The Approaching

AFTER “THE SQUEAKUL” BY MINUTEANDONE

Every dusk, the song came over the hill.

They’re approaching, it went. Bird call centers. There’s no hoping. Stop opposing.

Nobody in the village had seen the birds. But the song listed what they had — lasers, call centers, unknown technology — and what they wanted — everything — and what the village should do about it — nothing, loudly. It was a well-made song. It rhymed just often enough to be trusted.

The mice hoarded grain. The badger nailed his door shut, then nailed a second door over the first, in case the first had been listening. The rooster gave up crowing at daybreak; it felt like advertising. And one by one, without noticing, the villagers began to hum the chorus while they worked — because it was catchy, and because a dread you can hum feels almost like a plan.

The fox did not nail anything. The fox took a stick, and every dusk, when the song came over the hill, cut one notch.

When the stick was full, the fox started another. When there was a bundle, the fox carried it to the square and laid the sticks out in a row, and the village came and counted, because a row of sticks is harder to argue with than a feeling: four hundred dusks of approaching.

“Perhaps they are slow,” said the badger, through two doors.

“Perhaps they are far,” said the mice.

“Perhaps,” said the fox. “But I have been keeping the only record anyone has kept, and it says the approaching is going well for them. It is the arriving they seem to have no talent for.”

“Approaching is not a direction,” said the fox. “It is an address. The birds live there.”

That dusk the song came over the hill as always, and the village listened as always. But listening, it turned out, was a smaller thing than humming. The badger opened one door and kept the other, being a badger. The rooster crowed the next morning, to no consequences. And in time the village children learned the chorus as a counting song, skipping rope to it in the square, right there between the rows of notched sticks — which is the worst thing that can happen to a menace, and the best thing that can happen to a tune.

The birds, for all anyone knows, are approaching still.

The moral, hummed to the tune of the chorus: a threat that only ever approaches is a song — and a song borrows all its power from the throats that agree to repeat it.