Here is the truth in your reflection: In your new neighborhood, you’ll hear the bird circling after dark like a taunt, a reminder of your permanence in place. The bird is always overhead. You’ll hear him watching. The omnipresent owl, with his oscillating hum and buzz swirling overhead. It’s strange here, this feeling of prey and this noisy bird hovering low over your neighborhood, watch-light swiveling and panning, casting day into the dark, the beam cutting through black yards, across rooftops, into bedrooms and the baby’s room; and you just know this bird will roost in the gum trees one night, perched outside her window, pushing its noise into her dreams too. The noisy bird’s call rolls in waves around us all, slipping through open windows running down the halls. It rolls over you in the yard in your big shorts and polystyrene clogs, pushing you back into the shadows. You cower under the mock orange tree or beneath the arbor and crane your neck out only when the bird circles around and away from the house, chasing after the skittering runners; the tweaking prey, the taggers and bangers; drunks running from cars, drunks stumbling out of bars. The bird hovers and spins and its wind pushes all of them down like blades of grass, flattens them out on the asphalt. But the bird doesn’t see you in the backyard with your beer and your quiet music. Not you. Not tonight. The bird doesn’t suspect and won’t chase what doesn’t move, what has only recently roosted, relocated, separated and plugged into the seismic shifts of jobs and geography. And he cannot know how you feel caged by the noise, pressed and petrified like the prairie dogs back home in Kansas who duck back into their holes when a raptor glides over the flats—even though you’ve done nothing wrong, nothing but act like a prairie dog scratching in the yard. Some nights the stuttering beat of his wings begins to grate and worry you, insinuating itself into your thoughts, making you wonder if the bird has finally come for you, finally found some secret sin you don’t even understand. It is in these moments that you have the urge to call the bird, to turn on all the outside lights, stand naked in the yard, beer bottle in one hand, and hoist your middle finger in the air. You would yell loudly, obnoxiously, and even when your song was drowned out in the chop of their witness, you’d bellow again, louder and longer, a sonic scream sending shock waves out and up into the air, the vibrations of your noise rattling windows, shaking songbirds from their nests, whipping power lines like spaghetti noodles, until your own little sound wave slammed into the helicopter and flipped it like a mosquito in a breeze, tumbling off into the stratosphere, the drone of it’s blades fading to a whisper and then dying in the distance. And you would act this way for no real reason, no reason other than the one which explains why as an awkward zit-faced adolescent, awake and alone in the house at night, you’d sometimes convince yourself that you were being watched, observed, spied on from the outside and judged; you’d pause before uncovered windows, your reflection gawking back at you, winking from a distant life just out of reach, and you’d raise your middle finger to your face and to the other invisible eyes outside, each one lurking in the inky blue-black night. Fuck you, you’d say to no bird in particular. Fuck you all.