MANY THEORIES surrounded Callum’s unique connection with birds; most were spiritual. Aunt Shelly believed the spirit of her late father inhabited the birds to protect him, and she vehemently accused her sister-in-law of being a pagan for suggesting the birds might be his familiars. Although people endlessly debated explanations involving angels, sorcery, or a random enigmatic quality in Callum, the essential popular opinion was that the birds were looking out for him.

This positive bias was forged after the first unusual encounter. When Callum was five, he escaped his mother’s clutches and ran toward an intersection. As he reached the curb, before he darted into traffic and into certain death, a pigeon swooped down, flapping into him. Whether the pigeon actually pushed him or just startled him enough to knock him back was unclear, but no one disputed that the bird saved his life.

It wasn’t a one-off. Birds seemed inexplicably drawn to Callum. They landed on his shoulder or head more times than anyone could count. Realistically, the number could have been counted, but no one could remember, let alone agree.

A neighbour told whoever would listen that he witnessed Callum searching his front yard for his keys for an hour until a crow plucked them out of a bush and delivered them directly to Callum’s feet. In a rare dissent, the neighbour’s wife said that was pure poppycock, that it was a magpie, and that it stole Callum’s keys because magpies love shiny things. Every time Callum was asked which version was true, he made the same joke, butchering a quote by Rita Mae Brown. “I forget. I guess the keys to my happiness are my bad memory.” It was never funny. Everyone agreed on that.

A more pragmatic theory about this phenomenon came from a stranger who was oblivious to the mythology and utterly objective. When Callum was a young man, his friend’s cousin from out of town visited on a night they all took mushrooms.

“Dude, did anyone ever tell you that the curls on your head look like wriggling worms?”

Clearly, the visitor’s vision was inspired by psilocybin’s ability to override the brain’s predominant sober system of interpretation. Normally, the gaps in our vision are filled in a way that makes inanimate objects live up to their name. However, when the suppression of visual options is removed, breathing and shifting interpretations are free to emerge. Still, Callum thought the theory was worth testing. Without the ability to neutralize the influence of confounding variables, his conclusion was hardly definitive, but he came to believe it was true. It was convincingly evidenced by all birds’ total avoidance of him whenever he wore a hat.

Callum refrained from sharing the wormy-hair theory with his friends and family. It hardly cast him in an attractive light, and more importantly, there were benefits to his magical designation. People treated him, if not with reverence, with perhaps an extra amount of unearned fondness. So, he kept it to himself. Then, when Callum went bald in his middle age, and the birds stayed away entirely, he expected people to notice the correlation. They didn’t. They stuck to whichever theory they had settled on and adapted it accordingly. His Aunt Shelley, for example, believed that Callum simply no longer needed guardian angels as an adult.

Callum’s grandchildren assumed it was an urban myth or at least an overblown story based on coincidence. The kids had never witnessed anything unusual, and adults were always distorting history. It wasn’t until Callum’s funeral, when a massive flock of multiple species of birds descended upon the cemetery, that the grandchildren began questioning their certainty. No one heard the words to Callum’s rite of committal. They only heard the squawking.

Kirsty Dale is a writer living in the Okanagan Valley of Canada. She is working on her debut novel.