Speaker 1: There are mornings in early spring when the city seems
Speaker 1: to slip just a little sideways, when the air under
Speaker 1: the blooming horse chestnuts seems to pulse, and the world
Speaker 1: holds its breath before exhaling a new day. I've always
Speaker 1: preferred to reach the garden before sunrise, when the dew
Speaker 1: is still thick on the lawn and the roses haven't
Speaker 1: yet shrugged off last night's chill, before people and traffic
Speaker 1: pour themselves onto the streets and fold away the silence
Speaker 1: like an old bed sheet. This particular morning, I pulled
Speaker 1: my bicycle against the rear gate, the paint on the
Speaker 1: garden sign peeling in the same way it had every
Speaker 1: March since I started. I took out my keying and,
Speaker 1: just for the pleasure of repetition, ran my thumb along
Speaker 1: the familiar teeth Before turning the lock open. The hinges
Speaker 1: breathed a low grown metal meeting soft daylight for the
Speaker 1: first time in hours. The botanical garden isn't mine, of course,
Speaker 1: I only help keep it running, clipping wild brambles from
Speaker 1: the rose beds, clearing gravel after a week of storms.
Speaker 1: Locking up at dusk, the work is quiet in the
Speaker 1: way I most like, physical enough to drive away anxious thought,
Speaker 1: outdoors enough to anchor the body, reliable enough to make
Speaker 1: time run smooth. I was the first to arrive, my
Speaker 1: boots sinking into the mossy trail as I set the
Speaker 1: greenhouse watering timers for the day. Even the birds seemed late,
Speaker 1: now cheaping from the box elders. No insistent robins on
Speaker 1: the You posts, you notice things are missing before you
Speaker 1: lament what's gone. As I idled with my coffee flask
Speaker 1: near the central rose garden, I realized the hush around
Speaker 1: me was deeper than usual. It was that hell breath
Speaker 1: moment poised on the edge between night and day that
Speaker 1: invites its own kind of superstition. If you move too fast,
Speaker 1: maybe dawn won't quite work. Light nudged its way through
Speaker 1: the tangled trees as I walked the path between the
Speaker 1: climbing Pier de Ronsard and the just pruned heritage. Then
Speaker 1: the chorus began, at first the familiar wood pigeons, a
Speaker 1: thrush somewhere near the old sun dial, and the overlapping
Speaker 1: trill of chiff shafts above the service shed, but over
Speaker 1: the top of that, weaving itself in and out was
Speaker 1: something new. The notes came in a stuttering ribbon, not
Speaker 1: the continuous chattering of sparrows, nor the ethereal spiraling lines
Speaker 1: of a nightingale. It struck first as a sharp four
Speaker 1: note motif, bold, strange, almost angular, then a hiccuping run,
Speaker 1: and suddenly a cascade of melodic fragments that seemed to
Speaker 1: tangle and untangle themselves in air. The last notes bent upward,
Speaker 1: flicking at the sky, as if the melody had just
Speaker 1: remembered it could fly. I stood very still, jaw slack,
Speaker 1: letting coffee cool between my hands. No bird I recognized
Speaker 1: or thought I did, sang like that. I spun in
Speaker 1: a slow circle, looking for the chestnut capped warblers, the
Speaker 1: rare spotted flycatchers, anything remotely unusual. But it was just
Speaker 1: the same scrappy handful of brownish red birds that always
Speaker 1: camped near the central roses, red backed shrikes. If my
Speaker 1: field guide memory hadn't failed me innocuous things save their
Speaker 1: predilection for impaling insects on rose thorns, these had always
Speaker 1: struck me as practical, pragmatic songsters delivered a little tune,
Speaker 1: chased a beetle, moved on to day, though, it was
Speaker 1: as if one or several sat at the center of
Speaker 1: some web of sound, pulling threads no one else could see.
Speaker 1: As the city's regular sound track kicked in beyond the walls,
Speaker 1: distant bells, the first clatter of market carts on stone,
Speaker 1: the far off hiss of a street tram. I tried
Speaker 1: to hold on to the after taste of that melody.
Speaker 1: At lunch, as I rifled through the office's fridge for
Speaker 1: my carton of soup, I almost walked right into missus Schroeder.
Speaker 1: She loomed over the counter, her shock white hair cinched
Speaker 1: with a green hair band, scanning yesterday's bird list with
Speaker 1: a fierce concentration of a chess grand master. Your face
Speaker 1: says you've seen a ghost, emmel, she said, not looking up.
Speaker 1: Not a ghost, heard something, though, I replied, nudging my
Speaker 1: lunch onto a free corner amidst her binoculars and battered
Speaker 1: bird guides. She peered at me over her teacup. Don't
Speaker 1: tell me you've finally heard my elusive pied flycatcher. I
Speaker 1: tried humming the tune, self conscious tripping over the intervals,
Speaker 1: but as soon as I started, the memory slipped. I
Speaker 1: produced only a rough, jumpy rhythm, a shadow of what
Speaker 1: I'd heard. Missus Schroder wrinkled her nose, unimpressed. Nothing in
Speaker 1: my books sounds like that, dear, nor in this garden,
Speaker 1: I promise you. That night at home, I tried again,
Speaker 1: made whistling attempts between spoonfuls of lentil stew, humming the
Speaker 1: shape of the unknown phrase into my phone, in the
Speaker 1: hope that i'd conjured detail from muscle memory. What I remembered, though,
Speaker 1: wasn't the precise notes, but the shade of it, something
Speaker 1: oddly compelling, lifting just ahead of itself. Lying in bed,
Speaker 1: I wondered if I had simply heard a moment's oddness,
Speaker 1: a sparrow's cough, a mechanical glitch in the chorus that
Speaker 1: would right itself by to morrow. I resolved to listen
Speaker 1: more closely at dawn. If I'd had any sense, that
Speaker 1: might have been the end of it. But nothing rare
Speaker 1: I've learned, leaves you alone for long, not in this garden,
Speaker 1: and not when you begin to wonder. In earnest daylight
Speaker 1: in the garden unfolds in trickling layers. I unlocked gates
Speaker 1: in slow succession eastern main doors for tourists, covered north
Speaker 1: arch for staff, chicken wired entrance for supply vans. The
Speaker 1: glass house huffs itself awake as heaters switch on with
Speaker 1: a mechanical cough, a kind of amphibious dawn, half worldly,
Speaker 1: half dream. Sometimes when I pause near the central path,
Speaker 1: I feel the city pressing at the edge of my mind.
Speaker 1: Tram bells at the top of the hour, a bakery
Speaker 1: van making curbside deliveries the long forgotten chime of my
Speaker 1: first phone alarm before smartphones. The botanical garden is supposed
Speaker 1: to be a pocket of old earth, cut off from time,
Speaker 1: a curated tangle of cultivated chaos, older than the stone
Speaker 1: University at Abuts, and just as riddled with secret corners.
Speaker 1: I know the garden's morning cast. Missus Schroeder, in her
Speaker 1: forest green windbreaker, stalks the undergrowth with binoculars at her throat,
Speaker 1: as if every robin holds a taxonomic secret. Anya, the
Speaker 1: violin student who practices on a sunken bench near the
Speaker 1: wild irises, often plays scales just above the level of
Speaker 1: bird song, her sound trailing out over the ponds. Marcus,
Speaker 1: our resident glass house keeper, lumbers by with rubber boots,
Speaker 1: muttering to himself as he pries open upper vents swollen
Speaker 1: shut by winter rain. A clutch of elderly gentlemen, hair
Speaker 1: bloom chief among them, scatter breadcrumbs for greedy pigeons near
Speaker 1: the central fountain, reminiscing about post war mornings and the
Speaker 1: cleverness of city squirrels. The garden sits cupped by the
Speaker 1: city's arms, quiet enough for bees to hum undisturbed in
Speaker 1: the foxgloves, close enough that you can trace the time
Speaker 1: by the rising and falling rush of traffic, or the steady,
Speaker 1: syncopated tap of an umbrella on cobblestones. Beyond the hedges.
Speaker 1: You come to know the melodies by season and habit.
Speaker 1: The distant brass echo from the university quad, faint piano
Speaker 1: from open conservatory windows, the rolling waves of bicycles layering
Speaker 1: with blackbird whistles. We regulars have our own symphonies, spoken
Speaker 1: and unspoken. Some, like Missus Schroeder, can identify each bird
Speaker 1: before seeing a feather, while I notice with smaller, slower senses,
Speaker 1: the way a particular sparrow repeats three flat chirps after rainstorm,
Speaker 1: or how the glass greenhouse seems to fold. Certain notes
Speaker 1: back toward the speaker. In Here, subtle shifts, the return
Speaker 1: of a wintering redstart, the rusty rasp of a whetstone
Speaker 1: from Marcus's pocket stand out so clearly wonder grows best
Speaker 1: where routine makes room for it. The garden, with its
Speaker 1: habit bound regulars and sharply attuned listeners, is a place
Speaker 1: where both the expected and the anomalous can thrive. Here,
Speaker 1: a melody out of step with the ordinary does not
Speaker 1: unseat the world's order. It lingers, the garden catches it
Speaker 1: for a while at least, and lets it grow. The
Speaker 1: second morning, Curiosity sat behind my ribs like a fluttering
Speaker 1: bird of its own. I arrived before sunrise, checked the beds,
Speaker 1: and positioned myself with a thermos under the oldest climbing rose.
Speaker 1: As the first ivory flush of dawn pushed through the trees,
Speaker 1: the air was briefly expectant, Then, like a signal, the
Speaker 1: birds began again. What struck me this time was not
Speaker 1: a fleeting tune, but a kind of weave. Six perhaps
Speaker 1: seven red backed shrikes perched among the brambles, firing off
Speaker 1: that same odd motif, as if it were a canonical anthem.
Speaker 1: Each bird sang a phrase. Sometimes one led, the rest
Speaker 1: followed in jagged harmony. Then soloists piped up, improvising. The
Speaker 1: melody was there, twisted, distinctive, exactly as it had haunted
Speaker 1: me the day before. Missus Schroder appeared, shuffling her field notes.
Speaker 1: A frown etched over the bridge of her nose. You're early,
Speaker 1: she said, and you hear it too. I nodded, half
Speaker 1: afraid if I spoke it might vanish. She opened her phone,
Speaker 1: pressing its small microphone toward the nearest branch. Not in
Speaker 1: any book I own, not in any database either, and
Speaker 1: I've got every app there is. Her voice was low,
Speaker 1: half admitting defeat, half something else, disbelief or awe. Two
Speaker 1: young men from the local bird watching club appeared, joining
Speaker 1: the impromptu huddle. They compared shorthand notes. Song starts at
Speaker 1: five zero five a m. Never before dawn, ceases entirely
Speaker 1: by six ten range. Nowhere else but the square quarter
Speaker 1: acre of rose beds and new avenues. Not a chirp
Speaker 1: outside the walled perimeter. If any bird wandered off, it
Speaker 1: sang only the usual repertoire. By midday, curiosity Court, a
Speaker 1: university student named Myra notebook bulging with zoology papers. Wandered
Speaker 1: up overheard Missus Schroder muttering, shrikes. Don't do this, Myra
Speaker 1: told us, waving her phone's record function in the air.
Speaker 1: They're not mimics, not like starlings, and not in clusters
Speaker 1: like that. Anyway. I spent the rest of the day
Speaker 1: in a peculiar, distracted mood, hyper aware of everything musical.
Speaker 1: As I left for home, weaving my bicycle through tourists
Speaker 1: and early commuters, I stopped to listen to the busker
Speaker 1: who played the far corner of the garden plaza. He
Speaker 1: was performing a tune so lively I tapped my shoe
Speaker 1: before I even noticed. And that's when my mind double clutched,
Speaker 1: because the motif the busker played, a rising, spiraling run
Speaker 1: of fours and five on his battered red accordion, matched
Speaker 1: something I had already whistled to myself, almost unconsciously leaving
Speaker 1: the garden that afternoon. At first I thought it was
Speaker 1: mere coincidence, but the cadence was exact. Only the birds
Speaker 1: had sung it first hours ahead. The tune I'd believed
Speaker 1: i'd heard new in the garden that morning echoed again
Speaker 1: now by an unsuspecting street musician felt suddenly as if
Speaker 1: it had arrived out of sequence. Was it possible my
Speaker 1: memory was jumbled? Had the birds copied the busker? Yet
Speaker 1: the timing seemed unmistakable? The melody had looped in my
Speaker 1: brain since dawn, long before I encountered it here played
Speaker 1: by human hands. I cycled home with a low grade
Speaker 1: tremor of anticipation, puzzling over the sequence. Had one of
Speaker 1: the birds perchance overheard the musician days before and repeated
Speaker 1: it in the garden? But the buses didn't run that early,
Speaker 1: and the birds never seemed to range beyond their corner.
Speaker 1: Or was I missing something altogether other stranger? If the
Speaker 1: birds had echoed the tune first, what could it mean?
Speaker 1: The next morning, I came to the garden more prepared.
Speaker 1: I left my phones record a running as I made
Speaker 1: the rounds, fixing the angle so that every snippet of
Speaker 1: song would be logged, both the shrikes odd motif and
Speaker 1: the regular dawn chorus. At noon, I corralled Anya from
Speaker 1: her practice. Aria described what I'd heard and asked if
Speaker 1: she could help transcribe the melody on her violin. She
Speaker 1: was delighted, bright eyed. I like a mystery, she said,
Speaker 1: and propped her instrument against her shoulder, tuning pegs clicking.
Speaker 1: We listened to the morning's audio again and again, the
Speaker 1: tune already more distinct, until she caught the cow a sharp,
Speaker 1: quickstep run, then an unpredictable turn downward. She repeated it,
Speaker 1: slowly at first, then building speed, until it sounded so
Speaker 1: uncannily like the birds themselves. I felt my skin prickle.
Speaker 1: At least it's in a key, she joked, handing the
Speaker 1: recording back. Not that many birds pick major sixth. That afternoon,
Speaker 1: Missus Schroder corralled a clutch of bird watchers for an
Speaker 1: impromptu dawn club. They'd taken to logging their own snippets,
Speaker 1: comparing the shrikes melody note for note against background audio
Speaker 1: clips of the city. Within a week, a pattern stiffened
Speaker 1: through the arbitrary. The birds always introduced new, complex musical segments,
Speaker 1: and those segments seemed with suspicious regularity to match events
Speaker 1: mere hours later. One morning, a bright metallic chime threaded
Speaker 1: its way through the bird's dawn motif, so odd I
Speaker 1: jotted it in the log as triangle bell. That afternoon,
Speaker 1: a parade rolled past the garden's east wall, and for
Speaker 1: the first and only time, the wind lifted the sound
Speaker 1: of wind chimes strapped to the lead marcher's banner directly
Speaker 1: into our line of hearing. Another day, a more percussive
Speaker 1: section appeared in the bird's morning song, a staggered off
Speaker 1: beat sequence. That day, just as tourists began their rounds,
Speaker 1: construction workers arrived unannounced to repair a fractured water mane,
Speaker 1: banging metal shovels with rhythmic clacks, precisely echoing the birds
Speaker 1: earlier prediction. Myra charted our data on a crude map,
Speaker 1: song motif time matching event time. The points formed tangled lines,
Speaker 1: but the directionality was always clear. No motif ever followed
Speaker 1: a new sound. Always it preceded it, sometimes by hours,
Speaker 1: at most by a day. We discussed it with the
Speaker 1: mild excitement A mystery always brings. Walking through the glass
Speaker 1: house among the oranges and slow waking camellias. I asked Marcus,
Speaker 1: our greenhouse manager, whether the dome's glass might do odd
Speaker 1: things with sound, Could something reverberation, maybe let last night's
Speaker 1: noises echo through in the morning. He shook his head,
Speaker 1: brow furrowed the glass muddles more than it sharpens. He said,
Speaker 1: you ever try recording a robin in here? Half the
Speaker 1: time it sounds like a badly tuned radio. Missus Schroeder meanwhile,
Speaker 1: grew more philosophical. Maybe the birds sent something in the
Speaker 1: air pressure vibrations, a kind of city rhythm before it
Speaker 1: turns audible to us. She described studies about migrating birds
Speaker 1: detecting magnetic fields, but none about melodic foresight. Words spread.
Speaker 1: Each dawn drew another small crowd, retarees in walking shoes,
Speaker 1: students still yawning, volunteers from nearby shops, all hoping to
Speaker 1: catch the next premonition. We compared logs, wondering aloud what
Speaker 1: the shrike sensed. Was it a coincidence, a confounding variable,
Speaker 1: or something subtler at play. What I knew and others
Speaker 1: began to suspect, was that the patterns refused randomness. The
Speaker 1: birds were not simply parroting what echoed around them. They
Speaker 1: pulled from a well yet untapped, singing pieces of a
Speaker 1: future soundscape, as if writing the next movement in a
Speaker 1: familiar symphony. With every new example, the mystery shifted its
Speaker 1: center of gravity. It was as if reality permitted in
Speaker 1: this tiny garden, a gentle reversal of cause and effect,
Speaker 1: at least for songbirds. Each new event taxed our vocabulary,
Speaker 1: not mimicry, not prophecy, not even memory. I found myself
Speaker 1: perched each morning, listening not just for beauty, but for
Speaker 1: what might come next, What slight disturbance, what joyful surprise
Speaker 1: would echo hours later in the garden's living score. I
Speaker 1: began to keep a running timeline, a home made calendar
Speaker 1: with two columns left for bird motifs, fragments, whistled, trilled,
Speaker 1: rattled right for the day's later events. Anya helped annotate,
Speaker 1: sketching quick staff notations that translated the Avian phrases into
Speaker 1: fragments intelligible to any passing musician. We compared recordings the
Speaker 1: percussive tapping of a child's stick parade, the polyphonic laughter
Speaker 1: from a wedding under the plane trees, applause for an
Speaker 1: impromptu theatre show stayed aged by a youth company hood
Speaker 1: until that morning, not planned to perform. We added up
Speaker 1: the tally. Never once did the birds echo an event
Speaker 1: that had already happened. Every musical piece in their morning
Speaker 1: chorus unwound later in the day, sometimes echoed in the
Speaker 1: chur of a bicycle bell, sometimes in the suddenly joyous
Speaker 1: chords of a violin soloist, once in the crashing clatter
Speaker 1: of a tray dropped by a caterer. On the efficient
Speaker 1: stone steps a visitor who introduced himself as Klaus, a
Speaker 1: semi retired composer drawn by a friend's obsession, arrived with
Speaker 1: a portable recorder and an eager open mind. He listened, nodded,
Speaker 1: replayed the dawn's audio again and again, tapping his note
Speaker 1: book in rhythm. These aren't simple copies, he said, This
Speaker 1: is composition. The birds hear something, how to explain a
Speaker 1: future motif and then shape it, stretch the theme, entwine it
Speaker 1: with their usual song. Not perfect imitation, but transformation, anticipating
Speaker 1: and rearranging what we'll hear later in the day. My skepticism,
Speaker 1: my deeply rooted belief in orderly explanations, started to grow brittle.
Speaker 1: I checked three times the field Guide's passage on shrike vocalization.
Speaker 1: Nowhere any mention of motifs constructed out of not yet
Speaker 1: heard urban noise. I reread our logs, tried mapping the odds.
Speaker 1: How often could birds have guessed the precise notes of
Speaker 1: an unscheduled air ray drill announced at random once that
Speaker 1: week and only broadcast to authorities minutes before it sounded.
Speaker 1: The probability shivered further from chance. In the staff office,
Speaker 1: I met with Myra and Missus Schroeder. I asked, voice tight,
Speaker 1: what are we really hearing? Are we just fooling ourselves
Speaker 1: documenting apophenia elaborate city wide coincidence. Myra shook her head slowly,
Speaker 1: genuinely troubled. It's too exact and always forward, never backwards,
Speaker 1: not once, repeated. Missus Schroeder, eyes fixed on the daily
Speaker 1: log book, offered, simply, I haven't heard anything like this
Speaker 1: in seventy years of bird watching. It's as if the
Speaker 1: birds here have found a scene between times folds. After
Speaker 1: days of constructing vantage points, repositioning microphones, and hunting for
Speaker 1: practical explanations crossdork city echoes, hidden speakers, we surrendered to
Speaker 1: disproving rather than solving. Nothing stuck. No pattern registered unless
Speaker 1: the timeline charted forwards. Whatever was unfolding wasn't recordable as
Speaker 1: mere accident. Later that week, Anya staged a test with
Speaker 1: a conspiratorial wink. She ducked into the gazebo at dusk,
Speaker 1: practicing a swift, complex motif newly written the night before,
Speaker 1: Known to no one but herself. She left no recordings
Speaker 1: behind and played early enough that no one but a
Speaker 1: reluctant magpie could have heard. The next morning, the shrikes
Speaker 1: opened their chorus at five zero nine a m. With
Speaker 1: a warbling version of that very motif, recognizable, though transformed
Speaker 1: into near aviary finesse As we gathered to witness, Anya
Speaker 1: all but dropped her violin, grinning in shock. That's mine,
Speaker 1: she said, laughing. Words spread quickly. Before ten the story
Speaker 1: reached doctor Laurent, an acoustic scientist with the university's physics department,
Speaker 1: who arrived surrounded by graduate students wheeling acilloscopes and odd
Speaker 1: gleaming devices. She measured sonic refractions, wave patterns, subsonic resonance
Speaker 1: through the garden stone work, the domes of the glasshouse,
Speaker 1: the humidity, thick air swirling in the rose beds. The
Speaker 1: only finding the garden muddled echoes didn't amplify them. Certainly,
Speaker 1: nothing on record about sound traveling forward. Every experiment comes
Speaker 1: up clean, Doctor Laurence said, No acoustic trick no back
Speaker 1: door resonance. Whatever's happening, it sits outside known mechanisms. Late
Speaker 1: in the day, I cornered Marcus while he fussed over
Speaker 1: a sticky greenhouse vent and asked if he thought anything
Speaker 1: in the garden's design, old stone work, underground pipes, micro
Speaker 1: climates could hide some past or channel some future. He
Speaker 1: only smirked, gestured at the uneven flagstones leading from the
Speaker 1: rose beds to the glass house. Place has old bones,
Speaker 1: he said. Sometimes the wind echoes in ways even I
Speaker 1: can't chart. Maybe there's more between stone and vine than
Speaker 1: we're meant to count. Missus Schroeder, now equal parts scientist
Speaker 1: and mystic, leaned forward during a log review that afternoon
Speaker 1: and announced, what if our timelines are simply a little
Speaker 1: out of step? Here? The city's heart ticks early and
Speaker 1: shrikes clever little things catch the pulse first. In less
Speaker 1: than two weeks, we demassed a log so precise even
Speaker 1: the most reticent bird watchers conceded its oddity. Every morning,
Speaker 1: the birds introduced new musical elements, each mapped with uncanny
Speaker 1: for del to later that day's unpredictable events. Every now
Speaker 1: and then, the motif would reference an event at the
Speaker 1: very edge of the garden, barely audible within the wall,
Speaker 1: but always within reach. With growing attention came press. A
Speaker 1: local science columnist famed for debunking and delight in equal measure,
Speaker 1: visited with a handheld microphone, spending three days waking at
Speaker 1: dawn to record the shrikes. She left astonished. Her article
Speaker 1: headlined tomorrow's bird song to day, what's in the water
Speaker 1: At the Central Gardens. The ripple widened. Officials from the
Speaker 1: university and the city's old conservatory sent cautious envies. Scientists, skeptics, musicians,
Speaker 1: even bureaucratic types with clipboards and data hygiene checklists. The
Speaker 1: gardens director noticed the crowd too, sending pointed questions about
Speaker 1: media policy, laboratory oversight, and most important, public safety, though
Speaker 1: the crisis was psychological, not physical. With attention, too, came disagreement.
Speaker 1: Some faculty dismissed the phenomenon as collective suggestion. One plausible mimic,
Speaker 1: repeated often enough, became evidence through psychological priming. Others worried
Speaker 1: our tools, audio logs, staff schedules created inadvertent feedback loops,
Speaker 1: biasing what the birds predicted. The more invasive the scrutiny
Speaker 1: the more those with open ears surrendered lab coats for
Speaker 1: hooded anoraks and coffee thermoses, presiding over ever larger dawn
Speaker 1: listening assemblies. Through it all, I became by accident rather
Speaker 1: than ambition. The keeper of the future song logs, Missus Schroder,
Speaker 1: handed off her files. Anya lent her daily notations. The
Speaker 1: composer emailed annotated track lists. Marcus supplied side eyed remarks
Speaker 1: about the ghosts being musical. At least each day, I
Speaker 1: padded through dewy beds to the central Garden, recording both
Speaker 1: Dawn's miracle and the increasingly social rituals orbiting it. One
Speaker 1: breezy Friday, I was asked to host a dawn tour
Speaker 1: for a group that included faculty, skeptics, musical enthusiasts, and
Speaker 1: three city officials. As the group assembled, I briefed them
Speaker 1: in a voice pitched between confidence and apology. I warned,
Speaker 1: most days the shrikes seemed content to play their tune.
Speaker 1: Whether it means anything is for you to judge. Just
Speaker 1: as Dawn cracked, the birds began a strange motif. When
Speaker 1: I jotted as repeated child's chant staggered applause. It struck
Speaker 1: me as cryptic, even dull, until hours after the tour
Speaker 1: had dispersed, a passing troop of school children late for
Speaker 1: a field trip broke into an impromptu clap and march
Speaker 1: game on the same flagstones that had rung with the
Speaker 1: bird's tune. Later, the consensus among my observers didn't matter.
Speaker 1: I stood among the roses, hands still muddy, aware that
Speaker 1: our puzzle had grown, legs had begun slipping beyond the walls,
Speaker 1: drawing outsiders, publicists, and detached scientists. Yet at the story's center,
Speaker 1: what I felt was not anxiety, but a kind of
Speaker 1: elastic joy. The question I had started with, what birds sang?
Speaker 1: That peculiar melody was gone, replaced by something more liminal.
Speaker 1: What if in this garden Time's arrow occasionally stammered, not
Speaker 1: for people, but for birds. What if nature itself composed
Speaker 1: and rehearsed a bar or two a head caught only
Speaker 1: in the places our listening was sharp enough and expectation loose.
Speaker 1: The curiosity pressed forward, insistent the shrikes future melodies were
Speaker 1: not merely uncanny mimicry. Nor was this puzzle about animals alone.
Speaker 1: The garden itself, ancient bones and tangled roots might shimmer
Speaker 1: on the border between world and possibility, a patch of
Speaker 1: earth shaped by centuries, where the boundaries of time could,
Speaker 1: under the right circumstances ripple. I understood the world differently, then,
Speaker 1: a little less certain, a little more attuned to the oddness,
Speaker 1: as dawn closed in around me and birds sang what
Speaker 1: was not yet true. The morning after the school children's
Speaker 1: echoing applause, I hardly slept, though not from excitement nor anxiety.
Speaker 1: There was simply an insistent present ness to the world.
Speaker 1: I dressed by lamplight, laced my boots, and stepped out,
Speaker 1: knowing I was moving through two realities at once, the steady,
Speaker 1: provident world of sunrise and a brighter, uncertain axis running
Speaker 1: just ahead of every known note word had spread. Of course,
Speaker 1: the city paper ran a follow up under the headline
Speaker 1: future in feather and Song. The garden's information desk fielded
Speaker 1: calls from national radio. Two university deans wanted to assess
Speaker 1: for experiment synergy. By seven, there were already new faces
Speaker 1: pressed to the garden's outer fences, recordedts with long black microphones,
Speaker 1: a clump of science undergrads with breakfast pastries, and a
Speaker 1: very alert woman in an electric purple cardigan, later introduced
Speaker 1: as doctor Anna Harm's Faculty Musicology. She carried a satchel
Speaker 1: bulging with notepads and staff paper. Her walk brisk eyebrows
Speaker 1: arched upward as if yearning to meet the sky. Missus
Speaker 1: Schroder handed me a mug of tea and slid in
Speaker 1: beside me on the bench. You know, emmil For seventy
Speaker 1: years I've wanted some one to share such a dawn with,
Speaker 1: though I never dreamed the city would give us a
Speaker 1: chorus like this. As all this attention ruined it, I shrugged,
Speaker 1: awkward with gratitude, and she sipped, her eyes focused as
Speaker 1: ever on the tangle of branches above the due dark earth.
Speaker 1: Doctor Laurent arrived next, dragging a small trolley of acoustic
Speaker 1: measuring equipment flanked by an army of blinking LEDs and
Speaker 1: wire coils. She nodded to me, adjusted the antenna on
Speaker 1: a device that looked like a hybrid between a radio
Speaker 1: telescope and a kitchen blender, and began her mourning calibration.
Speaker 1: Anya and Mira, pared by fate and musical predilection, stood
Speaker 1: beside the see Central bed, heads together over a shared notepad.
Speaker 1: Their laughter, bright, untroubled, at least for the moment. I realized,
Speaker 1: as I gazed at this accidental council of botanists, birders, physicists,
Speaker 1: and ordinary city folk, that the garden itself had become
Speaker 1: an interface, a membrane as finely attuned to oddities as
Speaker 1: any violin string, even if this time its vibrations ran
Speaker 1: deeper than bird song. Emmel, said Doctor Laurent, snapping me
Speaker 1: from reverie. Could you help me arrange these? She gestured
Speaker 1: at a batch of ultrasonic recorders that she both calibrated
Speaker 1: and carefully labeled in red tape. We're going to try
Speaker 1: multiangle recordings to day. If there's any information encoded in
Speaker 1: directions we haven't covered, I want to catch it, I nodded,
Speaker 1: positioning three black sticks into the soil at semicircular points
Speaker 1: around the largest climbing rows. The scientific side of me
Speaker 1: wanted so dearly to believe that the answer lived within
Speaker 1: the data, waiting to be coaxed out by the patience
Speaker 1: of the curious. By the creek, a group of retired
Speaker 1: gentlemen muttered about the city's coverage hysteria over a few
Speaker 1: clever birds, while a younger couple smartphones, Aloft attempted to
Speaker 1: snatch moments for their own stories. It was almost laughably modern,
Speaker 1: half ritual, half field work. The rest opportunistic. Myra, who
Speaker 1: been quietly observing while scribbling over comparative ornithological data, ventured
Speaker 1: a question, what if we brought in more experts. Someone
Speaker 1: who studies animal cognition may be from Berlin or Budapest,
Speaker 1: or you know someone who has studied bird navigation. Since
Speaker 1: shrikes migrate so far, missus Schroeder's grin was rye. They'll
Speaker 1: say it's an artifact, mass suggestion, or maybe a trick
Speaker 1: of the stone walls. Still send the emails. At least
Speaker 1: you'll see how fast a busy professor can invent a
Speaker 1: reasonable explanation for the impossible. Doctor Lawrence looked up as
Speaker 1: if summoned by skepticism. There are places in the world,
Speaker 1: she said, fiddling with the settings on her device where
Speaker 1: sound does the unthinkable. Norwegian valley where echoes return an
Speaker 1: hour later during certain winter nights, cathedrals with a ten
Speaker 1: second reverb, whole genres of folk music designed so that
Speaker 1: songs meet themselves in madair. She pinched the bridge of
Speaker 1: her nose. But if the phenomenon were strictly acoustic, we
Speaker 1: would have caught something by now, some resonance, some sulfurous
Speaker 1: artifact on the spectrogram. Instead, what we have, she trailed off,
Speaker 1: shaking her head. Is what, said Anna, who seemed hungry
Speaker 1: for a challenge. Doctor Lawrence surprised me with softness is
Speaker 1: wonder and possibly a challenge to the nature of sequence itself.
Speaker 1: We all paused, as audiences do when something at once
Speaker 1: simple and radical is placed before them, blurred, filled with
Speaker 1: a procession of experiments, arguments, and diagrams best left to
Speaker 1: those who crave control. Bird watchers from rival parks came,
Speaker 1: set up tripods and tarpaulins, and left frustrated when their
Speaker 1: own shrikes played by the old reasonable rules. The effect,
Speaker 1: if it could be called, that, was chained to our
Speaker 1: central garden and to this particular mottled flock. And a
Speaker 1: set to work analyzing the dawn logs. She made a
Speaker 1: pitch for causal seeding could sound shape the bird's next
Speaker 1: motif by introducing a passage late in the day to
Speaker 1: see if it would get incorporated into tomorrow's sequence. With
Speaker 1: Anya and Myra's help, she sang and whistled phrases, a
Speaker 1: syncopated walltz an interval series, until the garden itself seemed
Speaker 1: restless from all the human humming. For three consecutive mornings,
Speaker 1: the shrikes remained resolutely indifferent, singing motifs that would emerge
Speaker 1: later in those days, but never adopting the carefully seeded pattern.
Speaker 1: After the third morning of failure tinged anticipation, Anna shrugged, philosophical.
Speaker 1: You can't manipulate anticipation, she said, rubbing her temple, no
Speaker 1: matter how many times you transpose hope into C major.
Speaker 1: In the Universities break room, I listened as a visiting
Speaker 1: ornithologist named doctor Christo railthin and given to running his
Speaker 1: hands through his thinning hair, mapped migratory data on a
Speaker 1: coffee stained napkin. If you drew a line through the
Speaker 1: places these shrikes stop. He traced an arc from southern
Speaker 1: Spain up through France, Germany east into Poland and the Baltics.
Speaker 1: Every so often there's a sight associated with remarkable acoustic effects.
Speaker 1: Roman amphitheaters, temples with echo chambers, even a few medieval cloisters,
Speaker 1: some said to have been blessed to hear the voice
Speaker 1: of the future. His eyes glittered for a moment, not
Speaker 1: with the confidence of a scientist, but with the mischief
Speaker 1: of a child poking a stick at the perimeter of
Speaker 1: the impossible pattern or human fancy. I wanted to say, fancy.
Speaker 1: How else to hold my own practical world steady? Yet
Speaker 1: the magnetic pull of the garden's mornings was already rearranging
Speaker 1: my sense of consequence. Meanwhile, the city's press, picking up
Speaker 1: on the weirder notes, published stories of their own. One
Speaker 1: tabloid ran the headline mystic shrikes predict parades, timing, coincidence
Speaker 1: or telepathic phenomenon. Images of our garden went semiviral on
Speaker 1: social media profiles, accompanied by sound clips and odd, breathy hashtags.
Speaker 1: I tried not to mind. It was both a circus
Speaker 1: and a cathedral, depending on how earnestly you watched. To
Speaker 1: preserve whatever peace remained, we regulars informally cordoned off the
Speaker 1: roses at dawn. Spectators were gently reminded to keep back,
Speaker 1: Offering the elated shrikes a stage unspoiled by phone blips
Speaker 1: and breakneck commentary. Miss Weber City historian and un expected
Speaker 1: ally offered us new avenues. She wheeled a battered suit
Speaker 1: case into the admin office, Shaking off the dust. With
Speaker 1: both ceremony and acute pleasure, she spread over the table
Speaker 1: blueprints of the garden from its earliest iterations, hand rendered
Speaker 1: lines indicating paths that no longer existed, A labyrinth pattern
Speaker 1: beneath the current rose beds, marked by a central stone
Speaker 1: labeled cryptically as vox etony, the eternal voice, separated by centuries.
Speaker 1: She said, the garden hosts more than plantings. Look here,
Speaker 1: Her finger traced a quadrangle where a stone arch must
Speaker 1: have stood. This was once the heart of a ceremonial
Speaker 1: root tied to feast days, and she tapped a side
Speaker 1: note in Latin, then one in Old German ritual music.
Speaker 1: Priests or monks or whatever you'd call the old caretakers
Speaker 1: would hum and whistle here, so that, as the manuscript claims,
Speaker 1: the ground might know to morrow's joys. It was too
Speaker 1: curious to ignore this overlay of human tradition, with the
Speaker 1: garden's natural quirks layering a history of anticipation onto roots
Speaker 1: now tangled with future song. Disagreement, however, ran as freely
Speaker 1: as the garden's water channels. Some insisted it was all
Speaker 1: still cognitive bias that with enough data and a sharp
Speaker 1: enough mind, the pattern would dissolve into explainable cause and effect.
Speaker 1: Others spun out theories ultra low frequency vibration, electromagnetic resonance,
Speaker 1: mass unconscious priming. Skepticism flourished even among the enchanted. I
Speaker 1: found myself relying not on any single hypothesis, but on
Speaker 1: the evolving pattern of connection. No matter how many variables
Speaker 1: we scrambled, musical keys, garden layouts, even deliberate disruptions, the
Speaker 1: phenomenon remained elusive to intention, but transparent to observation. In
Speaker 1: the run of days that followed, and events cemented our
Speaker 1: sense of the garden's chronological sway. This time it wasn't
Speaker 1: a parade or a content struction crew, but the city
Speaker 1: Cathedral's bells, solemn and breath taking, rung only for funerals.
Speaker 1: The morning before, the shrikes had veered wildly from their
Speaker 1: usual tune, delivering a motif so grave I felt my
Speaker 1: pulse slow. Myra and Anna both remarked on the phrase
Speaker 1: identical to a certain funeral cadence from the cathedral two
Speaker 1: streets away. That afternoon, news spread a prominent civic leader,
Speaker 1: young beloved had died overnight, and the bells rang their
Speaker 1: morning hours after sunrise. The press ran with the pattern.
Speaker 1: City officials launched a hurried review of our audio logs
Speaker 1: for a brief while the garden was surveiled more intently
Speaker 1: than a state secret. Yet, though sound samples from every
Speaker 1: surrounding district were analyzed, no similar phenomena could be found.
Speaker 1: The shrikes of the gardens in a quarter remained alone
Speaker 1: in their art. Anna, undeterred by forays into the limits
Speaker 1: of causation, returned to her seeding experiments. This time she
Speaker 1: played sequences out across the garden with Myra's help, then
Speaker 1: returned at dawn, hoping to find them worked into the
Speaker 1: morning's song time. And again she was disappointed. The birds
Speaker 1: remained sovereign, their motifs, tracking not what humans wished or willed,
Speaker 1: but what the garden city and some unknown cross currant
Speaker 1: conspired to provide. One morning, mister bloom Hare bloomed to
Speaker 1: his oldest friends, approached me on the bench, a paper
Speaker 1: sack of breadcrumbs clutched to his chest, voice gruff from disuse.
Speaker 1: You know when I was a boy, he said, scattering
Speaker 1: feed for insistent pigeons. My mother, God rest Her used
Speaker 1: to say, the garden recorded secrets. We'd whisper wishes into
Speaker 1: the rose beds, and she'd say, give them time. This
Speaker 1: place hears everything that is and will be he eyed.
Speaker 1: The morning crowd streaming past. Perhaps these birds, he continued,
Speaker 1: aren't telling us what is to come, but helping us
Speaker 1: be ready, tuning us so when the world plays its
Speaker 1: strange music, our hearts can catch them downbeat. I thought
Speaker 1: of Anya's violin, of all the city's little daily crescendos,
Speaker 1: sudden and bright as brass. Every attempt we'd made to
Speaker 1: shift the motif, every plan to prompt or own the
Speaker 1: bird's anticipation, had failed, mirrored, unpredictable events arrived anyway at
Speaker 1: their time, their place, observed, not created. I let mister
Speaker 1: Bloom's words sink in. Perhaps the song itself is not prophecy,
Speaker 1: but preparation, a garden's silent rehearsal for what will be.
Speaker 1: That day was bright, wind drenched. I walked the perimeter,
Speaker 1: heart loose and directionness. Wandering past the edge of the
Speaker 1: rose beds, I found myself drawn by an unpruned clump
Speaker 1: of climbing vines, thicker than I remembered twisted around an
Speaker 1: old stone plinth. Pushing gently through, I was met by
Speaker 1: a cool whiff of earth and a silent, narrow alcove,
Speaker 1: recently exposed by winter's thinning and the early efforts of spring. There,
Speaker 1: half swaddled in moss and petals, was an old stone arch,
Speaker 1: its face pitied but legible under careful light. Latin, and
Speaker 1: what looked like medieval Germans snaked across the inner curve.
Speaker 1: The central phrase almost lost to centuries hortous audit quad
Speaker 1: non dumb dictum ast, which with some effort translated as
Speaker 1: the garden hears that which is not yet spoken. I
Speaker 1: crouched before the inscription, pressing my palm to the cold surface.
Speaker 1: Imagination or intuition, I could almost feel a hum, like
Speaker 1: the distant tremor before thunder, or the way a plucked
Speaker 1: string waits to be heard. Miss Weber summoned by a
Speaker 1: call poured over the stone with brisk affection. I've seen
Speaker 1: hints of this in the town's records, she murmured, producing
Speaker 1: an archival note from her ever present files. There in
Speaker 1: faded ink was a second reference to hum, so that
Speaker 1: the ground no to morrow's joys. Her eyes sparkled, It's
Speaker 1: not just a matter of birds or chance, emmel This
Speaker 1: patch of earth aspires to more than cultivation. It's a lens,
Speaker 1: an old one, perhaps, but tuned to more than one
Speaker 1: kind of time. That afternoon, I found Doctor Laurance sitting
Speaker 1: by the greenhouse, surrounded by waves of data print outs.
Speaker 1: If there's any natural resonance, she said, it's deeply buried.
Speaker 1: If not in the physics, then in this place's peculiar history.
Speaker 1: I ran every kind of analysis, every frequency cross check. Nothing.
Speaker 1: But then sometimes nothing is all you can ever expect
Speaker 1: from equipment built to confirm what already exists. I remembered
Speaker 1: cases rare and controversial, where stone circles, empty amphitheaters or
Speaker 1: cathedral cloisters generated ghost echoes. Strange pockets, whether past or future,
Speaker 1: clung to the present. But every test, every clever attempt
Speaker 1: to bottle the taste of to Morrow's melody, failed to
Speaker 1: move us closer to causation. Yet in those shared moments
Speaker 1: of early light, a new possibility revealed itself. Perhaps in
Speaker 1: rare places layered by centuries of ritual architecture and unplanned community,
Speaker 1: the border between memory and expectation thinned, Perhaps time itself
Speaker 1: was not as linear as the garden paths I walked
Speaker 1: each day. Perhaps here certain listeners could catch the future's slipstream,
Speaker 1: even if only by the briefest of refrains. I stopped
Speaker 1: one evening under the stone arch, letting the day's sun
Speaker 1: fade over the domes of the glass house. The birds
Speaker 1: were silent, already vanished to their evening roosts. I stood
Speaker 1: in that hush, listening for footsteps, distant bells. Nothing new,
Speaker 1: nothing planned. Yet my sense of tension, the need to
Speaker 1: name or claim the unknown, had lost its urgency. Later,
Speaker 1: as the dust settled from weeks of attention, a plan
Speaker 1: was formed, a group assembly, one more pre dawn gathering,
Speaker 1: not to record, experiment, or manipulate, but simply to listen.
Speaker 1: Anna called it the listening. She and Anya set the time.
Speaker 1: Myra brought her annotated logs, Missus Schroeder and the bird
Speaker 1: herd watchers brought only open eyes and thermoses. Marcus grinned
Speaker 1: and supplied wordlessly a fresh bag of pastries. That morning,
Speaker 1: the sky arrived in Indigo, rags missed unrolling over the
Speaker 1: garden paths. We arranged ourselves in a loose circle by
Speaker 1: the central bed, no gadgets at hand, notes folded away.
Speaker 1: Even Doctor Laurent and her students joined us, faces clear
Speaker 1: of scientific armor, waiting as the first calls shivered through
Speaker 1: the air. The shrikes opened with a fired off run,
Speaker 1: spiraling sweet light, then a bright bell like motif. Unmistakable.
Speaker 1: At first, I assumed it was memory, until Anna narrowed
Speaker 1: her eyes, slowly transcribing. Myra checked her phone. No events scheduled,
Speaker 1: no parades, nothing forecast on the city's public calendars. No
Speaker 1: one moved, We just listened. The motif emerged, changed, deepened,
Speaker 1: repeating with poised anticipatory energy. A tiny overture, a bell
Speaker 1: song for a celebration not yet written. By late morning,
Speaker 1: A sun pulled cool gold beyond the hedgerows. A young
Speaker 1: couple appeared at the garden's main gate, flushed and breathless.
Speaker 1: They spoke with the administrator. Could they possibly arrange a
Speaker 1: wedding to day now? An efficient was phoned. A city
Speaker 1: musician dashed across from the conservatory carrying a set of
Speaker 1: wedding chimes borrowed at the last minute. As we watched
Speaker 1: from the margins, some laughing, some in awe, the gentle, joyful,
Speaker 1: pealing of bells floated across the rose beds, weaving through air,
Speaker 1: just as the birds had done hours before. Anna, teary eyed,
Speaker 1: put her hand over her mouth. Anya squeezed Myra's shoulder.
Speaker 1: You can't plan it, Anya whispered, it just arrives. The
Speaker 1: group for once was silent, not with skepticism or disbelief,
Speaker 1: but with what I think of as humble joy. I
Speaker 1: saw Doctor Laurent and Cristo exchange a look, a look
Speaker 1: I would not have expected from scientists used to equations,
Speaker 1: not wonder. After the wedding had dissolved into photos and laughter,
Speaker 1: our little circle lingered. Missus Shroeder passed around pastries, quietly declaring,
Speaker 1: sometimes the only explanation is that not everything wants explaining,
Speaker 1: this place has its own rules for those able to listen,
Speaker 1: we drifted outwards. Missus Shroder wrapped my hand in both
Speaker 1: of hers, murmured, you'll hear new wonders tomorrow, emmil You
Speaker 1: just have to trust the silence before the song. In
Speaker 1: the days that followed, city interest faded, the visiting teams
Speaker 1: dismantled their senses, and the world's relentless march returned, disrupted,
Speaker 1: perhaps only in invisible ways. I resumed my old routines, pruning, opening,
Speaker 1: waiting for the spring's green wave to break through the cold.
Speaker 1: Something inward had changed, not certainties, but attention. Every step
Speaker 1: before dawn now carried a tinge of anti dissipation, as
Speaker 1: if I too was waiting for the world to finish tuning.
Speaker 1: Before the day began, the regulars, no longer at odds,
Speaker 1: began forming loose morning gatherings. Arguments softened, replaced with easy
Speaker 1: wonder and quiet laughter. Sometimes we sat silently, sometimes we
Speaker 1: ate together, but all shared the knowledge a secret, both
Speaker 1: ordinary and rare, that reality kept wider patterns than we
Speaker 1: had dreamed. I still kept my log, but only in
Speaker 1: loose sketches. Arrival and departure, a new tune, a coincident, laughter,
Speaker 1: a bell, a passing parade. Each day's song now felt
Speaker 1: less a puzzle to be solved than an overture to
Speaker 1: be witnessed. I no longer pressed to capture every measure,
Speaker 1: every note. I listened instead for the shape of tomorrow
Speaker 1: as it threaded itself into to day. Once, as rain
Speaker 1: scattered early buds from the apple trees, I passed beneath
Speaker 1: the old arch after a tiring morning, hand trailing along
Speaker 1: its pitted stone. In that pause, I heard the faintest
Speaker 1: hint of song, shrill and sweet, almost familiar. I smiled,
Speaker 1: not quite sure if it was real or imagined, and
Speaker 1: felt welcomed by uncertainty. On the first truly warm morning
Speaker 1: of April, I stood alone again, boots sinking into damp
Speaker 1: grass beneath the climbing roses, hands wrapped round a cooling mug.
Speaker 1: The garden lay before me, a patchwork of green and shadow,
Speaker 1: birdless for now, save the faintest scurry in the underbrush.
Speaker 1: I listened, letting silence deepen, until just as the sky
Speaker 1: mottled with the blue wash of sunrise, a cluster of
Speaker 1: shrikes released their first motif. The notes unfurled, twisting ahead
Speaker 1: of memory, fragile, impossible, exquisite. Sometimes I wonder if all
Speaker 1: of reality isn't gently foreshadowed, running just ahead of itself,
Speaker 1: singing in outlines that if I pay attention, if I
Speaker 1: trust the quiet between breaths, I might hear what matters most,
Speaker 1: the hummer to morrow, the garden's living overture. I listen,
Speaker 1: I wait, and every so often I think I hear
Speaker 1: the world composing itself, one note ahead of knowing, and
Speaker 1: that is the end. Thank you for listening, and I
Speaker 1: will see you in the next one.