothing more. Addie was not the captain of her eider.
He’d heard the military was working on the ability to control its trained dolphins through neurochip ridealongs, a prospect that would have horrified his younger self. The use of chipped songbirds for surveillance, an early way the technology had been co-opted, had always bothered Johan the most. Fire, the wheel, the blade, the internet: no tool resisted use as a weapon.
“For Dad? You can’t — you can’t mean what I think you mean, Papa. Don’t do this,” Addie said. “The kids and I love you, you know that. We need you.”
“Oh, no, no.” Laughter nearly escaped him before he stopped himself. It wasn’t funny. Why did he want to laugh? Because it was life that had brought him out here, or the possibility of it. Life and lightness and hope that had lately filled him so that he scarcely recognized himself from the shell he’d been for months prior. “You thought I was coming out here to die somehow? I’m sorry to worry you. Nothing like that. I’m coming back, I promise.”
Her sigh crackled over the wristwatch speaker. “Then what’s going on? You don’t need to come out here to remember him. Stop scaring me. What if you capsize? Come back now.”
“Addie…” She’d taken Johan’s death hard, too, but their grief had led down different paths. Addie, at least, seemed to have emerged from the darkest stretch of hers. He did not want to pull her back in.
They’d moved to this Maine college town when Addie was nine and bought a house only a minute’s walk from campus. She was fascinated by the squirrels. (So were the undergrads; in Domenico’s experience, every college had legends about its squirrels.) On one of her first ridealongs in Maine, her squirrel host was struck by a car and killed. She said, later, that she didn’t feel any pain, just the shock of finding her mind thrust back into her own body without warning. He’d hoped, in a way, that the experience might calm her fears of death.
But she was traumatized, and he and Johan were not prepared for the way it manifested. She hid food under her bed and in her closet. She climbed trees with a wild and foreign boldness. Traffic unnerved her, understandably, but so did hawks and eagles. Johan mused that the connection might be reciprocal: that a part of the squirrel’s consciousness had survived, like an afterimage encoded in Addie’s neurochip, and that it was still sending impulses to her brain. Domenico dismissed the theory. The technology had not been designed that way. She was identifying with the squirrel out of grief born from the intimacy of experiencing its final moments, that was all. Grief changed people. At any rate, the phase passed after some weeks and Addie was back to her obsessive neatness, once more wary of heights and indifferent to birds of prey.
He had never told her of Johan’s theory about the squirrel and didn’t intend to now. He looked at the eider perched on the bench as if it were his daughter and tried to meet its eyes. “Last year, around the time he got sick, your dad often used to go to the island through the terns. He joked about coming out here from his hospital bed when I’d have to leave at night. I told him he shouldn’t, thought it might mess up his vitals and keep him admitted longer. But anyway. You know him.”
Johan’s interest in arctic terns had always tilted toward obsession. He envisioned renting a boat and tracking the entire 25,000-mile migration with ridealongs the whole way, enthusiasm undimmed by Domenico’s maybe-next-years.
“We don’t know what the host animal experiences when its human ridealong dies during the link,” Domenico said. “And — I don’t know what he was doing at the exact time he passed — but I’m certain he was accessing terns during his hospital stay. And.”
For a moment, only the eider cooed in response. Then he heard a noise from the speaker, a gasp that might have been a cry.
“I’m not certain,” he said. “That’s why—”
“Papa, no.” He could hear her frown, her clenched fingers, in the strain of her voice. “It’s been a year. You always said he was alive in his work, but I didn’t think you meant literally—”
“Right. It’s just a theory.”
“There’s a therapist I saw for a few months, back in the fall, remember? She’s a little strange, but so helpful. Dad’s still here in our memories. But he’s gone.”
The oar slipped along the gunwale and he grabbed it just in time. Addie’s eider flapped its wings but stayed put. Somewhere a gull shrieked.
“I do know. Rationally, I know. It’s bunk. I just need to test it. Get near them as a human, see how they react. Assure myself. Maybe your therapist would call it closure.”
When she didn’t respond, he lifted the oar and dipped it into the water. The canoe cut through the gentle water toward the small tern-spotted island. His fingers ached as he gripped the oar. Once the boat started moving, the eiders departed into the darkening sky.
“Papa.” Addie’s voice once more, intrusive but gentle. “Against my better judgment, I’m going now. Be quick, okay? And safe.”
“I will.”
“If you drown out here I’ll kill you.”
“Love you too, sweetie.”
It was quiet now but for the slosh of waves, the shrill chatter of nesting terns, and the percussive thrum of his own pulse. He knew this island well from a bird’s perspective, having gone on ridealongs with almost all of the chipped terns over the past several weeks. All but one. Every time he checked, tern B107 showed as occupied. Ridealongs ended automatically after two hours, but with B107 there was never a pause, never a flash from red to green on the list. He’d checked at all times of day and night.
“Probably a malfunction with its chip.” He muttered this aloud. Spoken words carried weight. “That’s all it is.” He kept rowing.
Maneuvering the canoe as close to the rocks as he was willing to risk, he turned it parallel to the shore. The screen showed the occupied B107 within 30 yards, along with dozens of others. As well as he knew them, his failing eyesight in the fading light could not distinguish one individual from another. That was fine. Johan would recognize him.
The terns squawked in wary regard. Fledglings peeked out from beneath their parents. He knew well the famous defensive instinct that would lead them to attack and so he sat, immobile, until several stars twinkled in the dark above him. The birds remained on their nests, patient in their collective standoff with this tall intruder. B107, whichever it was, did not break ranks.
“Come on.” His voice was louder than he intended.
The terns shrieked. Six or seven zoomed toward the canoe, sharp red beaks aimed at his head. He put his arms up against the assault. The oar slipped from his grasp. He leaned over the edge of the boat, feeling it buck and roll beneath him, and the oar vanished into the dark water.
The pain only hit him once the birds had retreated. His arms bled from pecks and scratches beneath the holes they’d torn in Johan’s jacket sleeves. He remained still for several minutes, keeping his arms over his head in case they came back. A cool breeze cut through the holes and made his wounds sting. Slowly, he reached under the yoke and found the second oar. Stroke to starboard, stroke to port, each one accompanied by a sharp shudder. The terns, observing his slow retreat, did not move to follow him.
After twenty strokes he paused and rested the oar in his lap. His bad hip hurt almost as much as his arms. “Come on, B107,” he said again, softly. “You know me. You know me.”
But now every bird in the bay left him alone.
The sky was winter-dark and nothing shone on the waves. He could barely see the water. He struggled to remain upright, to avoid crumpling into the canoe and disturbing its balance. The fabric lining of Johan’s bomber jacket was binding to his bleeding cuts; it would dry there and hurt like hell to take off.
No answer was its own answer. It had always been a long shot. Johan had said to him once, Now that we’ve decoded animal cognition, the last great mystery is death. In the abstract, the phrase struck him as sublime. Still, even then, he’d responded: Someday we’ll solve that, too.
It was just like him to want a simple answer to a complicated question. But the simple answer was this: he had loved the man who loved these birds, and loved him still. Perhaps the birds, who did not startle at his muttered curses as he picked up the oar again, knew this and held back their aggression for that reason.
To the north, a faint green aurora shimmered. Domenico removed his gloves so he could read the glowing compass on the back of his right hand. Arms burning and leaden, he began to paddle back toward the mainland. He prayeth best, who loveth best, both man and bird and beast. It was the only line of that albatross poem Domenico consistently remembered, aside from the bit about water, water, everywhere that Johan, ever the pedant, always said people got wrong. He could hear his laugh, now — picture him sitting on the other seat of the canoe — hear him saying, Interesting hypothesis about the tern, but how could I confine myself to one creature’s mind when I already live in yours?
“Help me get home, then,” Domenico said to the empty bench, “and don’t let on to Addie what a fool I’ve been.” A line of lights marked the shoreline, hundreds of agonizing strokes away, but the eiders cooed and the terns watched and even though his afterimage of Johan couldn’t quote as much poetry as the real one, it was enough, it would have to be enough, to get him back to shore.
© 2026 by Anna Zumbro
2596 words
Author’s Note: This story was inspired by a picture from a writing challenge showing an elderly man in a boat with a large bird. The two figures looked almost as if they had an understanding with one another, and I started imagining a form of shared consciousness between them. The image also reminded me of the Samuel Taylor Coleridge poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” and the story emerged from there.
Anna Zumbro is a short fiction writer whose stories have appeared in LeVar Burton Reads, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Nature, and other publications. She teaches high school English and journalism.
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