I won’t lie to you. It was not how I saw myself going. The niggling details prick the ego. But it was swift, that much can be said.
It was a loathsome winter. Worms beneath the icy tundra, their pink fleshy heads frozen forever out of reach. Brain addled by starvation. Flesh wasted on the bone. Plumage desiccated of all piquancy. Surely I’d been cursed by the ghost of Tantalus.
But, for one day, one glorious day, the sun drunk on its own luminosity, the bitter claw of winter retracted. I was released! Unloosed! Liberated and delivered! The whole of life exuberant, for that day. I could hear the trees inhale, their buds push, their roots stretch. I could smell the perfume of rotted leaves, mold, and fungi. I could see the bark glow, sap quickening beneath the crust. Life! I feared it gone from the world forever, just as I did every year. And again, I rejoiced in my error!
I took to the skies. How could I resist the sweeping updrafts, the rush of bright air, the very ebb and flow of existence? I was transported, altered, and utterly unstable. I took risks; risks I’d scarcely take at summer’s end when limber, meaty, and ripe. I’d seen others do this before. Fools! I’d scoffed. And now I was the ninny, darting in and out of traffic, playing Duck-Duck-Goose with the sedans and SUVs. Had I heeded my education, it might have turned out different. I, top bird at Icarus University, author of award winning honors thesis, The Transmogrification of Solar Energies and Pathologies of the Psyche, should have recognized the signs. LaWSI1 was etched upon my beak. Patient presented, I might have noted, as euphoric, with transient vigour, manic flux, and delusions of grandeur.
So it was that I came to be acquainted with the voracious grill of a Ford F-150 as it soared down I-84 West at 72 miles per hour at 11:53 a.m. on Saturday, March 8, 2014. That first bite cleaved my left wing from its socket and sent me hurtling down the highway, feathers literally flying. I won’t belabor the point. Suffice it to say, the pain devoured me whole. But it was a busy day. I hadn’t even tumbled to a stop when a late model rusted-out Honda Civic sans hubcaps (oh! the ignominy!) rushed to greet my fate.
Now, I know what you’re wondering. And no, my life did not flash before my eyes. Robins don’t go in for those kinds of histrionics. If you didn’t get it when you were here, one more second certainly isn’t going to make a difference. The pavement, if you must know, was all that flashed; the white dash of lane lines signaling S-O-S as I performed my horizontal pirouette.
In any case, in these situations, one always hopes the human doesn’t see you at all. They can be so flighty as layers of socialization, instinct, and emotion squabble with raw ethics and in no time at all, they’ve convinced themselves that it’s better not to kill you. Fortunately for me, I only had time to pray Please don’t swerve! Please don’t swerve! Please don’t swerve! and they didn’t.
1 Late Winter Solar Inebriation, or LaWSI (pronounced lä‘sē), was first discovered by Thornbill Laureate Professor Woodline Thrush in her airparting research conducted on the I-95 corridor. Alas, she later succumbed to same.
Julie Jones is a fiction writer residing in Connecticut. She works full time as a law librarian and is writing her first mystery novel.
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