March 13

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Sentri couldn’t believe it. He’d ordered some essential parts through Amazon to complete a renovation project, and they’d gotten his order all wrong. The wrong size of this, the wrong type of that. One of the products arrived broken. Just about the only thing they got right was the receipt at the bottom of the box. For a company based in Seattle, near where Sentri lived, he was impressed at how much they’d screwed up.

The purple Steller’s sea eagle was not the type to get angry, but he was frustrated, given how much progress he’d been making on the project up until now. He decided to wander into his backyard to take his mind off it. The birds that often visited his feeders always cheered him up.

There were more than a few little ones flitting around today, and Sentri relaxed in a patio chair as he watched them zip around and enjoy the early spring air. He could hear the rap-rap-rap of a woodpecker and managed to spot it on a tree in one of his neighbor’s yard. And flying over the tree was another bird that looked— wait, could it be?

Sentri sprinted into his house to grab his camera and took off in the direction the bird was heading. It was unmistakably a Steller’s sea eagle, just like him — albeit not anthropomorphized — and that made it an exceptionally rare find!

Steller’s sea eagles are native to eastern Asia, not North America. There had been a famous vagrant spotted in the U.S., but last Sentri heard, it was on the east coast. It’s possible this was the same one, or it could be another one. Either way, Sentri had to get a photograph. This was too good of an opportunity to miss.

The vagrant was just barely within viewing distance and flying away from its purple counterpart, so Sentri began to run. He was surprised to find himself closing the distance between the two, but with his focus entirely on the other bird, it never registered in Sentri’s brain that he might be growing enormous in size.

Soon, the smaller bird alighted on the tallest branches of a tree in a nearby park, with Sentri right behind it. He took out his camera and got dozens of excellent shots (despite his enlarged fingers fumbling with the controls.) It almost seemed like the sea eagle was kind enough to strike a few poses for the camera, much to Sentri’s amusement.

Finally satisfied, he turned to walk back home… and only then noticed the trail of carnage he left in his wake. Flattened cars and twisted, broken streetlights marked the titanic bird’s path, causing a sheepish blush to appear on Sentri’s cheeks as he realized what had happened.

Overall, though, the huge purple bird was thrilled with the new size. He’d always felt an affinity toward fictional giants and being such a colossus just felt right. And, now that he was so big, there were a few things he could take care of…

Sentri began to walk toward downtown Seattle, walking alongside the highway system and enjoying his literal bird’s-eye view of the tiny cars crawling along down below. He’d been in one of those cars before, bemoaning the heavy traffic around the city. But now that he could see for miles, the causes of the city’s traffic problems were obvious.

“Hold on…” Sentri thought to himself, furrowing his brow. He leaned down and tore an exit ramp out of the ground as if he were pulling weeds from a garden. “If I just take this and move it over here…” Confused motorists honked and shouted at him, but Sentri paid them no mind as he set about redesigning the infrastructure. In less than half an hour, he was done. The traffic patterns were a little wonky for the moment, but once everyone figured out what direction they were supposed to be going, it would make things on the highway so much smoother.

“There we go,” Sentri said, dusting off his hands. “I’ve been wanting to fix that for years.” He strode onward, soon reaching the downtown area. He had to squeeze to fit his massive body in between the tightly packed city blocks, his large purple feathers brushing against the windows of office buildings as he made his way deeper downtown.

Eventually he saw what he was looking for: the gaudy white geometric spheres that indicated he was on the campus of Amazon’s headquarters. He wasn’t exactly sure where to go now that he was here, but he did recognize one building in particular as holding the primary corporate offices.

Sentri stepped over to it and tore the roof off of it like he was opening a cereal box. “Oh, hi, excuse me,” he said as he looked down at the terrified executives in their top-floor suites. “You messed up my last order. Can I get a refund?”