As a child, I loved seagulls.

One year for my birthday, my mom got us a beachfront hotel room for two weeks. It may also have been a trial separation from my dad. I was nine, so the details are fuzzy, but for me it was incredible.

My birthday is in the winter, so the hotel was dirt cheap, the beach was almost completely empty, and I even got to see snow on the sand. Best of all, I could spend hours feeding the seagulls.

Our fourth floor balcony became my standard feeding spot. Every day, I would stand out there and toss food to the gulls.

In retrospect, I had trained them.

Every day, the little human came out onto Balcony Four and food appeared.

There was also a little burger place nearby that started giving me their leftover fries. They cooked them in batches and threw away a ridiculous amount, so instead they would hand them over to the weird little seagull child.

Naturally, I decided to escalate.

One day I acquired what I remember as approximately five gallons of french fries, hauled them up to our room, and took my position on the balcony.

The gulls arrived.

The fries flew.

Everyone understood the arrangement.

Then the phone rang.

I brought the fries inside with me, because I was nine years old and obviously I could not leave them unattended. The gulls might eat them.

I walked maybe fifteen seconds across the room, picked up the phone, and answered it.

Then I turned around.

Silence.

Hundreds of seagulls.

Not a few adventurous gulls poking their heads through the door.

All of them had come inside.

In maybe fifteen seconds, apparently without making a sound, hundreds and hundreds of gulls had poured through the open balcony doors and occupied the hotel room.

They were on the bed.

They were on the furniture.

They were in the bathroom.

They were everywhere.

For one bizarre second, they just seemed to be standing there.

Then they noticed the fry bucket in my hand.

The room exploded.

Every gull started squawking at once.

They were screaming, flapping, launching themselves across the room, tearing through the place like crazed cokeheads fighting over the last line. Wings everywhere. Beaks everywhere. Feathers everywhere. Gulls smashing into each other, gulls flying over the bed, gulls coming out of the bathroom, gulls trying to get to the bucket.

Absolute madness that no hotel has seen since the era of big haired rock stars.

I slammed down the phone, grabbed the fries, and tried to get back to the balcony.

Tried.

One seagull is not particularly formidable compared with a human being.

Hundreds of seagulls, however, turn out to be a nearly impenetrable wall if the human being in question is a nine year old boy.

It took me minutes to cross one hotel room.

I had to physically force myself through a solid mass of shrieking, flapping gulls. They snapped at me. They beat me with their wings. They scratched me.

Did you know seagulls have claws?

I did not.

I learned.

Those little bastards have talons.

And when hundreds of panicked gulls are climbing, flying, and scrambling over you to reach a five gallon bucket of french fries, they use them.

I am thirty five years old now.

I still have a few scars.

Eventually, bleeding, scratched to hell, and clutching the most valuable bucket of potatoes on the Atlantic coast, I managed to fight my way back onto the balcony.

Then I started throwing fries over the railing as fast as I could.

And, thank God, the gulls followed.

They poured back out of the room after the food, snatching fries out of the air so quickly that most of them never even reached the ground.

Within minutes, the invasion was over.

The gulls were back outside.

The room was mine again.

It was also covered in gull shit.

A few hours later, my mom came back to find me cleaning it off basically every surface in the hotel room. I was covered in scratches and bruises and bleeding from most of the exposed parts of my body.

As a child, I loved seagulls.

I still fucking do.

They are my spirit animal. I love gulls. I strive to be a gull.

If I were a furry, I would be a fucking seagull furry.

Feathery?

Whatever the bird ones are.

Edit tightened up my writing a bit