Near a pit of freshly buried and forgotten corpses, Layla finds a Funny Rock. The other rocks in the sandy pile are more like stones — smooth, rounded and pocked with gray and grayer gray — but this rock is pointy like broken glass and milk-white with something red just beneath the surface shaped almost like an ice cream cone.

"Layla!" Neveah's voice makes Layla jump, and her teeth crunch down on the lollipop in her mouth, breaking it into two red-flavored pieces. She pulls on the candy's stick, yanking the fractured red half of the lollipop from her mouth, and turns in the soft sand. Neveah is peeking around some tannish beach grass, and Layla waves her free hand at her friend.

"Check out this rock I found!" Layla says, pointing her sticky fingers at the Funny Rock. The other rocks are covered in wet sand and look like pebbles compared to the Funny Rock, which is nearly as tall as she is and clean, like it had been scrubbed in the kitchen sink (or maybe Lake Michigan) before being placed where it was.

Neveah shuffles from behind the grass, grasping at her pink swim top so hard that the tips of her fingers turn pale. Her eyes are firmly fixated on the swirling and screaming seagulls near the Funny Rock. Everybody is afraid of something, but seagulls were silly to be scared of. But, like a good friend, Layla looks for the closest seagull to her — only a few feet away — then makes a quick lunge at it and screeches. The bird squawks and flies away, then Layla smiles and gives Neveah a big thumbs-up.

The hot wind blows off the gray lake, pushing the stench of the unknown corpse pit away from the girls and into town; it blows Neveah's coily hair into her face as she crosses the sand to Layla, kicking up sparkling, sticky sand with each step. Her arms are crossed — oh, she's not happy; she always liked swimming way more than exploring. Layla crunches on the half of the candy in her mouth.

"The red matches the sucker," Neveah says, stopping a ways from Layla, who looks to the half-lollipop attached to the plastic stick in her hand, then at the rock, then back at the candy. It did match. Neveah was always good at that kind of stuff.

"Weird," Layla says, fixated on the Funny Rock again. There is an odd feeling about it, like how she felt when she was first told monsters could live in closets or under her bed. Supposed-to-be-scared. But she isn't.

"It's creepy." Neveah solidifies that feeling, then continues, "Let's go swim." She stares at the rock like it was a seagull, wrapping her arms around herself, but her mouth is set in a line. "Put your sucker on it for later, your aunt won't let you leave without—"

"Ev-er-ee-thing," they say together. Each syllable draws Neveah more into a smile until both girls are grinning at each other.

Layla is missing two of her pointy teeth, and she can't wait for the adult ones to come in even bigger and pointier than the baby ones (that's what Aunt Tee told her would happen, anyway). Neveah is lucky, she hasn't lost any teeth yet. She's also super smart — Aunt Tee won't let Layla leave without "everything."

Layla licks the lollipop and sticks it firmly against the smooth surface of the Funny Rock with the palm of her hand. Candy isn't sand, and the rock is strangely receptive to having licked sugar stuck to it. Neveah grabs Layla's arm and tugs on her to come to the lake, but Layla pulls her arm back to lick the lollipop and the rock together, because she knew then it really wouldn't come off.

"Ew," Neveah said. Layla put her hands on her hips, then turned and grinned at her friend again, then pushed her toothy smile wider when she saw Neveah was grossed out by how she wrinkled up her nose.

"Now it's really stuck," Layla says, then drops the smile, bringing a fingernail to her chin. "I hope not forever."

Neveah rolls her eyes, then sighs when Layla goes back to staring at the sucker stuck to the Stupid Rock — the sun glints off the red candy starkly sticking to a vertical facet of the rock.

"It's not stuck forever," she says, then pulls on Layla's arm again. "Let's go swim! School starts soon —" her dad and Layla's Aunt Tee wouldn't let them swim during school days, and they were starting so late this year because of covid finally being over that they probably wouldn't get another chance to swim "— and it smells."

It does smell. The six-year-olds and their guardians don't know about the shallow corpse pit ("grave" is too kind a term), but their noses do, and so does the cloud of vultures circling above the beach, casting weird shadows on the girls as Layla relents to Neveah and runs along with her away from the Stupid, Funny Rock and toward the lake to swim and play.

🍬🍬🍬

It's often strange how one simple act can change things. The girls had no way of knowing. While Layla laments about how jealous she is that Neveah is going into first grade when she is only just now going to kindergarten because of Aunt Tee being afraid of her being "behind" and Neveah interjects with an idea for pretend where Layla gets to be a shark and she a mermaid, a seagull lands on the Stupid, Funny Rock. The girls aren't there to see the bird's foot barely touch the glittery stone before the skin peels from muscle. It shrieks and flaps its wings, but something like sunlight, but far more sinister, reaches out of the top of the stone, firmly holding the bird's skinned foot into place.

Skin and feather flay from its body, neater than taxidermy, and the light pulses between the loose skin and intact muscle, pulling them gently apart. The bird still writhes, then its shrieks double as its quills are pulled from muscle; the small amount of blood that had come from the flaying of its foot suddenly turned into a steady stream dripping from underneath its loose skin, down past the light and along the white facets of Stupid, Funny Rock. The rock is never wet from the blood; instead, red runs just under the surface, pooling along crystalline veins and pores.

Meanwhile, the girls are playing. The frantic calls of some seagull are lost on the people on the beach, if they can even hear it over the seagulls nearest them or the crashing of Lake Michigan's desaturated water or the airplanes flying into Chicago or the construction sounds just behind them or the train ding-ding-dinging in the railyard.

The sounds are all so overstimulating to something. At some chime of a railroad, or maybe at one too-loud squawk from the seagull, the bird's skin and feathers float like a sheet above its body and its beady eyes bulge from its head. Beams of light pour out around the eyes, blinding the creature before suddenly being replaced with an upwelling of blood that pours out along its slick, skinned face. It silences, but the city does not. The light beam pouring out of the Stupid, Funny Rock flickers, then disappears when the gull falls stiffly over. Its skin goes limp and wetly plops onto the rock, then slides slowly down it, leaving behind a streak of blood until it rests in a shapeless heap in the sand at the foot of the stone, not far from the skinned carcass.

Layla was right to lick the lollipop onto the Stupid, Funny Rock. Maybe it would have fallen otherwise. The rock is no longer milky white, instead now a pinkish color with darker red splotches. Around the lollipop, the rock is bright, bright red. It matches too well. Layla would probably think Neveah wouldn't like it, because it is hard to tell where the lollipop is against how red the Stupid, Funny Rock had become around it.

The corpse of the seagull twitches. The sand around it, stained pink from its blood, scrubs itself clean as red seems to run back into the bird. Then, the skin and feathers inch forward toward the skinned corpse, pulled shakily from its limp form and into a sheet as if it was attached to fishing line just out-of-frame of a movie. The bird's eyes turn pure white and dart around, and its beak opens and closes, showing off the ligaments and muscles moving in tandem to make the movement happen.

Skin touches muscle, then, in what seems like an instant, the skin is rebonded to flesh without seam. The feathers audibly pop back into their places. The white eyes roll to-and-fro, then the whole body rolls without moving any of its limbs. Guided by invisible strings, the bird gets to its feet without ever moving anything but its eyes, which rove from the rock and lollipop and vultures and sand and beach grass and sky and especially the sun.

It shrieks at the sun.

It shrieks again, something garbled beyond seagull sounds. It's loud enough to turn the heads of some people on the beach — much louder than those death throes from earlier.

It's in a body. It observes other things that inhabit the same kind of body it's puppeteering, then moves its legs and wings. The movements are stiff and unnatural; even the shifting of the feathers is wrong, as some move in the wrong direction. Perhaps, though, it is passable. Something intelligent had to have woken it up. The Red Stuff stuck to the side of its shrine showed as much.

There's a passing thought, hardly discernible, about a wish to have been more aware when its Awakener left it an offering. There is no concept of time while Entrapped. The last things capable of creation besides the other Gods were ugly bipedal creatures that said things in so many ways that there was no uniform idea of what they even were. It hopes for something far simpler than those creatures, much like the bird whose body it now inhabits. At least the bird is less alien than those soft-skinned creatures.

It lifts its wings too slow, then flaps down too fast and moves its wings too many times to fly. It rises too fast for how it moves, but it knows it doesn't have to be perfect – it just has to seem right enough. The noise that bothered it before dampens as it rises. The sky is still blue, the sun is still in the sky, and, below: water (maybe an ocean), a strange conglomerate of right angles made up of dark gray, and gray things that looked oddly like trees without the leaves. And there are some trees, just, sparse. Whatever the gray is, it encroaches on what the world once looked like.

It is pulled down and toward a beach: that should be where its new Awakener is.

The beach is inhabited by more of those bipedal things, like the last thing that woke it up. They have colorful items on and around them; some of the smaller ones are building things out of the sand. Some of them are in the water. A beacon is on shore, just where the water and sand meet — that would be the thing that woke it up. It lands abruptly next to a small, pale thing with sandy hair — its Awakener, shown by the beacon of red around it — and a similarly small, brown thing with dark brown hair. The pale one matches the beach's sand, and has a red item covering its body, but not limbs. The brown one has two pink items that cover below one set of limbs and above the other set.

The names for all these things are beyond it. The old terms are gone. It only has memories of the kind of creature these things are; their behavior and décor is alien.

The two don't even glance its way.

The Awakener pounces toward the other, knocking the other down into the water, and they both squeal and make sounds that it partially recognizes. So... the things did still speak, but differently than before. It tries to mimic a set of sounds it heard — "mermaid" — from its bird body, and the two things freeze in their play and turn toward it. The Awakener points and bares its teeth. The other, after a second, screams and scrambles out from underneath the Awakener, running out of the water babbling something incomprehensible.

Over and over, the Awakener starts to repeat something; after the fourth time, it could make it out, though the meaning was lost on it: "It talks!"

It mimics the sound, and the Awakener's mouth drops open, then bares its teeth again and makes a broken-up, high-pitched noise. It mimics the high-pitched sound (much easier than the other sounds); in order to understand, it needs the Awakener to touch it. The other things on the beach seem to notice it now, so it hops forward in a way that is completely alien — its legs don't even move — though this uncanniness seems lost on the Awakener, who stands up and starts to walk toward it. It moves forward again, but then a tall thing with red hair lifts the Awakener out of the water and says something, then looks down at it and kicks sand toward it.

It shrieks and flaps its wings in a clumsy manner; the Awakener's voice is high-pitched like a shriek now. More sand flies at it, and it flaps its wings again, this time lifting itself into the air. There are more loud noises behind it as it rises up and up, maybe up too high.

It will need to try again. As a thing, not a bird, because apparently only the things — it wishes it remembered what the "things" are — could speak, not birds. Odd how it all devolved over time. It looks into the sun. For now, it needs to bide its time. The sun should set, like it always has, then it can start its work.

an: expect some edits to this chapter down the line, i didn't get much time to proof this!