The birds have begun to change shape. Their beaks are growing longer. “Because of Allen’s rule,” Anik says, nodding like it’s according to plan. “These larger appendages facilitate more efficient heat dissipation by maximizing surface area, like how you feel like tearing off your clothing when it gets hot,” he explains, although I don’t see how clothing is related. Anik shows me a picture of the heat exchange across the body of a Geospiza fortis, splotches of bright yellow and orange by its beak and legs, the only vascularized surfaces without any insulation of feathers. He acts like the heat dissipation limit theory is revolutionary, but to me, it’s just another manifestation of balance between what the earth gives and takes: the more heat your metabolism dissipates, the more energy you can consume. “So we’re going to have big-billed and big-legged birds—that’s pretty cool,” I conclude.

Anik just had his appendix removed. I drove him from the hospital to his house where I’m staying for a month to run errands and make sure he doesn’t irritate his incision or die. His appendix burst while we were visiting a farmer’s market for pluots. Anik needed someone to accompany him on outings, and I rarely had anything else to do on weekends. One moment we were scrutinizing green pluots from deep purple ones, and the next, Anik was on the ground, clutching his stomach while I tried to stay coherent in explaining the situation to the 911 dispatchers.

“Humans should’ve evolved without appendices,” Anik groans and shifts in his seat. It’s hard for him to sit. He curses his belly pain every other minute. “And wisdom teeth,” he adds. “Birds are lucky they adapt so quickly.”

I don’t bother telling Anik that the appendix is supposed to store bacteria beneficial to the health of our intestine’s flora. Humans can get by fine without a few organs. We continue watching the birds out the window. I joke about taking on rich, old, white people hobbies like bird watching, but my mood dampens quickly when Anik snarks about being too old to do much else. Neither of us has seen this type of bird before. Seven of them perch on the avocado tree Anik never waters. They’ve got bills the length of a child’s forearm, a brown plumage and cream-colored underbelly, mustard mohawk crest feathers, vibrant red eyes. “Like aliens,” I marvel. Anik shoots my observation down and lectures me for such a limited scope of imagination: not all forms of life need two eyes and a head and a central nervous system; what lives in outer space could be like nothing we’ve ever seen before.

“Is it worth thinking about aliens when we still haven’t figured out what’s up with the birds?” I ask. Anik shrugs and groans, the mild lift and drop of his shoulders pulling and loosening the flesh near his stomach. “Don’t push yourself,” I repeat even though he’ll forget again in a few minutes.

I met Anik a decade ago during my final few days of hospitalization for pneumonia. My stay was almost going to take longer until the doctors finally had some sense knocked into them to switch me from penicillin to clindamycin. My mom nearly lost it when the doctors told her they might need to perform surgery on an eleven-year-old, and she began her crazed research into alternate antibiotics before landing on clindamycin, at which point she commenced a single-sided barrage of phone calls and emails to the doctors and her insurance plan with NCBI links. I spent most of my time in the children’s play and craft room, which was pretty empty and lonely—I assumed the other kids were too sick to walk around. The staff prepared cardboard jewelry boxes for me to paint and cover with foam stickers. Anik walked in as I evaluated the merits of decorating a heart-shaped box with more hearts and glitter. He was a volunteer at the hospital, long retired and on a quest for work to keep his brain sharp. He treated me nicely, asking how I felt, if I needed anything, but I was too young to know how to demand things from others and nodded quietly. Anik was the only staff member I recognized; the nurses who checked up on my IV changed too often for me to associate a name to a face. I learned Anik hated his school days because they ate up all the time he could’ve spent on personal growth. “What’s personal growth?” I asked. I thought growth was aging. “It’s doing what you want,” Anik said. I liked Anik because he told me versions of truths I’d never heard before: anyone who says “we are here to help you” is lying and doing the bare minimum for a paycheck; most of the “quiet and sudden” heart attacks probably take the larger part of a day to kill their host (painfully and slowly); no one knows what comes after death but we do know everything that makes you operate ceases so there’s probably nothing, truly. These were my favorite moments—when I got to learn things that I thought distinguished me from my peers, a maturity spurt. Anik was also surprisingly good with his hands, and after he taught me to fold a paper crane, I tossed mine and kept his, the creases folded cleanly and crisply, wings flapping without a tear as I pulled the tail back and forth.

One of the birds begins attacking the neighbor’s bobcat who has crossed into Anik’s backyard. Anik never tells the neighbor to keep the cat indoors even though it’s an invasive species. He finds cats cute and elegant and can’t get over himself to tell off his neighbor about their pet preying on small animal populations. The other birds join in, grasping at the bobcat’s fur with their claws. “They must be building nests,” I say, tying my hair up into a ponytail. “They should just use yours,” Anik jokes. I lose a handful of hair every morning after combing it. The biological waste doesn’t serve much of a purpose besides clogging drainage systems and decomposing slowly—hair is built to resist decay after all; that’s why the dead who come back to haunt in horror movies still have their luxurious (if a bit greasy and dry) locks. “What if the cat kills the birds?” I ask. Anik is quiet for a moment.

“Well, they both seem like invasive species. Might as well let them duke it out,” he replies. I disagree—I think the birds are a part of this ecosystem, a result of strange combinations of selected genes and evolution. The cat will only continue to sink its teeth into more blue jays and hummingbirds whose corpses litter the corners of the fence. Anik no longer has a strong interest in biodiversity. I think he’s realized he’ll die before any of the weirder effects of global warming manifest and believes the most he can do is minimize his presence, quietly let the world adapt as he sits from behind a window lamenting his no-soda-or-Calpico diet.

Anik’s son, Sam, asked me to take care of Anik after the appendectomy. Anik refuses to live in a senior center because the “other oldies don’t know Bergmann’s rules from Allen’s rules.” Sam told me Anik thought I was “clever and honest, not like the whole two-faced bunch of them” and that Anik would shut down whenever a hired nurse came to check on him. “All those nurses did was poke and prod and ask how I felt for an outrageous sum—why waste words on greeting people you don’t care about anyway?” Anik often complains to me even though we both know Sam is paying me well. I don’t need the extra income but I wouldn’t take care of an old man for free. I’m not that selfless. I’ve told Anik this. “Of course not, you shouldn’t do anything for free,” he chortled.

I’m convinced we’re witnessing something very special in Anik’s backyard: birds Pokemon-shape-shifting themselves into mega efficient heat-dissipating creatures. Who knows what will be next. Flamingos with legs the height of a house? Bats with wings spanning the length of a plane? I hand Anik a mug of water. He’s supposed to stay hydrated so I fill his mug every two hours and he sips obediently. After setting the mug back down, he yawns. “Well, if they can evolve at a rate faster than the planet burns up,” he shrugs.

“I think it’s possible,” I tell him. The birds look majestic and curious, long having abandoned the cat and now pecking at tiny, unripe avocados dangling on the tree. Their beaks could probably split one through its center, seed and all. Their beaks could probably even snap the cat in half if they’re serious. I imagine them as next-generation dinosaurs.

“Hah, humans haven’t even managed to naturally select out wisdom teeth and appendices,” Anik says. I think Anik is being too harsh.

“That’s because modern medicine protects people from dying left and right,” I reply. We watch one of the birds cut an avocado fruit from the branch. It drops to the ground, whole.

“And so we live on.” He draws out the words like speaking drains all his energy, like he’d rather not.

I stay with Anik for the rest of the month, sleeping in the guest room, buying groceries with his credit card, helping him get out of bed and put on his shirt. I work from the dining room which receives the most natural lighting—more than anything I can get in my apartment. I live in a one-bedroom place on the second floor of my complex where I can hear my upstairs neighbors’ stomping and smell my downstairs neighbors’ pungent cooking. They use more turmeric than I can stomach. Then again, I can’t handle much: spicy food sends me to the toilet for hours, eggs cause my face and feet to swell, seafood gives me rashes. I decline most mixer invitations to restaurants; the gastrointestinal consequences aren’t worth a potential one-night-stand or date. Anik’s house is much nicer, albeit an older construction with no heating or air conditioning. The stone insulates the air pretty well. He also has a big kitchen and a wall full of cabinets which he uses to store his old gadgets: three adaptors to who-knows-what, manuals on Java and SQL, a digital multimeter, huge boxes that I haven’t bothered to dig into. I’ve only cleared enough cabinets to store my new purchases of rice, salt and vermicelli. The only food item I had found in the cabinets was a half-empty bag of pinto beans. Anik had been eating beans for most of his meals. “I don’t think the gas you get from all that fiber is going to make the healing process any easier,” I told him before dragging in sacks of plain white rice. He has been good about the changes in his diet. He compliments the bland soups I try to salvage with five-spice powder and sesame oil and finishes all of the diluted porridge whose volume I double with water when I’ve run out of cream of wheat and curry leaves. I’m not sure what he likes so much about beans besides the bowel movement bolster, but he stays mostly quiet when it comes to what I feed him which I take as a win.

Anik spends most of his time complaining about not being able to do anything, although he’s courteous only to do so after my work hours. The boredom drives him to run experiments on the birds’ behavior. From the corner of my eye, I see him organizing different cans of food: dried mung beans, soybeans, corn kernels, sunflower seeds, cracked eggshells. He stacks them by the backyard and drags over a lawn chair that squeaks and screeches as he sits. I shift my full attention to him, concerned he might collapse into the chair’s legs and concrete patio bricks. Anik picks up each can and shakes them before sprinkling the contents on the ground, waiting several minutes before proceeding to the next can. The birds flock over, pecking at the ground. They go for the sunflower seeds first, then the corn and beans, and finally the eggshells. Anik does this every day, and gradually, the birds begin to react to the sounds of the cans shaking. They can hear the difference and react most eagerly to the sunflower seeds. “It’s all the fat,” Anik explains, tossing another small handful—not enough seeds to occupy all the birds, but enough to be worth the fight. The birds who are crowded out try to shove their way in, and just as they do, Anik tosses another handful of sunflower seeds in the opposite direction. I shut my ThinkPad. The birds scatter.

“I don’t see how this extent of phenotypic plasticity could occur,” Anik says. Species that demonstrate the most efficient adaptations are typically the largest, most interconnected populations with the shortest generation times—in other words, pests. Anik taught me this years ago in the hospital when I had spotted a cockroach on a bookshelf. The birds don’t look like pests.

“Maybe they’re just pretty and the big beaks are for mating or tearing apart smaller birds instead of dissipating heat,” I suggest. One of the birds begins to stab its beak at a smaller one who’s in a prime location for gobbling up sunflower seeds. Anik scatters another handful to shoo the offending bird away, but the sounds of the seeds rattling against the metal can and landing on dirt fail to capture its attention.

“I don’t think it cares about the food anymore,” I tell Anik.

“That makes no sense. All animals are motivated by scarcity and resources as dictated by biology and evolution.” Anik scatters another handful of seeds to no avail.

I slide the door open and slip on a pair of flip flops and make my way over. I gently tug his sleeve and he lifts his hand for me to hold as he stands. We walk back inside together, him leaning on me, me struggling to stand upright against his weight. Anik used to play volleyball when he was in his thirties. He trained his vertical jump to make up for his height disadvantage, and the constant impact destroyed his joints. Anik still insists on walking and running around. I think his mental fortitude is the sole thing keeping him active because the doctors are stupefied that he doesn’t need painkillers.

“Are you going to let the bird die?” Anik asks me as I slide the door close.

“You need to take your antibiotics.” I pour the pills into the lid of a capsule and hand Anik a cold cup of water. He tosses the pills into his mouth and gulps them down before scrunching his face up.

“They shouldn’t taste like anything if you’re swallowing them whole,” I say. Anik exhales and his eyebrows relax.

“It’s hard to stamp out instinct.” The pills make Anik drowsy so I help him to his room for his nap. Old people naps, he calls them. They’re the type of naps you have to take else you’ll collapse mid-action which is quite hard to do in reality. I’ve seen Anik drop to the ground snoring while assembling pictures of Guillemots, the photographs scattering on top of his chest, rising and lowering to his breath. I nearly dropped my computer on my toe when I heard the thud of his body hitting the hardwood. I thought he’d died. I imagined the dust accumulating on my apartment desk, the lone framed picture of my mom’s pet chinchilla, a pair of ripped rubber gloves I insisted on reusing, the opened bags of dried kelp and wood ear, the container of miso with a spoonful dug out of an otherwise smooth and untouched surface. It would be nice not having to return so soon.

I help Anik lower his body to his bed. He’s surprisingly sturdy and hardly needs my assistance, although I support his upper back anyway.

“I’d wager those birds have fallen behind. Those huge crests and beaks and laser-like eyes—it’s not good to stand out in a human-manipulated ecology. Just look at all those mismatched white animals on a brown snowless background. Like the snowshoe hares! They might as well be waving a flag to all their predators without the snow,” Anik grumbles. Anik has himself all riled up. He glares at the ceiling and rubs the hem of his shirt between his fingers so hard I can see the white of his knuckles and wonder if he’s trying to light a fire with the friction.

“And then they die,” I say. Anik frowns. Sometimes I think he believes natural selection is unfair because humans have mostly worked around it with modern medicine. Other times, he seems distant—maybe even apathetic, like when he watches the neighbor’s bobcat bring back a finch in its mouth.

I leave the room and shut the door so my dinner preparations don’t disturb him. I swear the vent is a kitchen cryptid whose goal is to get me to lobby for a noise tax. The long-beaked birds outside are still polishing off the seeds, beans and corn, and the violent bird is still attacking the smaller one, who has begun to bleed from its wings and stopped thrashing. I wonder why it won’t fly away. I’ve always thought flight was the coolest capability of a bird’s anatomical design (and am constantly puzzled by penguins). After setting a piece of frozen chicken thigh on the counter to defrost, I slip outside and close both the screen and glass door so Anik doesn’t wake. I wave my hands and shout “go away” and “shoo” and “bad bird”, waiting for the larger bird to relent.

Lucy Zhang writes, codes and watches anime. Her work has appeared in The Offing, The Rumpus, EcoTheo Review, Minola Review and elsewhere, and was selected for Best Microfiction and Best Small Fictions. Her chapbook HOLLOWED is forthcoming in 2022 from Thirty West Publishing. Find her at https://kowaretasekai.wordpress.com/ or on Twitter @Dango_Ramen.