My Sister's Pet Owl

Date: 9/9/2017

It was a calm summer night. My sister and I were hanging out in our dining room, which connects to our back patio. We were playing with what I can only describe as a "bottle rocket;" it was a plastic, rocket-shaped toy full of fuel that we launched through the patio door into the backyard, where it flew around and did loops. My sister had also built a sort of perch in the backyard that night. The perch was set up because her pet barn owl was going to visit her. She had raised the barn owl since it was an egg. However, she had set the owl free when it reached adolescence, so they had been separated for many years as the owl had flown off to live in England. Tonight, it would return. I saw the owl glide onto the perch. It was female, very regal-looking and affectionate, nuzzling its feathery face up against us. The owl was also able to talk to us by using my sister as a translator. It had a kind, sweet personality. I remember thinking that it was very strange how a bird could be so much more intelligent than other animal species and even capable of speech. I thought that, either my sister was just bullshitting me, or science should look into it. The owl took wing again, ready to fly back off into the night sky, but I called out "wait!" because I had more questions for her. I asked about the differences an owl perceives between living here and in England. Instead of answering my questions, though, the owl flew back over to my sister. My sister and the owl roughed around with each other. My sister took the owl by the talons and spun it around in a circle, which was a sight I considered extremely disturbing, like the owl's legs might pop off under the strain of being swung around like that. Suddenly the owl's legs looked like super long chicken legs and it was lying on the ground. One of its legs was folded in on itself unnaturally. There had been an injury. I felt guilty, like I had caused this. My sister knelt down beside the owl, whose legs now looked muscular and covered in feathers. My sister asked me to hand her a scalpel, which I did. She wanted to operate on the owl. I was so uncomfortable. My sister was not a veterinarian, so WTF was she doing cutting its legs open?! I sat on the grass in our backyard, not even able to look. My sister seemed to sense how uncomfortable I was, and sent me back inside with the instruction to fill the bottle rocket with more fuel--but to be careful that it didn't explode in my hands because the fuel was volatile. Still disturbed, I began to fill the bottle rocket's inner compartments with a viscous brown substance called "sap" and little brown pellets, taking care that they didn't touch each other lest they explode early. I thought about how my sister was always the one to take care of pets, and how I wanted a pet of my own someday. I remembered some instructions I had read about purchasing your owl eggs. The standard procedure was to incubate the eggs and then feed the baby hatchling chicken salad sandwiches. Also, apparently my sister's owl's leg problem was not uncommon and could be cured by "stimulating the leg tendons." I tried to set off the bottle rocket again into the backyard but instead of flying, it hovered in the air. I nudged it a few times, trying to get it to fly and aim it away from the house. However it flew away erratically and shattered two windows--first the window to my parents' bedroom, then our kitchen window. My dad approached from within the house after he heard the windows shatter and he was angry. I knew I should feel guilty, but didn't. I said to him: "I don't think this is real. Look at the windows. Are they broken or not? I don't think they are." I blinked a few times; the windows seemed to change from broken to not broken. I told him I thought I was in a dream, although I couldn't be totally sure.