Buzzing [19]

There was a whirring or buzzing kind of noise. It reminded me of the 17 year cicadas, the overwhelming 100-decibel buzzing sound that masks everything else in waves of Insect Love Calls, some summers, altering the very atmosphere and making me a bit woozy. This version of it had a similar effect.
I shook my head to try to clear it and stood up straight as the figure detached itself from the jungle overgrowth behind it and smoothly floated towards me.
He? She? was taller than a standard door- which I knew to be 7 feet. They? was pure white, like snow or clean new paper or sheets.
Even the irises of their eyes were white. There were pale blue shadows to help to distinguish some of the features of their face.
Their clothing, too, was white- what there was of it. They had on a sort of loincloth/kilt arrangement, and a sort of kerchief/headdress that resembled, a little bit, the headdress of the Sphinx at Giza.
They had long thin legs that bent backwards, like a bird’s, and their arms, poking out from beneath their [also white] feathered cape were as thin, and looked to be scaled, like a lizard or a bird.
As they came closer to me, I decided that the small goatee on the chin and the lack of breasts indicated a male.
He stood about ten feet from me, now, and cocked his head one way and then the other, regarding me.
I said, “Hi there, I’m sorry, I…”
As soon as the sound came out of my mouth he startled, a bit, and his head shot up a good four or five inches to teeter on the top of an impossibly long neck, his feathered “cloak” flipped around to behind his shoulders, becoming wings, and he bounced a little bit on his backwards-bending legs, and made a noise that was a cross between the buzzing noise I’d been hearing and that of a hawk’s cry.
My turn to startle. I crouched down a little bit in fear and raised my hands in, I guess, supplication. The universal “please don’t hurt me” stance. His head on its long neck came forward a bit , and he sniffed at me, cocked his head back and forth again, making quiet buzzing/ chirping noises.
I started to wonder whether this was a sentient being or not, and took a step back. As I did so, a large WHOOSH of air came from directly overhead, and my seven foot tall acquaintance looked up with a big smile on his face.
I did NOT like that. At all.
I turned, and behind me, standing on top of the stone, was the 25′ tall Daddy of the little baby I’d been frightening with my apparently uncouth behavior. He too was pure white, but somehow more… buzzy. There were small cracklings and sparks at the edges of his feathers.
I tried to speak, but there was no getting my vocal chords to function at this point, so I just stared up at him and waited.
He cocked his head at me, hawklike, and then, with a slight buzzing to his voice, said, “Y’all ain’t from around here, are ya?”
I gasped in surprise and then said, “Nope. Sure ain’t.” in as dry a Kansas manner as I could manage.
There was a sound like distant thunder, which seemed to be coming from somewhere inside his white, downy chest, and then he broke out with a loud squawking noise that it took me a moment to realize was laughter.
He poked at the little black stone I’d put out as an “offering”. “Nope bzzzzz no good. Not good. Why? How?” He cocked an eye at me, looked me up and down. His eyes glinted a bit too brightly for my tastes. “Where’dja git this?”
I said, “A man gave it to me yesterday. I didn’t know that…”
“Man? Half yellow eyed man?” I nodded numbly. He rumbled again, and his eyes began to look like halogen lights.
“How’d you git here, then?” he asked, suspiciously, his neck getting longer, like his …chick’s had done.
I shuffled my feet, took a deep breath, and blurted, “I was helping Grace to get Albert into the rock and she said she didn’t have a gift and neither did Charlie or what’sizname, Skelty? so I thought this stone would be… shiny… enough?”
He stopped glowing for a second, then, and looked me up and down a bit more slowly.
“Albert’s in the rock?” he asked, quietly. He flicked my pebble off of the stone onto the ground and said, “You keep that.” in almost the same tones that Pebbles had used, the day before. Then he said, “Step away, please.”
I picked up the pebble and put it into my pajama pants pocket.
The bird-man perched there for a quiet moment, silently, and then began to buzz and rumble in a rhythmic kind of way. I realized it was something of a heartbeat rhythm, steady and circular, like the drumming in an inipi-circle. As he did so, I realized the young “chick”, near me, was joining in, and that more were emerging from the jungle all around. Soon there were a half dozen chicks all around me, all thrumming to the same rhythm, and they and their parent were all glowing with an increasingly bright cerulean blue light. And buzzing loudly.
And the hair on my arms was beginning to stand on end.
I ran about thirty feet towards the treeline, then, just barely avoiding the flashing lightning as they all discharged their built-up energy into the tunnel-stone, flapping their wings in unison in the way that geese do when making a display.
The energy seemed to spool together like bright blue ropes, then twined itself over and through the black stone in an intricate geometrical pattern, and then disappeared.
The big guy jumped down off of the stone then, and ambled over to me with a look in his eye that reminded me of the ravens I’d met in Vancouver. The look in his eye was the glint of a friendly trickster, if ever I’d seen one.
He said, “Yeah, that rock’s no good here, but I gotta say, them things you have on your feet are right purdy.”
“You… um… you like my socks?” I asked.
“Socks? Yeah, them’s real nice socks.”
They were damp from my running around in this wet climate in them, but I pulled them off of my feet and passed them up to him without hesitating. “Then please consider them my gift to you.”
He smiled broadly and made a small chirping noise at his chicks. Two of them hopped over. He gave each of them one with a certain amount of ceremonial pomp. They each appeared delighted with wonderment, and began dancing around playing with them.
My now naked feet sank into the cool damp moss underfoot, which was actually a little more comfortable than the wet footwear.
He said, “We’ll getcha all fixed up, don’t choo worry,” and gestured back behind me, showing me a footpath that led off into the treeline. He then walked ahead and led the way.
I followed, and the chicks brought up the rear, like a line of extremely tall thin man-shaped baby ducks, two of them still playing delightedly with my damp red socks.