Inside Where You Belong

The first bird to fall didn’t make news. It dropped from the sky above the garage while my brother was checking the Doberman’s gums for signs of the rabbit that had gone missing from the hutch. The bird bounced off the roof and hit the driveway head-first. I was standing on the woodpile our dad had stacked last spring. It was covered with an orange tarp that I pretended was fire and climbed on periodically to test my courage. I jumped down and crossed the yard and looked at the bird up close. It lay on its side, gray wing twitching, breast the color of a dull penny. Its beak was chipped and there was a wet spot on the tar beneath its head.

“Hey, Doug!” Doug was hitting the Doberman’s muzzle with a stick. “Come look.”

He gave the dog a last smack and walked over to where I was standing. “Did it shit on you? It’s good luck if it did.”

He got a shovel from the garage and scooped up the bird. It opened and closed its broken beak and Doug shoved me with his elbow. “Stand back.”

“What do you think happened to it?” I said.

“What difference does it make?” Doug carried the shovel to the back yard and flung the bird into the woods. It landed on a heap of twigs where it stayed until the Doberman found it.

Next: a pair of nuthatches in the community pool that had been closed for winter. The birds landed on the cover where recent winds had strewn pine needles and a few twigs. There were puddles on the cover too, and at first it looked like the birds were just bathing. I saw them on my way to school, and on the way home they were still there, beating their wings against the water. I climbed the steps and walked onto the diving board to get a better look. I couldn’t tell from their cheeping whether they were frightened or thought I might help. Either way, they were too far out.

In the days that followed, there were more birds than usual on the sidewalks and streets. Not just the occasional pigeon or jay, but cardinals and swifts, birds you hardly ever saw on the ground. Some had been hit and were flattened on the road with just a few feathers lifting when a car rushed by. Others turned in stunned circles or sat on the curb. On the way to school, I kept my hands in my pockets and watched where I stepped. The birds were all damaged in one way or another: splintered beaks or twisted wings, a skinny leg that buckled when it tried to move. On the playground, a chickadee lay on its side beneath the slide. I kicked some sand on it, then turned it upright with a stick.

The TV stations found out about the birds and parked their vans on our streets. They interviewed neighbors and pointed cameras at the ground. On the nightly news, I saw a sparrow with its foot hooked on the bar of a sewer grate, the camera so close you could count the feathers. Our town had the most cases but it was happening in other places, too. Some experts thought the birds had suffered aneurysms or heart attacks and others blamed cell-phone towers. Prophets warned of an avian flu that could scramble the human nervous system. Cable news showed a dead swan on a lab table, and standing over it, a man wearing scrubs, a scientist or veterinarian. The scene looked washed out and sad, like an old black and white TV show: the white swan in the white room, the pale man in his gray outfit. A few things could happen, he said. The sky could take them back or they might adapt to living on the ground. They could die out. The swan’s huge wings and long beak looked ancient, like a pterodactyl’s. Nothing lasts forever, the scientist-vet said.

On afternoons and weekends, I stayed in my room and played video games. I tracked storms and built bunkers and fought off zombies in my Ninja skin. I traded and fought. I ruled kingdoms and led armies, and sometimes, I became the bad guy, just for fun. I jumped from buildings without getting hurt and learned to fly and hung out in the air over cities I’d never seen. There was nowhere I couldn’t go. I built a town from the ground up, and when my villagers died of dysentery, I logged off.

Outside, the sky was empty, and I no longer woke to the chickadee song coming from the branches by my window. Birds’ feet were no good for climbing but some of them wouldn’t give up on the trees. They nested in roots, easy prey for coyotes. Some tried to walk and wove down the street like drunks, holding up traffic. People kept their distance as best they could but there were too many birds and some were mean. The nicer ones chirped from the underbrush, full grown birds who on another day might have been mistaken for chicks who had fallen from a nest.

Three weeks after the robin in the driveway, a whole flock of birds fell into our backyard. Six geese. Eight, if you count the ones that landed at the neighbors’. I was taking a bath when something outside grazed the window, a flap of black like a magician’s cape. I heard Dad shouting so I jumped out of the tub, wrapped a towel around my waist, and went out to see.

Dad’s hands were on his head and Doug was standing over a fallen goose, cradling an elbow with his other hand.

“Motherfucker just about took my arm off!” Doug kicked the goose, and the goose raised its head and squawked.

Dad and Doug had been ripping up root vegetables from the garden. There was a trowel on the lawn and a little heap of radishes by the fence. Dad ran his hand over his beard and left a smear of dirt on his cheek. “No warning or nothing,” he said. “Bam! Right out of the blue.”

A goose with a broken neck lay on the patio and several others were scattered on the lawn. One was struggling to stand. Another had fallen in the woods not far from where Doug had tossed the robin. It rustled the leaves.

“They can’t fly anymore,” I said.

“No shit, Sherlock,” Doug said.

It was mid-October and the air had a wintery bite. I had begun to shiver and my skin had little bumps from the cold. I wrapped the towel tighter around my waist and crossed my arms. The bird nearest me raised a wing and stared at me with its dark pupil.

“Get inside,” Dad said.

“Maybe it’s a force field,” I said. “Maybe something happened when we switched to 5G.”

“You’re a moron,” Doug said.

“Enough,” Dad said. “Inside, before you freeze.”

I watched from behind the sliding door as Doug got the spade from the garage.  The geese were bulkier than the robin and hissed when he got near, so Dad said forget it and Doug left them alone. The ones that could still move lay on their sides and kicked the air like newborns. I went into the bathroom, drained the tub, and got into bed in my underwear. I flopped from side to side but couldn’t get comfortable. Just after dawn, I went downstairs and poured myself a glass of water in the kitchen. Outside, the birds lay motionless in the gray morning light, each one exactly where it had fallen the day before. The Doberman was pacing by the sliding glass door, eyeing them. He whined to go out and I let him.

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Kate Crosby’s stories have appeared in Pleiades, The Journal, The Bellingham Review, Bartleby Snopes, Beecher’s Magazine and others. Her flash fiction received nomination for a Pushcart Prize and Queens Ferry Best Small Fictions. She earned an MA from the Bread Loaf School of English and an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. She lives in Salem, MA and teaches high school English.