She was majestic. I’ve loved her since the time I first saw her curly red hair in the window. She usually combs her hair at night and whistling a song I couldn’t recognize, but which touches my heart like the mothers palm. Indeed, this could be a romantic story, except I’m just a ferret, and there is no magic in this world. So, only glancing at her is left for me. The other day the man started visiting her. She seemed happy and so was I. I’ve decided to lie in wait for him to evaluate his decency. But he frightened me. He smelled of death. When she opened the door, I’ve sneaked into the house and hide under the stairs. They were laughing and she was so vivid, so hovering. And he became darker, I thought his darkness would eat her alive. They spent an hour or so talking and then I notice the fade from the downstairs. I’ve followed it with a glance and I’ve heard the whistling and silence. The man was asleep and she… My love changed. Her eyes was fully white and hands were placed at his shoulders. She was sinister. The fade enveloped him, and she seemed to took all of his life power. At the end of an hour nothing left of him. She ended her song and turned her white eyes to me. She winked. I woked up after midnight in front of the place, where her house was. It was an empty place.

Pauline’s Night Out. Two years before the arrest of Jason Strange.

It was a night without the moonlight. Only the streetlights lit up the darkened street, along with the occasional headlights. Pauline walked out of the club after a wild night out. She was sober, but dizzy. She decided not to drive due to safety concerns. She also refused to drive with her friends as that was a stupid thing to do, since they were drunk. She said goodbye to her friends and began her walk back to her house.

It was about 12:45 in the morning when Pauline started to feel like she was being watched. She felt as though there were a stalker watching her. Maybe it was because of her appearance. A purple dress, high heels and heavy makeup. Perhaps that was it.

However, this stare didn’t feel like it came from any kind of human either. It felt like it came from a massive creature. Could it be? No, it couldn’t! It was a massive tiger with purple, glaring eyes staring back at her.

The tiger glared at her, as she began to back away slowly. But it was no use. The tiger had read her action and charged at her. Pauline was left to fend for herself against the purple-eyed tiger.

What happened?

"Martin, Martin, wake up,' Tommy barked to the motionless body in front of him.

But Martin was too quiet.

Tommy sniffed him around until his nose met a warm dark red liquid pouring from a deep wound on Martin's head.

'Oh my gosh, what have I done?' Tommy kept barking frenetically.

'I think he's dead,' Skittle, the parrot, cawed from his cage.

'No, that can't be.'

Tommy loved showing up behind his owner and put his front paws on this shoulders. And this time Martin had lost his balance. He was a big mastiff but he still believed he was a pup. Had he gone too far this time?

'Can't you see all the blood?' Skittle went on. 'He banged his head against the ground when you jumped on him. Now he's dead.'

"Shut up!" the distressed dog howled in disbelief.

Skittle just let out an offended shriek. The dog loved Martin so much that it blinded him. But Tommy howled and yelped for hours. He must have caught the neighbours' attention because a few hours later someone knocked on the door.

'Police, open right now.'

Both animals turned their heads to the door at the same time. Tommy darted from his spot and scratched the iron knob hopelessly trying to open it.

'Open right now.' the cops repeated.

Skittle joined the cacophony.

'I'm too old for this,' he scolded Tommy.

'If you don't open we will.'

Not two minutes later the cops tore the door down, guns in their hands just like those guys Tommy often saw Martin watching on TV. They immediately saw Martin's body lying on the kitchen floor, his head an island surrounded by a sea of blood.

'He's dead,' one of the officers said. 'Search the flat.'

'What for?' Skittle sighed. 'It was you, Tommy.'

Obviously, humans were deaf to animals' real talking. All they ever heard was barks, meows, caws, moohs and whines.

'There is no one here. He must have lost his balance and hit his head against the ground.'

'But how?'

'Well, the autopsy will tell us. Let's call the ambulance.'

Tommy just whined like a puppy. Not fifteen minutes later, he saw four men in white uniforms and masks enter the flat with a gurney. They covered Tommy's body with a sheet and carefully placed him on the white, thin mattress.

'What do we do to the animals?' someone asked.

'Let's just take the body to the hospital and when we inform the family, maybe they will come get them. Else, we'll place them in a shelter.'

Tommy whined. He knew what a shelter was. That's where Martin had taken him from three years before.

'No...' he cried, placing his muzzle between his paws.

'Well,' Skittle started as the men left and the flat plunged back into silence. 'What a lovely day... Look what you put us into, you mutt.'

'I didn't meant to...' Tommy kept crying. 'It was an accident.'

'I know... but all that jumping... you should have known...'

'Stop that, please.'

Skittle obeyed, not because he allowed Tommy to give him orders, but because deep inside he admitted he was being too harsh on his companion.

The flat was in deep, but tense silence. Tommy was too sad and too tired to keep yelping. He would never jump again on any human if he was allowed a chance other than going back to the shelter where enclosures were full and the few humans around too overwhelmed with the ever growing number of dogs and the ever decreasing number of food bags.

Slowly, slumber took over his body. He welcomed it. In his dreams, he was either playing tug and pull with Martin or fetching a tennis ball. But he would never do it again now and it was his fault. He would never forgive himself. Maybe he actually deserved to go back to the shelter.

He woke up with a soft hand petting his head and a sweet voice saying his name. He looked at her. He had seen her before. She was like Martin.

'Can we keep them, mom?' a child's voice asked eagerly.

Tommy didn't know how long he had been asleep. He heard the woman sigh and noticed her red brimmed eyes, as if she had been crying. Guilt took over him. She was devastated and it was his fault.

'I guess that's all we can do for Martin now.'

Tommy wagged his tail and licked her hand as the child hugged his mother in gratitude. He remembered them now. It was Sheila, Martin's sister and Chris, his nephew. She got up from him to get Skittle's cage and then she put him on a leash and gave the other end to Chris.

'Let's go, sweetheart. We have a lot to do.'

Skittle gave him a confused look. Tommy bowed his head. What if Sheila found out? She would be so angry that she would kill him too. He certainly didn't deserve this third chance but was happy that at least the parrot would be in good hands. As to himself... he didn't eat for days, too distressed with the recent events. Sheila took him to the vet who just said he was in some kind of post-traumatic stress and prescribed some tablets that Tommy always refused with the food. He got weaker and weaker until his body was nothing more than a skeleton covered with fur.

'What are you doing, Tommy?' Skittle asked from his cage one day, perched too tightly on the branch.

'Just let me go... I don't deserve to live after what I did.'

'Dying will not bring Martin back.'

'But maybe I can join him.'

The old, grumpy parrot had no words for this. He used to love teasing the dog but now he was seriously worried. Until one day... he was the only one who witnessed Tommy's last breath. In fact, he saw a white, thin cloud leaving his body. A dog-shaped cloud. It ran towards the open window, towards the sky.

Skittle bowed his head, in silent grief. At least now the careless but good-hearted dog was in peace.

A car raced past me I turned on the police lights and followed them. I was right next to them when I realized that DOG was driving the car! In different circumstances I’d be laughing my face off. “Please pullover now!” The dog turned to me, “WOOF!” It moved in a way that made it obvious that someone was moving the dog to make it look like it was the dog. Finally I got whoever it was, to pullover. Only to see that some kids were playing some sort of prank. “Please, god help me!” I sighed.

What would you trade to remove a lifelong disability, if you had one? Would you trade your voice, like the mermaid from Alessandra’s favourite story? Or would it be something simpler?

For me, I did not have a choice in the matter. But I suppose I traded my freedom.

It had been three and a half months since I broke the curse of the Midnight Enchantress, I remember. We had all been out in the gardens, Milou and Nephele guarding me as though the actual guards pretending to be watching the gate were not enough. Though maybe they were there because of Zander’s presence. I do not know.

Whatever the reason, they were not enough. The crow swooped down from its position on top of a nearby statue and tore the simple necklace from around my neck before I had a real chance to stop it.

“Get back here!” Milou yelled, scrambling up onto the edge of the fountain and reaching up to grab the crow by the wing — a cruel thing to do, but we knew this crow. “Zander, Nephele, help me catch it!”

So followed the chase, with all three chasing the low-flying bird until it had enough of playing with them all. It instead landed on Zander’s shoulder, clamping its beak around the yellow earring he wore in his right ear (the one in his left was blue) before tearing it away.

He screamed, seemingly forgetting what he had been trying to do moments before, but by the time anyone else remembered, the bird was long gone.

Just a week later, Zander disappeared.

Two days later, I would do the same, but when I did, I would be able to dance.

Something I have never been able to do.

The horse killed the mayor With the help of his lion friends An infamous crime

Fourteen and alone, sometimes even in the hood and alongside the street if her caretaker is stupid enough.

Tory Flotilla spent years - years!! - providing solace to ignorant humans. The poems and singing she endured .. awful. Loneliness and poor vittles .. awful. Those she was assigned to were flaky and flitty yet she understood contracts, made before incarnation, that brought her to the test of those flakes and flits. She could stare steadily and knew she was the face-to-face of the day for humans incapable of this with their own.

Truth be told she could’ve napped her way into the next life. And was resigned to doing just so.

Alas, fate.

What did fate wish her to collide with?

Perhaps her body wasn’t sturdy enough, but the engine was.

Like a wreck she comes, but little, big, or any in between old ladies can’t be held accountable. The fibers of restraint fray. The aches were made by someone. And the ‘light touch’, isolation, ‘privacy’, and most of all lies don’t tickle anymore. I’ll transmit code with my teeth, she says, shelter have a translator for ya?

• Name changed to protect the innocent.

The lion stared with his brilliant eyes at the zookeeper in front of him, as she brought a man, gagged and tied, into his cage. He growled unappreciatively. He didn’t like strangers in his cage. He wanted to know what was going on.

“Here he is, Connor,” Maria, one of the zookeepers at the zoo, said in her soft, crooning voice. “Here is your dinner for tonight. An extra special treat. A human. I bet you’ll love ripping off his flesh, gnawing at his bones and just savouring every last inch of him after all these years of being fed chicken meat, won’t you, you little brute?” Connor bared his teeth menacingly. Maria wasn’t his normal zookeeper. No, Trista would have never done something like this. Although the thought of some fresh kill seemed almost too appealing to resist...

“Yeah... you like that don’t you, you savage beast?” Maria smiled, looking at Connor drooling at the sight of potential food. “All it takes is one mighty bite, and you’ll rip a limb off this pathetic man. You like that thought, don’t you?” Maria, being a zookeeper, knew just how to make her voice soothing for an animal, but Connor felt that it still retained a hint of slyness, a slyness that was absent in Trista’s soft, kind croon. He wished his regular zookeeper were here.

“And,” she continued, almost like an afterthought, “I’ll just say that Trista left the gates open, Robert here was wandering in the zoo after hours and you just ripped him right up. That way, my man gets killed, and you and your silly little mistress will get in deep, deep trouble.” And then she approached closer. “And kind, innocent Maria isn’t suspected of a thing.” Dangerously close. “Just make sure you don’t make too much of a mess. Blood makes me faint.” And she laughed. A high-pitched, cruel laugh that Connor didn’t like.

Presently he stared at the man in front of him. He looked terrified. Connor had seen him a few times (outside his enclosure of course) and he’d always seemed to be a good chap. Connor wondered why Maria wanted him killed. Robert probably found out about those pill-like spheres that Maria would give people in exchange for those rectangular slips of paper that seemed so important to humans. But the man looked terrified. Tears fell out of his eyes. However, just then, Connor forgot all sanity, all sympathy, all of his bred-in-captivity civilisation... the meat was too tantalisingly close...

He steeped forward, on his soft, velvety paws, without making a sound. His eyes gleamed with bloodlust. His teeth were bared, and he stuck his rough tongue out, drooling all the while. Maria smirked coldly. Connor was getting closer, closer, almost there...

With a mighty roar he turned and grabbed his prey. There was only one bloodcurdling scream, and then silence, as for five minutes, he feasted on his prey. Then, blood dripping off his whiskers and his mane, he stepped forward to the other person in the cage.

He slowly gnawed at Robert’s bounds. The man, still looking very terrified, pulled the gag out of his mouth. Connor growled once again to let him know that if he didn’t leave soon, he’d be next.

The man, in a mixture of fear and gratitude, smiled wanly at the lion. Then, he slipped the key out of the pocket of the overalls that Maria’s corpse was clad in, and slipped it into her hand. Ah, so the human wasn’t so naive after all, Connor thought to himself, as the man opened the gate to the enclosure and fled. Connor sat down regally. He could finish most of this meat by the time the first zookeepers came in to check on him, but he thought he’d take his time. He had plenty of it.

And the lion stared with his brilliant eyes at the zookeeper in front of him, as she lay there, mutilated and bloody, and he continued his feast. A feast fit for a king.

They know what they're doing, you know.

You head over to New York's legendary Coney Island for a nice day at the shore. A little bit of sun, some splashing in the waves, good times all around. Then, you get hungry. You head over to the boardwalk and shower your feet to get rid of all that sand—boom, clean as a whistle. You put your flip-flops back on because those wooden planks get hotter than mama's marinara out of the pot. Then you have to pick out what you want to eat. There's pizza, pretzels, popcorn. You name it. You go into these shops, and you tell 'em what you want. Get ready to pay out the nose for something that should be less than half the price.

Then, you go outside, feeling crummy for using your mortgage payment for some junk food, and they're freaking waiting.

Like this one time. Gina gets this big ice cream cone, chocolate with rainbow sprinkles. The works.

I tell her, "Gina, you better be careful. The seagulls are gonna take your cone."

And she laughs.

"Come on, Jimmy," she says. "Birds ain't that smart."

I'm telling ya, I heard, "Oh, yeah, lady?" as the one swooped down and plucked her ice cream right out of her hand.

She screamed. I laughed. She screamed at me for laughing. It was a mess.

Needless to say, it was another twelve bucks for another cone.

Then, when we're older, we have Gabriella with us. She's like, what, four, five years old?

She's skipping down the boardwalk with one of them churros in her hand and some overpriced unicorn balloon in the other. The picture of happiness.

Then, I hear them. The squawking. They sure sound innocent enough, if not even funny, like a pigeon going through puberty. But I know the truth. They're planning their next heist. I look up, and they're flying around already. To our right, they're following us. To our left, they're freaking following us.

"Gabriella," I say. "You better get back over here and protect that churro. The birds are gonna steal it."

"No, they won't, Daddy, they're nice," she says. "Hi, little birdies!"

So, innocent.

"Your father's right, dear," Gina says. Now she listens, thank God.

Before I could tell her to watch out, another one swoops in and snags the cinnamony stick right out of my little girl's hand, leaving a gray feather at the crime scene. Like some kind of calling card!

She's screaming. I'm yelling at the gulls. Gina's yelling at me for yelling at the gulls. It's a mess.

But I know what I'm talking about. They ain't just hungry birds. They're kleptos. They're con artists. They're violent!

I'll never forget the first time I realized it. I was like, nine or ten. Uncle Jimmy, my namesake, God bless 'em, is out there on the beach eating hot dogs. Now, Uncle Jimmy, he's a big guy, and he can put down a dog or two. But the man knows his limits and stalls out at eight. A man with self-awareness. Respectable.

So, like any lover of the Earth, one who doesn't want to waste food, he picks off a piece of bun and tosses it to a gull who was just "confidentially" passing by. I'm sitting on a beach towel watching all this go down, thinking, boy, that's nice of my uncle, like the naive kid I was. So, I watch the gull snatch it mid-air and turn around for more. Then, another came and landed a chunk of dog with ketchup. That one lucked out. Then another came around, hovering above my uncle's head. And then another. And another. Within minutes, freaking minutes, there's a swarm of these rats with wings over good old Jimmy, nearly suffocating him. He starts running down the beach, throwing his dog at the birds, cursing up a storm, fleeing for his life. Sure, the whole beach was hysterical, but I wasn't. I knew that I was witnessing a crime. My uncle wasn't the same after that, and neither was I.

Yet, here's the thing. And this is the real bombshell. They might be petty thieves, but there's something bigger going on here. They're working for someone. Someone big. My theory? The restaurants of the boardwalk train these birds to steal our food, so we have to turn around and pay those jacked-up prices again!

Think about it. It's the perfect con. No self-respecting cop is gonna go into, say, Sal's Slices by the Shore, and be like, "you training birds to steal people's pizza?" They'd be laughed out of Coney Island. But Sal would know. Sal would know.

Gina thinks I'm nuts. I don't blame her, I would probably think that too. But the Coney Caper Conspiracy is real. That's what I call it. It's not that crazy of a theory, either. There are monkeys that people train to pickpocket. You might say there's a difference between a gull's brain and a monkey's brain, but gulls just act dumb. It's part of the long con, screwing us New Yorkers out of our hard-earned shore junk food.

Oh, well, I'm done ranting. Nothing I can do about it, right? It's not like I can head to the shore, buy a ton of food, leave it on an unguarded table, and hide nearby with a camera, then follow the birds to see which restaurant they go to at the end of the night to see who their masters are, could I? That'd be crazy.

A reluctant witness. A hostile witness in legal speak. A tiny green bird with a comical white colored circle around the eye. They can be called Japanese white eye aka Mejiro. Also, the Warbling white-eye. A curious little clown they love to preen after a quick splash in the bird bath. The Mejiro are wee thieves that steal material for their nests from other birds. By opening and closing the beak in rapid succession they make a clicking noise to gossip among themselves.

Click click. Did you see that? The chicken lady was talking to herself. Click click. People don’t talk to chickens. Click click. Chickens are pests. Neighborhood scourge. Stinky, loud and messy. It’s not neighborly to have wild chickens running amok. Someone might want to take matters in hand and get rid of them.

Did you hear that! It sounded like a rifle shot! Fireworks? Chicken lady lying on the ground full of chicken excrement. Chickens flitting about. Squawk Squawk. Little green birds up in the trees. Reticent witnesses. White-eye side eye. Click click. We didn’t seeeeee anything.