"Ow!"
I fling it. The flamingo sails over my fence, hits Flynn's yard, lands on its wire legs, and resumes pecking his grass without missing a beat.
Behind me, the rosemary bed. The formation of three has reached it. They work systematically. Peck. Strip. Peck. Strip. Rosemary needles rain down.
"Stop! Those aren't grass, you idiots, those are HERBS?—"
A shadow falls over me. Not a cloud shadow. A Flynn shadow. He stands at our fence, and he's breathing hard, and there's a streak of dirt across his shirt, and he's holding two flamingos by their wire legs, upside down, beaks snapping uselessly at the air. His hair is wild. His boots are still unlaced.
"They're spreading."
"I can see that!"
"Into YOUR yard."
"I KNOW."
He drops the two captive birds. They right themselves instantly, wobbling upright like those inflatable punching clowns, and waddle back toward his lawn.
"We need to stop them. They've breached the property division. This is no longer a single-yard containment issue."
A flamingo decapitates my tallest rosemary plant. The one I named Gerald.
"Gerald!"
Flynn looks at the rosemary. Then at me.
"You name your plants?"
"You have a quarantine zone behind your garage."
His mouth opens. Closes. Fair point acknowledged. He steps through the fence gap into my yard, and the proximity hits me all at once. The sheer mass of him. The way the porch overhang barely clears his head. Soil and cut grass and something warm underneath, like cedar, maybe sandalwood.
"Truce?"
One of his flamingo captives pecks his ankle. He doesn't flinch.
"Truce."
Flynn's plan is simple. Military. He explains it in clipped sentences while a flamingo chews on his ankle strap.
"Herd them to the center. Circle formation. Grab and contain."
"Contain them in what?"
He pauses. Looks around my yard. His gaze lands on the wheelbarrow I left tipped against the porch, the one overflowing with empty terracotta pots and a tangle of twine.
"That."
"My wheelbarrow is not a prison."
"It is now."
He grabs it, dumps the pots onto my porch with a crash that makes my teeth ache, and flips it upright. His forearms flex. The veins run like rivers under moss-green skin.
I look away. Focus. Gerald is dead. This is war.
We split. Flynn takes the left flank, circling wide around my herb garden where four flamingos are systematically dismantling my oregano. I take the right, where two more birdshave discovered my marigold border and are pulling up flowers like they're bobbing for apples.
