The Sudden Death of Bird

Bay Sandefur

If it moved, he shot it. 

Out of some disposition, or rather his own habitus, the boy liked shooting things for fun. It wasn’t the fact that it would die, but the act of pulling the trigger and watching what happens to the body, the feathers, the fur, or whatever dressed the animal. It was the thrill he got from hitting the target. In those moments, he was capable. Powerful, maybe. After all, he would someday be a man. 

The day he went to the field, the boy woke up to the sound of nothing, in a house of nothing, where the only something he could grasp—though fleeting—was whatever he could muster out of the ragged earth himself. He did what he had done, what he had been told to do, to pass the time, to get any sense of feeling back into his chest. 

There were brief and yen moments of thrill he would feel. That was it: a rush, a pull into adrenaline. Then he was released. He picked up the corpses—or didn’t.

The BB gun, a light and small rifle with a bright orange muzzle, was loaded and leaned up against the wall near the front door. It was a replica of the thing that was made for killing—not hunting, killing. He grabbed it and left. The dirt road in front of his home eventually led to an opening in the forest. Like climbing through a window, the white oak curtains parted for the boy. He made his way toward the center of the field. What was once a screen for the rust-colored waves of passenger pigeons, the sky was now blank. 

There would be no more wing-invented thunder. For out there, in the vastness of the field, flew the last pair of those wings. The ones that, when accompanied by thousands of others, shook the ground that man stood on. The same ground man captured, poisoned, and picked the passenger pigeons’ corpses from when their work was done. He didn’t know this of course. The winged waves were already diminished by the time he was born. So when he saw one flying alone, he didn’t see the last of her kind, he saw a target. He raised his weapon, met the neon orange muzzle with her russet-colored chest, and pulled the trigger. 

For out there, in the vastness of the field, flew the last pair of those wings.

Feathers scattered in an instant. Her body contorted in reaction to the impact. Each muscle twitching in order to prevent an imminent end. 

The moment, for him, was insignificant. A bit of fun, really. The bird was flying, and then she was not. Her body was stiff when it hit the ground. Across the field and into the trees were millions of corpses just like hers. Their eyes wide, their necks cocked, their chests mangled and bloody.

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