Education

There wasn't much to the room that Blanco was confined to, so naturally he discovered most of its secrets and intricacies fairly early into his childhood. From his hatchling days he had discovered the thin paper pamphlets on the shelves, pages glued together with years of damp. He had torn the first one to shreds while trying to open it so he had begun to treat them carefully, prying them apart with thin splinters of wood that were pushed into the corners of his room along with other useless debris. Eventually, he beheld the contents of the tiny books in all their waterstained glory.

They were clearly colourful at one point, ink still showing through after years of abuse in the elements. Their pages were filled with large human letters and images that surrounded them, one letter per page usually, though sometimes they shared a page or even had a full double page spread to themself. With each letter he would recognise at least one of the images, leading him to saying the words out loud and trying to find the common thread between them. The thicker books held the answers he sought, full words made of the letters in the smaller books, piecing them together like a puzzle and revealing the long dead language to him. Blanco was beginning to learn ancient human, and the thought sent a foreign thrill of adrenaline through him.

“Mother?” he asked and she flinched like the word inflicted a wound, “Could you bring me more things with human words? I feel I’m ever so close to understandin’ them.” She sighed like it was simultaneously a relief and a great burden.

"It's already hard enough keeping us both fed, you want me to look for human trinkets now too?" she asked, anger sharp around the edges of her words. Blanco tried to not shrink away.

"Considerin' I can't go out and look for 'em myself, is all," he said, looking down and scuffing the wooden floor with his claws. This was something he had learned from her, how to lead someone to the conclusion you wanted them to reach. She didn't have to tell him to not go outside anymore, she simply told him what horrors she had faced during the day and let him fill in the rest. Now, he was simply laying out the temptation a curious young mind might feel and letting her fill in the rest.

The second visit of the day now held an extra sense of anticipation. It wasn't frequent, but mother would sometimes squeeze in through the door with a loose spined tome in her jaws and drop it on the floor in front of him. Blanco would at least have the manners to not dive into reading it instantly, but it felt like it would sit there and taunt him until mother left for the last time that day. There was a white switch on the wall and he was now tall enough to reach it, finding out it bathed the room in a weak yellowish light from above. He wasn't sure what made it work, but he was grateful for the sleepless nights it provided as he had enough light to pour over his books.

One unusual find was a hard, plastic book that mother deposited with her usual lack of care, watching it bounce off the floorboards.

“This one looked strange, thought you might like it,” she grunted. Blanco couldn't even wait this time, it had been weeks since the last piece of reading material and he was hungrier for knowledge than ever before. It ate away at him the way real hunger did, lurking constantly in the back of his mind and not letting him rest. Mother rolled her eyes and left, leaving him to inspect the book alone. It was strange, like she had said, book shaped but it didn't open straight away. He tried his usual toothpick method to pry it open, shocked to find a black rectangle inside instead of pages. He turned the rectangle over on the floor, poking it with his nose and gently nudging it with his feet. The top of the rectangle moved slightly like a hinged lid, but he could see nothing but a shiny strip of tape inside. He let the hinge fall back into place and hummed, looking at the two circular holes in the back. The shape was familiar, but it took a while for him to make the connection.

In the corner of his room sat a large box on a wooden stand. It connected to the walls of the room and mostly sat silent. Blanco had tried to make it work before, finding a button he could press but it only lit up the front of the box with a screen of fizzing black and white dots. Under this screen was a hollow hidden behind a swinging door, a rectangular shape that nothing in the room seemed to match. Now he hurried to the box with his new find carefully held in his jaws and tried to push it into the hole. To his delight, the box fit in perfectly, sliding in almost automatically and letting the door close behind it. He pushed the button and watched the static come to life again, watching intently as the screen began to flicker and images began to appear. A human, behind the fuzz of aged recording, like one of the pictures in his books. To Blanco's surprise, it wasn't just the image on screen, but noise began to come from the box too.

"What's this?" the human asked, holding a shiny red apple in her hand and pushing it closer to him.

"An apple," he answered reflexively.

"That's right, it's an apple!" the human said enthusiastically, making Blanco jump out of his feathers and hurry to the back of the room. His heart was racing, how had the human heard him, was it some type of window? He stayed silent as she held up an orange and repeated the first question. "That's right, it's an orange," she cooed in her saccharine voice. It wasn't a window, the human wasn't here with him, presenting another conundrum to the juvenile Carno. Perhaps this was just a picture that moved and spoke, never changing its lines or colours the same way his books remained as they were unless he marked them in some way. The box hissed and fizzed its way through the rest of the picture, sometimes cutting out for minutes at a time but Blanco watched the static just as attentively. 

"You're doing great, you're so clever," the human cheered.

"I'm so clever," he breathed reverently into the empty room.