Episode 10: “The Owls of Olivewood”
If you were going about your normal day, how many owls would you need to see before you thought something was wrong?
Actually, scratch that. Too soon for that.
So, have you ever remembered a show or something from childhood, and you start hunting around the web for it, maybe even start asking people about it, and you draw enough utter blanks you begin to suspect you somehow conjured it all up? Not the Mandela effect, where a bunch of people misremember the same thing the same way, but a show, a song, a commercial, some bit of ephemera that seems to exist only in your memory?
Stop right there, soldier! Do not Google. Do not ask someone about it face to face. In fact, if your supposedly lost thing somehow comes up in casual (or “casual”) conversation afterward, extricate yourself quickly; don’t panic but don’t dawdle either. Just make your excuses and leave the area.
And for god’s sake do not start posing questions on message boards.
In my former life I was a pop-culture obsessive – Star Trek to Star Wars and everything in between, though with a fantasy/quest lean. If you needed to see (but not touch) a 5-inch tall “Taz” Tasmanian Devil figure, I was your guy. My closet was devoted to shelving. The figures made me feel melancholy, but in a comforting way. As if I’d saved them from oblivion, deposited them outside of time. My girlfriend Shayna (how I enjoy saying that) calls it a non-toxic trait, my “green flag.”
It started with “Pop Trash -- The Pop-Culture Nostalgia Podcast!” which I had agreed, somewhat against my will, to start up with Kyle, whom I’d gotten friendly with on shift changes at the 7-11 while admiring each other’s retro t-shirts. They actually made more sense on him, since he was a little older than me.
Kyle makes up for his cheery acquiescence on the clock with a forceful personality off it (“a barreling sort,” to quote Shayna). He took over just by he being himself and me being myself. He’d been in radio and could instantly slip into a shouty, friendly, ready-for-anything mode. Argument and conflict energized him, paralyzed me. Peace and calm are my bag, not rough and tumble.
So: A two-guy operation with classic mismatched personalities (which can sometimes work), cranking out one show a week, the drudgery ratio climbing as I ended up handling more of the back-end technical bits -- which I actually was better at, my suspicions of weaponized helplessness on Kyle’s part aside.
That division of labor wasn’t in our official contract, written down tres cool style on a barroom napkin at Lily’s, sitting next to the taps with $2 cans of Pabst, facing the somewhat illicit (in Ohio) bottle of Everclear behind the bar. Shayna didn’t join us anymore. I’d caught him giving Shayna an unwanted kiss when he thought I was still in the bathroom at Lily’s, so she doesn’t come with me anymore.
The real problem was the usual one: No one cared. Listener numbers had flatlined at a low plateau and my publicity posts to my embarrassingly meager friends list were met with at best some version of “it’s in my queue,” which translated as “Let us never speak of this again.” The Discord channel I had painstakingly set up to bolster the podcast was a wasteland, my own pleading attempts at conversation starters scattered in the void.
Kyle wanted us to invest in better equipment (“gotta spend money to make money”) and I had none, which put us at something of an impasse. The night before we recorded our ninth episode, “TV That Time Forgot But You Remember,” I laid up in bed, pondering how to extricate myself without totally alienating Kyle, who I considered a friend.
On the day it happened we were recording the podcast in Kyle’s surprisingly tidy apartment, Kyle glancing side-eyed at my page of scribbled talking points. “It’s all about spontaneity, Bryan,” I could almost hear him saying, chiding my overpreparation.
“And now the question of the day,” he announced into his mic, launching into his standard ten-minute mark segment: \"If you were going about your normal day, how many owls would you need to see before you thought something was wrong? Zookeepers excepted.”
A pause for the audience to recover its breath, then, “So does anyone else remember an episode of the early-80’s Ted Knight comic vehicle Too Close for Comfort, where a frankly insufferable supporting character claims to have been kidnapped and is, ahem, romantically assailed by two enormous women in the back of a van, one of whom may or may not have been a man? Or, on a lighter note, that short film when the witch made blueberry pancakes that made everyone who ate them happy? And everyone who saw it suspects they dreamed it, maybe because they all saw it during class in 5thgrade with the lights out, half-asleep?”
I interrupted -- at least it felt that way -- “Or, to move into this millennium, the comedy starting Sinbad as the god Shazaam! that everyone swears they remember but was never actually filmed.”
“Or was it? Can we be absolutely sure?” Yes, but I murmured “Good point” anyway.
“So how does this happen?” Kyle asked. “Can memories somehow coalesce into reality? If you think about something long and hard enough can you somehow manifest it into collective memory, or even collective reality?”
“It’s also possible it did happen and we just have no proof,” I said. “Remember that pop culture was held cheaply back then. The BBC taped over priceless Doctor Who into the 1970s. And there were rumors of a 13th episode of Fawlty Towers—\"
“That all happened across the pond of course, but the point stands,” Kyle said and I was swallowing annoyance when a strange thought flicked into my brain pan. “The Owls of Olivewood,” I heard myself say.
Kyle frowned. “Refresh my memory.”
“It was a cartoon I watched when I was 8 or 9, so in the mid-1990s. I don’t remember many details. Just this creepy, quiet, blue-tinted world and this scene, maybe near the end, with a bunch of owls in the trees filling the screen just…staring out at me.”
“A parliament of owls, perhaps?”
Whatever, Kyle. “It had a distinct Riki Tiki Tavi vibe.”
“Chuck Jones, 1975,” Kyle filled in, of course.
“But more intense.” Sad was the word I wanted, but I didn’t want to ruin the vibe again.
Kyle punched some keys, frowned. “Well, sports fans, my Google Fu is failing me but maybe we can jog some memories out there. Imagine this,” he said, voice dropping into a low register, aiming for portentousness. “It’s 1995, more or less, and you’re home from school, loaded up on Dr. Pepper and Pop Rocks. You’re powering through your homework so you can watch the cartoon you saw advertised in TV Guide for 5 o’clock, right before the local news. And suddenly there it was: The Owls of Olivewood, perhaps introduced with a dripping Munsters-style font on screen and some ominous music….if any of that rings a bell, you know the drill, hop on to our socials and drop us a word.”
Someone did, in fact, eventually.
We kept firing up more examples of lost television; I didn’t flag around the 45-minute mark as usual but felt a strange new energy pulsing within me. Kyle even let me talk about the cringy rape joke I swore I’d heard on a Benny Hillrerun. The recording stretched past the hour mark. Finally, Kyle signed off with his trademark poetry-slam-adjacent monologue: “Indeed, the past was a different place. Serial killers, teenaged runaways crossing an emptier, wilder country where someone could become hopelessly lost and not be expected anywhere in particular, not leashed to a portable phone slash tracking device. What have we lost in trade for our digital security blankets?”
After we signed off, after I’d saved the raw file, planning to dub in some suitable copyright-free music at the right places later, Kyle said “That was a good one.” He fumbled for the cigarettes he kept quitting. “Say…we don’t have a topic next week. Why don’t you put something together on this Owl thing. Lots of folks with spare time on Reddit. Start gathering thread and we can do it for Episode 10.”
There would be no Episode 10.
I began the hunt for “Olivewood” the way everyone did, but the internet revealed not a trace. So I tried the old humble bit on Reddit: “Hoping this hive-mind of geniuses could help me out, surely I’m not the only one that remembers a cartoon I watched on TV as a young mite, 1994 or thereabouts with this creepy midnight-blue background with owls in the trees and disturbingly quiet, if that makes sense….”
“Any luck?” Shayna asked two nights later.
“No one else remembers it. Not even vaguely. One asshole on Reddit says I’m an attention whore. Another somehow got his way to our Discord channel and kept repeating Tell Me More. Dude I told you all I know.” And a few others had posed the same sensible question – what local market did you see it in? In other words, where had I lived at the time? I looked back at my post and was shocked to see I hadn’t included that vital bit of information. Why not?
“Maybe it wasn’t owls, Bryan. Maybe it was crows or some other avian. That would throw off the search.”
“Maybe.”
That night I lay in bed, feeling odd, like I was glowing from inside, some new version of me forcing itself to the surface.
I woke up sweating at 3:18 a.m. I’d had sweaty dreams before, especially after a night at the dive, standard stuff: Trying to run with lead feet, stuck in the back of a car with no driver. But this one was fiendishly involved, down to school parking rules and the precise summer hours of the “barn pool” where our family had membership. It seemed to stretch years, with humdrum stretches where little happened besides me wandering around our suburban neighborhood, sometimes at night with friends, sometimes on my bike alone, following the bright morning sidewalk like found gold on a glowing morning.
And sometimes, riding up a certain hill, at a break between houses, I glimpsed the city skyline.
But what city?
I waited until after breakfast, then said, casually as I could. “Shayna, did I ever tell you I lived in Texas as a kid?”
“You’d be lying.”
“Well I did. A suburb of Dallas.”
“No,” Shayna replied calmly, “You grew up in Georgia, moved to Ohio, college and job here, met me, game over. Anything else is just dream infection. It will pass.”
But Shayna’s rock-bottom common sense didn’t reground me this time. The details refused to fizzle away in the light of day. Did I dare call my mother to confirm where I grew up? She would really start worrying about her little boy then.
I was definitely eight at the start of the Dallas experience because I had a birthday shortly after we moved (from where, though?) when I turned nine and only a few kids came to the new kid’s party. We played three-on-three soccer in the front yard and the team I was on won 6-4 but I was stuck playing goalie and had to chase the ball down the street twice at my own birthday party. Which meant we’d had a big yard to play in.
My mother worked in an office with an elevator and soft carpet and I had a babysitter and I went to a private school with uniforms and I got paddled in 6th grade for talking in class.
I went to the closet and found my shoebox of old photos. Among the old Polaroids were several I didn’t recall, like one of me on my bike in a driveway. While I squinted at blurry green street signs and Googled “color and font of street signs in different states,” Shayna folded her arms and glared. “Is this like that time when you woke up and had to hunt down your high school diploma in the garage to make sure you’d really graduated?” She looked almost angry.
“No. This is different. It was like life. Some of it was even boring. Shayna, how did we meet?”
A sigh, then, “Lily’s, at the trivia night gone bad. That incel kept pawing my keyboard because I couldn’t make the software update load. You shooed him away.”
“Don’t talk about Kyle like that.” I turned it over and over in my head until I convinced myself I really did remember it. I kept joking until the worry left her face, then went to take a long walk by myself, putting “home town Decatur” into my phone.
I woke up sobbing at 3:03 a.m.
“What’s wrong, Bryan?”
I didn’t answer, just stumbled down the hall with wretched urgency to the closet. The shoebox of photos now held just one single square Polaroid of me as a child, holding a tiny black and white bulldog puppy.
I showed it to Shayna. “Have you seen this before?”
“Can’t say I have.” She was trying to hide her puzzlement. “Cute puppy.”
“This was me growing up in Texas. That’s Bully. Olive trees backed up to our house and one night I was walking him and heard the owls hooting and got scared and let go of his leash and left him there. I never found him.”
“Do olive trees even grow in Texas?” But the photo and its undeniable realness stumped her. “Do you actually like dogs?” She ventured.
“We’ve talked about this! No, I’m not an animal lover, but I was and am perfectly capable of having normal feelings of affection toward a family pet.”
“Sorry, sorry,” she interjected, patting my hand. “I know you loved him, Bryan, and I can’t pretend I can explain this photo right this second. Maybe Kyle is having it on with you. But I’m sure if you ever were in Texas, though you weren’t, and if you did lose your puppy, though you didn’t, I bet he got found and adopted by a nice family.” I knew she was laying on the condescension to distract me. But I could tell she was worried, whether about me or the situation I couldn’t tell.
Even as we stood in the closet, peering at the new old photograph, my memories were being overwritten, erasing Decatur and replacing it with Dallas. Our family’s new backyard descended into a dell where the fog festered at the tops of the ragged olive trees long into the morning. I remembered a Kevin with a purple birthmark on his chin. Bruce, a kooky, hulking kid at school with a strangely high voice who carried a pocketknife and stabbed me in the butt on the playground. A face from Decatur sprouted freckles and became a Michelle and I couldn’t recall the old one anymore but suddenly had always had a crush on the new. I remembered bringing Bully home from the shelter in Dallas, holding him tight to my chest in the backseat. He hid under the sofa the first few days, emerging occasionally to bite our ankles with those oh-so-sharp new puppy teeth.
A new timeline had been grafted onto my consciousness. The way olive trees could do. And who could tell me which version was real?
Well, my mother could. And there were of course ways to look up such things. I even recalled a Dallas phone number, the old-school seven-digit variety that was all you needed back then. But I wasn’t up to any of that.
I quit my cashier post, then took the coward’s way out and quit the podcast via Instagram message to Kyle. Always direct, Kyle left a two minute, fifty-seven-second voicemail I deleted unread. He quit trying after that, which somewhat surprised me. I started drinking whiskey with purpose. Shayna looked at me oddly, surely wondering if this was some kind of warped relationship stress test on my part. It wasn’t. I just wondered what kind of person would abandon a puppy in the woods, no matter how scared they were. I didn’t want to be that guy anymore.
When I woke up sweating from another dream, I went to the shoebox and found what I already knew would be there: A single black rewritable VHS tape, rewound, in a frayed off-white cardboard container. It had no label but I knew what was on it: A cartoon from my childhood, and mine alone, coming for me. For revenge. Or just perhaps, for redemption. Either way, they were trying to tell me something.
I took the tape to Shayna, who placed it without comment on the dresser. Then she went to her computer for an hour of silent, intense searching. For nearby mental health facilities, perhaps, I though with some hope.
Afterward she crawled into bed next to me and launched into a recitation. “Owls have a good life. They’re cute when they’re babies but grow up to be assholes. They have no natural predators. It helps that they taste like shit. They don’t have to flap their wings, they swoop so you cannot hear them flying. They don’t have eyeballs so they can’t move their eyes. And they rarely target dogs, not even little puppies, so maybe your little friend’s OK in there.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
She breathed hard and said, “Because I have a VCR in storage.”
My shoulders sagged with relief -- not so much about the VCR, which I could have obtained on eBay if I didn’t feel like eating for a while -- but that she had just agreed to help me, something I hadn’t dared ask her to do.
“I just need to know, one way or the other,” I said. “It’s about the dog.”
“Yeah, I can see that. You’ll be Ok. You’ve got your friends there, remember? Yaz and Yosemite and Superman. Just remember the safe word is pineapple.”
Under the crazed circumstances, Shayna’s strategy (or was it a tactic?) was pretty sound. First, she took my liquor away. Then she hooked up the VCR and TV in the closet and learned ways to make the space somewhat soundproof (for her own protection) on the cheap with caulk and rubber mats. She also purchased for some reason an industrial strength flashlight that looked expensive. Shayna would monitor the closet via her laptop security camera so she could focus on me while hopefully being protected from whatever lay in wait on the videotape.
When the hour finally came (3 p.m., the hour of reason, to counteract my 3 a.m. hour of insanity) she said, “Just remember whatever’s happening when you watch this thing is just in your head. I’ll be watching you…like an owl. Now go find your puppy.”
“So you can’t blink?” Smart-ass to the end.
“Actually that’s a miscon--never mind. You ready?”
“I was born ready.” Fake courage was better than none. The tape was the trap, my Bully memories the bait. Something malign wanted me to watch. And here I was, tragic idiot, about to do just that. Still, having a plan, dare say a mission, made me feel slightly less helpless.
“Breath regularly, stick to the mission, remember no matter how scary or mean it gets in there, that it’s just a cartoon, it can’t really harm you.” Then, “I love you,” accompanied by a kiss on the cheek -- Shayna’s last words before she closed the door, plugging up the crack under the doorframe with a rubber mat held down with electrical tape.
I sat down on the hard stool (to keep me from slipping into a trance, or something) reached down and with an unsteady finger punched the arrow button marked PLAY.
With a susurrating sound the VHS tape whirred and flickered to life. A textured staticky blackness filled the screen, then attenuated into a deep blue, landing around a shade perhaps found on Mars, but never here.
It was as I remembered.
The animation was fuzzy but somehow immersive. From a bleak midnight street view of a sprawling, desolate mansion, the scene crept rightward with tension-inducting slowness, to a shabby field adjacent, stopping at a copse of ragged trees. The olive woods. Not sunnily situated Mediterranean plants, but ancient gnarled things whose tangled limbs cast tortured shadows. There was something undeniably inhuman about the rendering of the scenes. Perhaps people really do have souls; I could feel their absence in every distorted tree and bush.
Then, abruptly, I was inside the screen, cut off within that closed world of blue. I could not turn the tape off: There was no tape, no television, no closet, no apartment, and no phone. My hands dangled empty and useless with no phantom phone limb for security. No wind in the gnarled trees, no crunch of leaves under my feet. No Shayna watching over me, just a blank Bible black sky, sans god. I tried to keep breathing, to scan for the little white bulldog, but lost control of my feet: Against my will I was propelled into a clearing surrounded by a circle of craggy, carbuncled olive trees. A darker part of the dark wood resolved into an array of sharp ears and talons, silent sentinels perched atop each tree.
The Owls of Olivewood.
The parliament peered down upon me with infinite, unmoving malice. Somehow I knew facts about them. That they didn’t sleep. They didn’t nest. They had nothing to brood over, nothing to clutch in their claws with anything approaching affection.
Which made me think, with a shudder, of Bully.
I’m coming, Bully! I wanted to shout, out of defiance if nothing else. But my throat was fused lead that absorbed my attempts at noise and I was paralyzed, unable to look away from the looming parliament, trapped in a rancid crevice of time-space.
Where’s my puppy! I demanded silently, pathetically, knowing that even if I regained voice and motion I would only run away again in the face of those thick, black-slitted eyes, slanted downward by deep time and unsleeping exhaustion, far more horrific than my memory. What did it want with me?
It’s all that humans ask, that things turn out all right in the end. But how could they, with The Eyeless in the back of it all? Misery and regret would claim us all eternally and there was nothing to be done and I was powerless even to weep. I was a toy figure of the true gods, not cherished, but malevolently trapped upon a cosmic shelf in oblivion, outside of time.
Sudden, blinding desert daylight filled the space, cursing me with a full view of the horror directly before me, an enormous decayed white owl with slumped slits for eyes.
And then -- in that piercing white light, with a slow heavy ruffling – it blinked.
Instantly the darkness snapped back on and a flattened scream reached my ears: “Bryan! Get Out!”
Startled, I found my limbs working again. I fell recklessly in reverse, away from the Eyeless, stumbling backward until I tripped -- to find myself lying on my back facing the ceiling of my closet. I staggered out through the flung-open door, slammed shut by Shayna as I stumbled past her and slumped hard against the kitchen counter, staring back at the door, blinking for my life, until I convinced myself it would stay shut.
She clicked the huge flashlight off and back on. “No eyeballs, remember. They can’t avoid the light.”
Some time passed before the colors of the world came back, and with Shayna’s help I was able to stand up.
The mind fog was melting away. I’d never lived in Texas. There’d been no mother with a career in a building downtown without a 13th floor, no all-night biking with the neighborhood crew. No Michelle. No Bully.
When I checked the shoebox again the Polaroids were old and familiar, including one of me on my Big Wheel in our old driveway at 138 Hampton Way, Decatur, Georgia, surrounded by neighborhood kids, each of whom I could name. I recited their names like mantras, tugging me back.
I burnt the shoebox and we kept the closet shut, TV, VCR and all. For a few weeks we slept on a sleeping bag in the den. Then we wiped the proverbial Cheeto dust off our computer keys and left that world behind. Shayna quit her library job with the move, a pity because the county had just given workers a 2.5% raise. It felt like a narrow escape. She is stuck with me, though. She saved my life after all. Sorry babe, them’s the rules.
Now we’re growing our own food in this little backyard garden in Iowa (don’t ask). Note: You won’t be able to grow all you need to eat from a little backyard garden. Between us we’ve dropped almost fifty pounds. Frankly we’re roughing it a little, adjusting to our new way of existing.
I deleted Episode 9. Sorry Kyle, it was our best work, but certain, ahem, dogs need to lie. Kyle’s not a bad guy -- at least I don’t think he’s the bad element here -- but I can’t have him in my life now.
Owl breeding season is looming, so at twilight we put the sound machine on. I freed my action figures on eBay (well, Shayna did, she doesn’t take anyone’s shit -- Taz sold for $345, no refunds). We canceled our streaming subscriptions and got library cards. We keep our windows and closets shut so as not to spy a new box in the corner or an eyeless face on the other side of a window glass. We tread lightly on the internet. And we don’t speak of that day, for fear of bending unwanted attention our way. Our one concession to modernity is our 100,000-lumen flashlight. We keep the batteries fresh.
On Monday mornings we eat at a nearby diner, full of sullen black coffee regulars and a heart-breaking attempt at a kid’s menu. We look odd with our dark clothes and pale faces but we smile and tip well and talk about our sad garden, and sometimes the coffee drinkers overhear us and give us advice. Good relations with local humans may become important one day.
When we feel things closing in, we take walks – on the street, no parks or forests, we’ve never been nature people and aren’t going to start now.
And, when we think the other one’s not looking, we glance up at the sky.
Shayna sleeps on the couch (she swears she finds it more comfortable, OK?) so I can sweat the sheets in peace, dreaming of the Eyeless -- most nights, unless I get terribly wasted. Thankfully I’m a nice drunk, or at least an apologetic one. It’s manageable. I’m staving off despair. Shayna begs me, sometimes near tears, to talk about the Owls, but I have to keep it bottled up so I don’t infect her with weird retro-conned memories as well.
So, I ponder these questions alone.
Did The Owls of Olivewood ever exist, anywhere, in any way?
Somewhere in the cosmos, is there a Bryan in a Texas who abandoned a puppy in an olive wood full of owls?
If you were going about your normal day, how many owls would you need to see before you thought something was wrong?
About the Author
Clay has been published in The Headlight Review, Broad River Review, Three-Lobed Burning Eye, and Tales from the Moonlit Path. Three of his six core toddler memories involve the alphabet.