The bird eyed me unhappily from where it was perched on the border of my grandmother’s garden, between the rosemary bush and the tomato plants.

“Becca!” my grandmother had called to me just moments before, “There’s a sick bird by the side of the house!”

Now she was hovering behind me, green garden hose in hand. The late afternoon sun turned the summer sky orange and threw her shadow black against the brick wall of the house. The dark blue paving stones I was kneeling on sent heat through my jeans and into the palms of my hands. As I watched, the bird toppled off of the bricks that made up the border and landed in the dirt. There it crouched, its beady eyes watching me nervously. Its rumpled brown feathers crossed over one another and stood up in the back. I was vaguely reminded of my brother Michael’s unruly hair, which stuck up in much the same way.

“Do you think it wants some water?” my grandmother asked. Without waiting for me to reply, she reached for a dish my mother and I had chosen for her birthday the year before. Black with a statuette in the shape of a frog reclining along the rim, it had been intended to make a small reflecting pool. Instead, it had accumulated brown scum along its bottom and shallow lip. My grandmother filled it with water from the hose and placed it in front of the bird.

I sat back on my heels, waiting to see if the bird would drink. It staggered towards the dish, flailing its wings wildly and tumbling forward onto its beak. Covered in dirt, it looked even smaller than before. As if embarrassed by its clumsiness, the bird turned its head to glare accusingly at me. I stared back, amused by its damaged pride. It didn’t drink.

By this time, my grandmother had left to water the rest of her garden. The neighbor across the fence had spied her from her kitchen window and hobbled outside still wrapped in her bathrobe and slippers to announce that her daughter was visiting from Chicago. My grandmother mentioned that her doctor had mentioned that maybe she should consider getting knee surgery. She was adamantly against letting anyone fiddle with her decrepit knees, a sentiment her comrade heartily approved of. The neighbor had gotten her hip replaced not too long ago and, contrary to all evidence, maintained that it hadn’t helped at all.

I straightened up to return to the game of pool I had been playing with Michael and my cousin Daniel, hoping that by the time my mother came to pick me up the bird would have left. I didn’t want it to die, but neither did I want to spend my afternoon watching it glower at me.

As I rose, the neighbor spotted me and broke off her complaints in mid-sentence. “That can’t be Bruna’s daughter! The last time I saw her, she was this high!” With her withered hands, she indicated a height around her knee. “How old are you now?”

“I’ll be fifteen in October.”

She nodded. “Fifteen. That’s a good age. High school. What are you doing sneaking around in the tomatoes like that?”

I looked down at my feet. The bird was still there. “Grandma found a sick bird. It doesn’t seem to want to drink.”

She shuffled over to where I was and peered near-sightedly over the fence. “That one? It was in my rosebush earlier. It’s just a baby; it’s still learning to fly.”

My grandmother hobbled back over to take another look. “I don’t think so. It looks old to just be learning to fly.”

“No, no. I saw it practicing earlier. It’s learning to fly.”

As they entered another heated discussion, the bird began struggling towards the fence. It tripped over its own feet before it had gone far, collapsing onto its side. Floundering in the mud, it rolled onto its back and made its position even more desperate. It rocked from side to side, trying futilely to flip itself back over.

After watching it for a moment, I decided to help it back onto its feet. Poking it with a stick seemed rather rude, but my grandmother didn’t have any of the heavy garden gloves my mother kept lying around, and she seemed too engrossed in her debate with the neighbor for me to interrupt, so I had to make do with a branch to roll it into a more comfortable position. Eventually, the neighbor retreated slowly back into her house, muttering that she had medication to take. My grandmother returned to watering her lettuce.

The bird was lying on its stomach now, its tiny body rising and falling with its panting breaths. It didn’t look very comfortable prostrate in the dirt with its wings spread out to each side, but there wasn’t much else I could do. Despite this, I couldn’t get myself to leave as I had originally planned. I felt that since I had opted to help roll it over, I was responsible for its future.

Just as I was about to ask my grandmother for a cardboard box and blanket to place the bird in, my mother’s car pulled up in the driveway. A few minutes later, she appeared at the back door, holding a slice of cold pizza left over from dinner.

My grandmother turned off her hose. “How was your class?” Without waiting to hear the answer, she went on, “Becca and the boys ate dinner when they came over. Michael and Daniel are in the basement playing pool.”

My mom laughed and took a bite out of the pizza. “Yeah, I saw them. Daniel is winning again. My class was fine.”

I looked down at the bird just as its body began to spasm oddly. I got the impression that I was witnessing the beginning of the end.

“Grandma? It’s twitching.”

My grandmother tottered slowly over. The back door slammed shut behind my mother as she came over to join us. The three of us bent over the dying creature.

“Maybe it’s thirsty,” my mother suggested.

“We tried giving it water. It didn’t want to drink.”

“Maybe it couldn’t reach it. Spray it with the hose and see what happens.”

My grandmother looked none too happy about this proposal, but relented for want of a better suggestion and carefully dribbled a few drops of water onto the bird. Immediately, it began flapping its wings and thrashing violently.

“Try again.” My mother suggested. “It seemed to like that.”

This time, my grandmother held the water over the bird longer. We watched as it squirmed around, its movements growing slower and slower, until they finally stopped completely. My grandmother turned accusingly to my mother.

“You had me kill it!”

My mother looked insulted. “How was I supposed to know? If you sprayed Becca with water, she wouldn’t die!”

“No,” my grandmother replied, exasperated, “But she isn’t a bird.”

“If she were so close to death that spraying her with a hose was going to kill her, it would be better to put her out of her misery anyway.” My mother’s serious tone made this seem almost reasonable.

I looked down sadly at the still body lying in the puddle of water and mud at my feet. Even in death, the bird’s black eyes seemed to be watching me. It was accusing me of facilitating its demise, of allowing my grandmother to go along with my mother’s ludicrous plan. Listening to my mother and grandmother bicker, I felt like laughing at the idea of myself laying in a hospital bed as my grandmother sprayed me with a hose and sent me off into the next life.

Gradually, my mirth subsided, and all that was left was a sort of grief for the creature at my feet. Tomorrow morning my grandfather would scoop it up with a shovel and find a corner to bury it in, provided the neighborhood cat didn’t come by and dispose of it during the night. But for the moment it remained where it was, a miserable, soggy mass of feathers that lay huddled beneath the rosemary bush. It seemed to be a particularly ignoble fate for a bird that should have been soaring above the peaceful rows of homes as they sat basking in the dying sun.

I imagined children called groaning in from a hundred backyards to bathe and drift off to sleep between clean sheets. Two hundred barbeques whose coals glowed red as they cooled off, three hundred street lights that blotted out the stars as darkness fell. Four hundred back doors whose locks snapped shut against the night, five hundred bedroom lights glowed warmly against blinds until they were turned off. A thousand streets, ten thousand suburbs that fell away in a golden mass as the bird soared up towards the sky. Free, rather than trapped and killed in the dirt by the green snake that was my grandmother’s garden hose.

---

Author's note - So, I realize I should be updating Outcast, and I apologize to anyone who is reading this and is getting angry with me, but I really haven't had time to work on it. The only reason I'm posting this is because I happned to revisit for an English class (actually, I was too lazy to write a paper, and so decided to pull up something I had written before, but never turned in for a grade) and thought that since it was much improved, I would repost. Again, my apologies. I'll post as soon as I can.