Birds - Dustin Michael
Today, I watched a small bird fly over the open field where I sat on a park bench. I then watched a hawk rise from the upper branches of the tree on the edge of the field, fly up behind the small bird, and pluck it right out of the air.
Some of the birds in our neighborhood hang around in our yard enough to have earned names and backstories—the bluebird, the mockingbird, the pair of cardinals. I thought about how my family might have known the small bird, now dying in the talons of a vanishing hawk. The attack had happened kind of high up, and I hadn’t seen what kind of bird it was. Also, it had happened fast, at the speed of sudden and unexpected death—the speed of blood clot, of stroke, of brain aneurysm. Of highway crash. Of theater gunman. Faster than reaction and dread. The incalculable unfairness of deadly speed. Twice as fast as hope and fifty times as large. Big hawk against little bird.
Sometimes I forget the end comes this way, in a sudden, unseen rush from behind. Had the smaller bird, in boredom, once prepared some clever last cheeps? It wasn’t even given an opportunity to use them. There was no resigned soliloquy of chirps to say, “So, Death, here you are. Long have I read the markings of your beak in the bones of my friends and felt the coolness of your shadow in my blood, and now, at last, I see your face.” There wasn’t a shriek or even a flutter. There was no sound at all.
Against the pale autumn sky there was only a single silhouette where there had, briefly, been two. Taking no notice of the loss of one tiny bird, the world continued just as it had. So did the hawk, which flew away, tracing across the sky the unfinished path the smaller bird had embarked upon moments before.
No one else seemed to notice that anything had happened, and I wouldn’t have noticed, either, had I not been also watching my daughter run across the open field with her arms stretched out straight at her sides like little wings.
Originally published by Atrium 2016
Dustin Michael lives with his family in Georgia, where he teaches writing and literature. He and his wife share blogging duties at https://phinphans.blogspot.com, where they write about their son, Phin, who was recently diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia.
