I'm walking on a beach. Spot a wine bottle on the sand. I pick it up.

Inside, a black thing squirming.

Despite all the legends of vengeful djinn trapped in bottles a thousand years, I pull the cork.

The black oozes out. Crows! Ratty, half-featherless, skeletal crows. Been trapped a long time, I guess. Two adults and their child. Strange crows. They have antennae like butterflies or moths.

The young one looks the worst off--it has a huge horrible parasite crawling out of its bill. Luridly colored segments. Sickening to see. But the chick opens beak wide and the parasite, even larger than I thought, crawls out completely. To my surprise the chick is still alive and whole--was it a giant bug the chick was trying to swallow, not a parasite at all?

Look closer at the monster. A fetal or new-hatched crow, not a bug! A second chick inside the first. Weird colors because it's featherless, but by the embryonic features it'll grow into one more crow with antennae, like its parents and sibling. Now I'm as glad now I didn't intervene about the "parasite" as I am that I did intervene about the bottle.

They'll be all right now, I think...

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• Nestlings: while drawing a dream ("A Sphinx's Sketchbook") I quoted that joking Greek definition of humanity: "featherless bipeds." Well, here they are. I also worked on a dream-comic, "Bonk Veronica" which has chicks in a nest being fed Warm.Wet.Worms by their mom, the ScreenBird.com
• Crows: anarchy, fun, raucousness?
• Starved, bottled birds: the support group of anorexics I still go to now and then, though I'm eating pretty well these days. Still, I was feeling a bit socially starved. So I went. Mostly women--"birds". How I wish I really could let them out of their prisons!
• Worm: what horrifies me now is just the fetal stage of a wild new life. Let it grow!

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