The feast of the Hurling Birds

 

The forest is a flutter with the Hurling Birds. Come, let us follow them and see what this hullabaloo is all about.

 

They’re an awesome sight, aren’t they? Giant birds, each wing the size of a comfy family-sized sofa, soaring through the sky, as if in defiance of gravity. Hurling Birds don’t fly in the normal sense, they literally hurl themselves into the air and then simply glide through the skies, their great wings capable taking them for miles without so much as a flap to power them along.

 

En mass they are an amazing sight, over a hundred of them, diverging on the village. See them swoop down, cawing and crying as they do so.

 

But what is causing all this commotion?

 

The entire village is out on the green, standing with their backs to each other, in an enormous circle. They stand shouting, while the Hurling Birds dive down towards them, seemingly swooping up the words they are calling out.

 

What is happening?  Let’s listen to what some of the villagers are saying, to see if that gives us a clue:

 

“There’s nothing wrong with your casserole, Darren, it’s lovely.”

 

“I’m sorry, I don’t have any spare change.”

 

“I don’t hate your mother.”

 

“I’m so glad you called. I was just about to email you.”

 

“I wasn’t doing anything with the hamster.”

 

As they speak, the birds swirl down, into the paths of the words themselves, beaks agape, soaring so close they almost kiss the villagers, so determined are they to swallow up ever lie spoken.

 

Because that’s what the Hurling Birds are feasting on: they live off the energy that comes from lies. The energy exerted to think up and maintain lies makes them one of the most energy-rich emissions to come from an animal. The Hurling Birds have evolved to live purely off that energy.

 

Long ago, of course, the ancestors of the village would have suffered daily interruptions from the birds every time they spoke, every inconvenient moment you could think of: in the middle of sealing a business deal or bursting into the bedroom at those intimate moments when a wife, say, has perhaps been overgenerous in the description of her pleasure.

 

So the villagers and Hurling Birds somehow managed to come to an arrangement. During the weekly Lie-Out, the villages repeat every lie they have told during the preceding week, allowing the birds to feast as they would, whilst leaving the villagers in relative peace in their day to day lives.

 

And even though their lies have to be shouted out in public view for all to hear, in truth very few lies are ever heard, such is the noise and din of an entire village shouting their lies together, along with the screeches and squawks of the birds.  Plus, of course, the villagers are all expert liars, experienced at burying the true lies amid a stream of pointless made up untruths. Taken out of context most lies lose their true meaning, and little is ever given away during these events.  

 

There is no point trying to hold back a lie, for the birds know, they can smell the food-rich content of your deception. Anyone foolish enough to leave out a lie would see the entire pack of birds descend on them, greedy beaks pecking away until they are forced to repeat their lie, this time in full view of the entire village. Any lie extracted this way would be talked about for months afterwards.  

 

Only one man takes no part in these proceedings: the priest himself, who stands and watches the gathering from afar.  The priest, of course, never lies, so he has no need to appease the birds, or so it is said. But it is also said, that every spring the priest takes a young Hurling Bird and keeps it in his cage. Whether or not he ever repeats his lies to it we can never know – what goes on at night between a priest and his bird is nobody else’s business; all that can be known is that every spring when the old bird is released to accommodate the new, it is big, fat, bloated, barely able to hurl itself up in the air to fly.

 

Why, you may ask, do the villagers put up with the humiliation that comes from having their lies exposed in such a public way? Why don’t they hunt the birds down, or move to a forest why they can lie uninterrupted?

 

The answer can be told in a single word.

 

Justice.

 

The Hurling Birds are the judges at the finest courts in the known universe. Indeed, I challenge any imagination to devise a finer system. For with the Hurling Birds in residence all crime can be solved by means of asking a simple question. ‘Did you do it?’ The birds feast on the replies of any wrongdoer foolish enough to reply with falsehood.

 

And so we leave them. The birds belch off into the forest, having consumed enough lies to keep them satiated for an entire week. The villagers return to their homes, via shops, pubs and any venue where they can share gossip on anything interesting they heard, or make their apologies for any lies they had to confess. “You try so hard with your casseroles, Darren, I just didn’t want to disappoint you.”