Record 12 – Voices That Were Not Birds

The closer we came to the park, the clearer the strange sound grew. It wasn’t birds. It wasn’t singing. It wasn’t anything the trees should have been holding in their branches. It sounded almost like talking, but wrong – too slow, too sharp, like someone trying to speak through a broken machine. The air carried it in uneven pulses, each one scraping the quiet.

We stopped at the southern edge of Central Park. The sound drifted out between the leaves, thin and scratchy. “E…den… pro…to…col…” Each piece came with a pause, like the voice was searching for the next part in the dark. Repsik froze beside me. His ears flattened tight against his head, not in fear, but in pure disbelief. “That’s not a bird,” he whispered.

There was no movement above us. No wings. No shadows sliding between branches. Nothing that could make a voice like that. The trees swayed in slow, perfect rhythm, but they didn’t speak. Yet the sound echoed from inside them, bouncing gently, as if the leaves were holding the words and letting them fall one by one.

My fur lifted along my back, but my mind stayed steady. This was strange, yes. Wrong, yes. But not chaos. Not danger. More like the world trying to tell us something in a language it didn’t fully remember.

Then the voice shifted. The pauses shrank. The sound grew just a little louder, just a little clearer. It wasn’t coming from the trees anymore. It came from above the lamps.