Summary of All My Birds by K.A. Teryna
Asimov’s Science Fiction, January/February 2026
When a doctor writes you a referral to see an ornithologist—not an orthopedist or otolaryngologist, but specifically a bird specialist—you accept it with the same resignation you’ve accepted everything else in your life: running while losing things, losing breath, losing yourself. The ornithologist’s office is in a hospital basement, staffed by a surprisingly young woman in a polka-dot dress. She hands you a brochure about bird illnesses and habits, then escorts you out in a rhythm of silence so complete you barely remember the visit afterward.
Soon, birds begin emerging from your mouth. First a finch appears while you’re at your favorite café, stepping onto your tongue and out into your palm with sharp little feet. You consult the ornithologist’s brochure and confirm: yes, a finch with a reddish chest and blue helm-like decoration. The birds keep coming—ducklings that follow you along the riverbank, tempting you with visions of comfortable domesticity; sparrows you vomit onto a metro floor after an accidental memory of Martha triggers an overwhelming emotional explosion.
Martha, your partner, is gone. Your apartment has become a monument to chaos and grief, cluttered with belongings and memories you can neither face nor discard. The only clean space is the kitchen table where Martha left an unfinished snow globe—perfectly unimagined, the last thing she touched. You’ve been searching for a ticket, the one that will let you leave this city that seems to trap everyone who belongs to it. Without the ticket, you cannot go.
Key Plot Points
- When you try to complain about the vanished ornithologist, even producing magpies and a jackdaw at the hospital desk fails to impress the nurses—the birds contain no official stamps
- Yarchik, a homeless man you inherited from Martha, visits for borscht and casually tells you that you won’t leave, that people search for tickets merely to confirm their existence, but those who truly want to leave simply do
- In anger, you vomit crows at him, and he leaves after observing that crow excrement is especially unpleasant and noting that he’s seen this pattern hundreds of times
- You spend days cleaning your apartment, selling off possessions, becoming lighter with each discarded item and each bird that flies out of you
- At the cemetery visiting your grandmother’s grave, you encounter an elderly couple at peace with their birds, living symbiotically with the creatures—a revelation that such harmony is possible
Unable to find the ticket in your thoroughly cleaned apartment, you finally attempt what Martha would have done: you paint the plaster bird figurines the ornithologist gave you in random colors and build them into a chaotic snow globe. It’s nothing like Martha would have made—the glitter looks like rain instead of snow, the birds are badly glued, the houses askew—but it’s yours, made for yourself, not as a monument to her memory.
On your apartment building’s roof, you discover one of Yarchik’s secret stashes—a wall covered in thousands of pages, notes, and tickets collected across the city. The wind rustles through them like leaves, and among the scraps you find a fifteen-year-old ticket to a Shrikes concert, the very concert you snuck into without a ticket when you were young and desperate. The wind itself places the ticket in your palm. In exchange, you leave Yarchik the snow globe you made.
You walk to the train station through rain and puddles, an oriole circling overhead. You leave your apartment unlocked, a pot of fresh borscht cooking, a note saying “be well” under the saltshaker. At the station, there’s no euphoria or special feeling—everything is simple and practical. You hand the yellowed concert ticket to the conductor. He stamps it without question and says, “Safe journey. We’re leaving in one minute.”
As the train pulls away, the rain stops, revealing an enormous freshly washed sky with pink clouds. Against this backdrop, the retreating city appears small and sad. Your birds—all the birds that emerged from your grief, your memories, your resistance to change—circle above it. You’ve finally left, not because you found the perfect ticket or the perfect moment, but because you chose to try. The story ends with you moving forward, lighter for all you’ve released, while the city and its birds remain behind, a chapter closed but not forgotten.