I

’d just started writing my story for Exacting Clam 17 when I heard this chirping sound in the corner of the page, looked up into the title, and spotted a small red bird perched on the numbers—one foot on the 8 and the other on the 9.

“Oh,” I said. “Hello there.”

The bird gazed over the sentences I’d just written. Then it darted to the first one, stole the “I” from it, and flew back to the top of the page.

“Hey!” I said. “That’s my I!”

The bird dropped the I on the 89, swooped back down to fetch the i in chirping, and returned to its perch. Then it swallowed the lowercase letter—despite my hollering—took the uppercase letter in its beak, and flew off.

I looked down at the sentence, which now read “. . . when heard this ch rping sound in the corner of the page . . .” I had some extra letters on hand, luckily, so I fixed the sentence—swearing to myself the whole time—and continued on with my work.

The next morning, though, I came back to the story and found it decimated. Not only were the replacement Is gone, but others had been removed too. “Then t darted over to the f rst one, stole the “ ” from t . . . ,” read the third paragraph now. I walked down to the sixth paragraph and saw, “ had some extra letters on hand, luck ly, so f xed the sentence . . .” The story was in shambles—it didn’t even make any sense now!

Fuming, I stormed over to some other selections. Sure enough, the bird had nicked some of their Is as well. “Marvin Cohen on Hearing” now contained phrases like “Here am,” and “The nstruments for th s are talk ng, see ng . . .” Hilbert’s poem “Nineteen Locks” was hit too—“Your shapes and l nes, the s gns that greet your s ght.”—as well as Stannard’s essay: “Yet as a young Engl shman now based n Genoa wanted to f nd an tal an poet whose wr t ng resonated . . .”

The editors called a meeting in Clam Tower that afternoon to discuss the “exact ng b rd problem.” Sal Vincent, an experienced hunter, said she’d be happy to take care of it. “Take care of it how?” said Helen Marsh.

“You know how,” Sal said, making her hand into the shape of a pistol.

“Shoot a helpless little bird?” Marsh said.

“This helpless little bird’s costing us a lot of money,” said Cordelia Twice. “These letters aren’t free!”

“What does it want with them, anyway?” asked Sigh Becker from the corner of the room.

“I think it eats them,” I said.

Twice turned to face me. “Eats them?”

“I saw it eat a lowercase one,” I said.

“Yuck,” said Marsh.

“Anyway, there must be a more humane option,” Sigh said. “Is there such a thing as literary animal control?”

“Animal control my ass,” said Sal. “If I see that bird I’m taking it out.”

The b rd—or b rds?—struck tw ce more that week. The first t me t picked at Shya Scanlon’s “An American Story” (“ t couldn’t have been nc dental that both these authors were aston sh ngly accompl shed . . .”). But the b rd also came back to my story, pull ng every s ngle out of th s paragraph. Why was t p ck ng on me? Could t have known was wr t ng a story about t? D d b rds read?

As long as our feathered foe was at large, Marsh ordered us to use as few s as we could. “Less for the foul fowl to steal,” she’d told us. The staff worked to comply—all of us except for Sal, who started walking through the journal with a r fle on her back.

That Thursday afternoon, I was working on the end of the story when I heard that familiar chirping again. I followed the sound off the page and out to the end of the book. There, in the dark corner where the page met the back cover, was a whole bundle of uppercase Is, all packed tightly in horizontal rows.

Suddenly Sal appeared next to me, her rifle in her arms. “I heard the chirping,” she said. “What is that friggin’ thing?”

Just then a bird’s head appeared out of the Is.

“Holy shit it’s a nest,” she whispered.

“Come on, Sal,” I said. “You can’t kill a bird in its nest.”

“Wanna bet?” she said, raising her rifle. “Goodbye you I-stealing—”

But just then a second head—the head of a tiny baby bird—appeared in the nest. And then another tiny bird’s face, and then another. The tiny birds were chirping and squawking—they were hungry.

“Don’t you dare, Sal,” I said.

Sal sighed and lowered the gun. Then we both watched as the exact ng b rd fetched a lowercase i—maybe even one of mine—and dropped it into the newborn bird’s open beak.