conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a title for a book about Wild, Birds, Review with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Genre Fiction?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this book could be 'The Wild Birds'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first four paragraphs for this book.. End with the sentence ' While science didn't really get Sarah going as much as standard forms of teenage deviancy, Lily was her best friend, and she thought Max was hot, so she attended science club on Wednesdays after school to be with them.'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Wild Birds
  And with that, Lily grabbed her own egg sandwich and left the kitchen with its lingering aroma of alcohol and eggs mixed with the pungent funk of thousands of newly hatched ladybugs. If Lily were to bottle the scent and name it, like they do in fancy department stores, she would call it "Despair" and use the torso of a thin, hairy, naked woman as its vessel.
  As Lily crossed the field toward the small housing development, she saw the blind harrier skimming low over the grass. The raptor kited for a moment, then landed hard into the grass, rising with empty talons before flying off into the distance. To Lily, the bird looked fatigued. She wondered how long a blind bird that size could possibly live. At the fence dividing their property from the new development, she rustled at the base of the fence post and retrieved an old rusty tin from under a patch of loose, wild grass. From it, she took out a packet of cigarettes from a ziplock and slipped one from the package, pocketing the rest. Alice would kill her if she knew. Crossing into the taupe wasteland, she ducked under some construction tape to enter the largest of the unfinished pressboard palaces, a cigarette dangling from her lips like Gloria in The Lost Weekend, Lily and Sarah's favorite movie.
  At the realization that it was their classmate, Max, who had called her a pretty lady, who moved his being closer to her being, Lily's neck reddened, waves of pink moving up her translucent skin. She felt like an octopus standing there, emoting waves and colors for all the world to see. Thankfully the light in the bare-beamed construction site was dim.
  Max was the most handsome nerd Lily had ever met. Half Siletz Indian with a long, perfect nose and dark hazel eyes, he understood molecular science like it was Disney. Lily was more into ecology, and Sarah was smart but mostly just kind of a punk. Sarah, at sixteen, already had five tattoos she said she'd sweet-talked her way into receiving for free from various admirers in Eugene. Lily suspected she had done more than sweet-talk to get them. While science didn't really get Sarah going as much as standard forms of teenage deviancy, Lily was her best friend, and she thought Max was hot, so she attended science club on Wednesdays after school to be with them.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me two more paragraphs.. Start with the sentence 'Olive craned her head back a little to release the little cricks in her neck as she finished up the dishes'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Olive craned her head back a little to release the little cricks in her neck as she finished up the dishes.
  The next morning the map was there, as promised, drawn in the crude hand of what appeared to be a seven-year-old. There was a dotted line indicating the trail that traveled past the eggers' camp and past a little shed she knew was called the egg house by the eggers. After that, the line curved around seal rock and up and over a steep series of pinnacles with steep inclines, and finally all the way on the far side of the island an X marked, "Jewel Cave."
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last four paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Sal and Alice both felt a certainty come over them that they were on exactly the right path, a sensation that had eluded both women for a long time. They drove the last six hours watching the land change and shift along the road as the tires rolled, heating with the tread of each mile. The light shifted and the sun hid and returned. As they rushed up into the lush Willamette Valley, greens swayed from the yellowed to the blued and back again in patches, in blankets of light and dark. Their minds wandered in and out of duty and consequence, family, and vice. Alice wanted a drink, but also enjoyed the feeling of depriving herself. It was time she took a good, long break from her habits, but she knew she needed help in doing so. Just sitting next to Sal filled her up with newness and possibility. Meanwhile, Sal felt the beating of her own heart in her ears and marveled at how everything still seemed to be working inside. In short glances she admired the curves on the jaw and cheek of the beautiful woman sitting next to her.
  They pulled off the highway and stopped at a roadside turnout to look at a kettle of turkey vultures numbering in the hundreds overhead. The birds circled slowly and wobbly on their wings as though they might drop out of the sky at any moment. But still they hung and wobbled, the wind warm below them as they circled and circled looking for food.
  Once they got back in the car, questions still to be answered started to line up on both their lips, but waited to jump. They sat in silence as the truck rumbled back to life. The sun was setting and the vultures settled into the trees to roost with precision and speed, as though trusting the trees to catch their hefty bodies as they hurled their way toward the earth. Back on the highway, farmhouses, cities, and factories flew past. The two women drove by life upon life—human, animal, and plant—but could not possibly know what would become of every last one, as much as their difficult, scientific hearts might yearn to catalogue them all. The living world flew by in a rush of greens and browns—the hues of beginnings and ends. These things would live; these things would die. An intense, deep blue settled in the sky behind the dying light. As they moved north, there was an unspoken agreement that this movement they took together was that particular kind of migration that, while complicated by the buzz of uncertainty and danger, compelled a being to keep going, to stay in flight.
  To Melanie Nead, my brilliant studio mate, reader, and rosé-sipping friend, who workshopped our manuscripts and gazed out over the beautiful city lights of Portland with me. Without all your support and insights I might have just chucked the whole dang manuscript out onto the train tracks below our studio window.