I love the Word Whore's voice, and I hope she keeps coming back to narrate more stories. Good stuff!
To me, the real horror of this story was the new will. The betrayal of her husband from his very death bed to force her into an inevitable and interminable unhappiness, wow that really hit me hard. The speculative element with the birds was just meh.
This story would've done better with a different title--it pulled the punch of the spec element. From the title, and her CONSTANT comments about "it was as if the birds were talking to each other" it was too obvious that the birds WERE talking to each other.
Granted, I didn't foresee the transformation at the end, but to me, getting turned into a bird was a less horrible fate than being saddled with the house and Min.
The story overall was too long, and could've used some trimming, and at the same time, some of the story elements seemed truncated, like the little boy who was only onscreen for a couple paragraphs before he disappears--hard to have a lot of emotion about someone who's been mostly absent anyway. And the budding romance with the lawyer that went absolutely nowhere--why not either trim that or make it more complete?