remembered

The baby bird lay, dead, in the middle of the asphalt driveway. It had fallen from its nest. He looked at the bird for a moment, studied it, watching the ants crawl across its body, then hustled the groceries into the house, left them on the snack bar, and went back outside, scooped up the bird with a piece of cardboard and deposited it beneath the shrubs near the garbage cans. It wasn’t much of a burial, but it was better, and he was reminded of the tiny bird he’d found, like this one, but alive, 25 years or so ago, when he lived in Detroit. That one was a baby starling, a bird almost as common as the ubiquitous pigeons, and he’d carefully taken it inside and they’d fed its yawning mouth with a medicine dropper for a day until someone’d come from animal control. He’d assured the children that the animal control officer would find it a home, but he knew better. He wondered, now, though, for a moment, if, indeed, the bird had lived to fly, at least once. He hoped so. Then, he went inside and put away the groceries.