By Kate Levin
When we arrive at daycare, I step out of the car and close my door gently, hoping not to startle my son awake. As I open the back door to retrieve him from his car seat, I see the bird.
I gasp, but only its stillness is gruesome. Otherwise, it’s perfect—round, brown, downy, wedged between leather and metal, tucked into the space where the door opens and closes. A baby; a sparrow, I think. When I was young, we had a Christmas ornament just like it.
There is my sleeping son, and there is the dead bird.
When he was younger, just born, fear overtook me in waves. I could lose him at any time. I could lose him because I had him, and anything I had, I could lose. The logic was airtight, suffocating.
But then I would look at him, breath muscle bones, humming in motion; a system insisting on itself. Who was I to doubt it?
A clean napkin is the best I can do for a shroud. I pluck the sparrow from the backseat, amazed by its lightness and lack of resistance. A few feet away, a thick wall of green shrubbery separates us from the daycare’s yard. No one is watching. I reach in and give the bird to the branches. Through the windshield I can see my son, eyes still closed. Beneath a buckled harness, his chest rises and falls, rises and falls, rises and falls.
Kate Levin‘s essays have appeared in The New York Times; The Boston Globe; The Paris Review Daily; Brain, Child; and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles and teaches writing at the University of Southern California.
Photo “nick snoozing in his booster seat” provided by Sean Dreilinger, via Flickr.com creative commons license.
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