The Murmuration
Category C: First Place (2026) Monash Short Story Writing Competition
Author: Bella Campbell
When the Businessman’s first daughter was born rosy, plump, and eager to suckle, he declared her his little Empress. When the Businessman’s third daughter was born soft and sweet, he declared her his little Princess. Between these two children there was, needless to say, another. However, the Businessman was away on holiday with his mistress when his wife went into labour, and so his second daughter was declared nothing at all.
When she was born, the midwife thought she glimpsed beneath the thin new-born skin not a roadmap of veins but the dark imprint of feathers. She was too professional to mention this, and there were other things to deal with: no sooner had the girl slipped into the world – slight, wet and wide-eyed – than she began to scream; an awful, piercing wail that the midwife assured her exhausted mother would soon stop before hurrying out of the room to stuff her ears with cotton wool.
Holding her daughter, the woman was reminded, bizarrely, of the pigeons she had kept as a girl. Homing pigeons, downy and cooing, who sat in the palm of her hand before taking flight. In the moment of lift-off, their wings would batter against her arm in the same frantic, fluttering tattoo as the baby’s heart. She had not thought about her pigeons for a long time, not since her father had deemed them unsuitable pets and bought her a kitten instead. She did not know what had happened to them.
*
So the Businessman had three daughters and was terribly wealthy, and naturally he doted on them. They grew up with equestrian classes and trips to the theatre, attended private schools and wore meticulously tailored clothes. They lived in a beautiful house with a manicured garden, were raised to have exquisite taste in food, furniture, and fabric, and taught that the world was a docile animal stretched out before them, belly up.
The eldest, an ambitious creature by nature and nurture, grew into her role of Empress. She rode life as though it were a horse, and she, being an excellent horsewoman, went far. A business graduate, then an entrepreneur, then a venture capitalist, then both. She rose in standing till she sat above the world in her skyscraper office, her meticulous highlights framing her head like a crown. The Businessman was very proud of her.
The youngest took a different path. She fell in love and married a gentle young man who adored her. They had a fairytale wedding and a beautiful honeymoon and lived in a big old house that they had repaired together. Before long, her belly swelled and she had a son, then it swelled again and she had a daughter. She curated a tastefully cosy home, joined the school council, and volunteered at her local church on weekends. The Businessman was very happy for her.
The truth is that, knowingly or not, lovingly or not, fathers often eat their children, and the Businessman was no exception. With the title of Empress and Princess, he closed his jaws around their futures, though without doubt they were pleased with where they went. This was not the case for the middle daughter, the one uncrowned by her father. Perhaps it was a blessing – she was, after all, spared some kind of expectation. Or maybe it was a curse, her father’s declaration the guiding hand that she, an arrow, had not been offered. It did not help that her family found her very strange.
Dark haired and dark eyed, she would wander aimlessly through the Businessman’s garden, lay herself down on its meticulously cut grass, stare up at its aesthetically placed trees, feeling for all the world that they were not real plants. It seemed wrong to call a tree a tree when no ants teemed over its trunk, no fruit sat rotting at its roots, no nests curled in the crooks of its boughs. Like a painting, it had all the appearance of the natural world but lacked an unsettled something she could not name. That which makes a deer twitch its ears and lift its head from grazing, or makes a starling launch suddenly into the air.
*
At night, she dreamt of unfamiliar things. Wind whispering between a thousand tiny bodies, all rising and falling, the clutch of fear in the pit of a stomach. Rapid beating, moving, rustling, onwards and upwards, and in this great synchronised murmur was a whisper.
Not here, not here, not here.
Infinity, the dream made clear, was something an earthbound girl could never understand, yet she woke with its taste on her tongue, and the fluttering in her chest that never ceased.
Once, in a rare moment of vulnerability, her mother had told the girl about her pigeon-heart. Like the beating of a great many wings, something too violent for such a small chest to contain. Later, the girl lay on her bed, pressing her fingers to her throat. She thought she felt it still; her own pulse was not the opening of valves but the pounding of feathers and hollow bones. She had within her a flightiness, that same thing stripped from the plants in the Businessman’s estate. It roosted in her meat, flapped against the confines of her ribs, but did not know how to get free. So the girl lived with it curled in readiness behind her breastbone, demanding to be let out.
*
The Businessman noticed his second daughter’s oddness and brought it up to her mother while they drank their evening glasses of wine. It perplexed him, such indecision. He, as a young man, had set out to conquer the world and had done a good job of it. He had never wavered, never feared. The path he walked rolled out like a straight, silken ribbon. His wife nodded sympathetically as he talked, reassuring him that he had set all his daughters up for success. If the girl was directionless, it was only because she had not committed to any of the roads before her. His mistress had told the Businessman much the same thing when he had confided in her, and so he took comfort that both his women were in accord. He was not a failed father and need not concern himself further than he already had.
*
It happened, one chilly evening, when the girl was wandering through the garden. Her mother had suggested she go for a walk, in the hope that nature might ease her daughter’s confusion. Truthfully, the girl saw no difference between indoors and outdoors on the Businessman’s property. Barefoot, loose-haired, she was a familiar phantom in these parts. Smooth white pebbles clattered pleasantly beneath her toes as she walked a path lined with topiaries. They were shaped into vases, books, castles, crowns, anything but trees. Not a blade of grass bent out of place, no wilted flower nor withered fruit to mar the garden’s loveliness. Within, a murmuring: blood rushing past her ears, a whisper made from sinews stretching and the clack of beak and bone.
Not here, not here, not here.
It was then she caught sight of it, a clumsy dollop of paint on the immaculate canvas that was the Businessman’s garden. A flat-topped cluster of tiny blooms tapering to a narrow, silvery stem. And oh, so garishly, unapologetically yellow, so clearly a weed, that the girl laughed. A shriek, really, in a place where only the mellifluous twinkle of windchimes was permitted.
She liked everything about it, this foreigner in the perfect tapestry that called itself a garden. She liked how it clashed horridly with the rich verdure around it. She liked how its yellow head was not a single flower but many, clustered together in a little saffron cloud. She liked that it was a remnant of what had been, before the land was razed and painted over. It too would be painted over, the girl realised. When the gardener saw this smudge of a plant, it would be ripped away and that she could not bear, so she stepped off the white-pebble path and knelt before it.
The girl ran her hand from its blossoms to its base where it was tethered to the ground. Earthbound. Her heart wanted to take flight. This place was not its home. Not here. Knuckles sunk into warm, wet soil, fingers fumbled, tearing papery grass, deeper. Then hands met below, cupped themselves, drew up, breaking free of the earth. She held it before her, roots curled tenderly in her cupped palms, and began again to walk.
Never had she moved with such purpose, swift as the sun strives for the horizon, intent upon its ancient route. Past a tasteful wishing well, across a whimsical bridge that skipped over an artificial stream, through the orchards, where not a single spoiled apple graced the grass, and to the wall at the edge of the Businessman’s estate. Here, and here alone, the garden was breached by what it sought to reject. Ivy slithered across the old stones in sulky, feline footsteps, brambles cresting the wall like the white of a breaking wave. The girl shuffled the forbidden flowers to one hand and groped at a gap between two bricks to pull herself up. It broke away in her hand and through failing mortar she saw a labyrinthine tangle of blackberry bushes. Another cackle swelled up from chest to throat to mouth, spilling into the dusky air.
The fluttering was very strong now. It ran deep, ran high, a swirling, crackling, swooping momentum. Anticipation of something. Of what?
Not here, not here, not here.
So she climbed the wall, bare toes scrabbling, nails breaking as they pushed into too-small cracks. Blackberry thorns sunk lovingly into her palm, her legs, the soles of her feet when she hauled herself over the barrier to leap into the hungry maw of bracken and stinging nettles. Welts and rashes raised themselves on skin, speckling her body like the stars that pepper the cosmos. She ran, stumbling over jagged ground and fused roots, delighting at the branches that ripped her hair as she sped by. The cry was coming up again and again. It could no longer be mistaken for laughter. It pierced the air with all the precision of a diving bird, high and wordless.
Had anyone been there, they might have seen the girl fly past, bloody and light-footed. They might have seen, as the midwife had long ago, shadowy feathery patterns pressing against her skin, like tree branches press against fogged-up glass. They might have seen her burst from the bracken, breathless and brilliant, into a clearing drowning beneath yellow yarrow. It eclipsed the ground entirely, so that as she ran, her feet no longer connected with the earth. Her hair whipped about her thin face, and she was going so fast, so fast across the yarrow, that it was impossible to tell the exact moment when, shrieking, soaring, she was no longer a girl but a bird. Many birds. Hundreds, thousands of starlings. Starlings with black eyes and black beaks and iridescent feathers that rustled and hummed like the thrust of blood through arteries. Frantically fluttering wings and sharp whistles reverberated into the twilight, an irregular rhythm to which the murmuration roiled. Rolling in and out of itself, it was a beast of tiny birdy bodies surrendering to an expanse of bruised sky. It danced, swung, oscillated and sang in a many-throated voice that refrain.
Not here, not here, not here.