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Bird of Prey

His wife and child were with him; they had seen it too. His wife was in the passenger seat beside him, her knees mashed against the dashboard, her long legs cramped. Their lanky grown boy was stretched out on the back seat. They were traveling on a four-lane highway in Belgium. In Europe cars move fast and they were going 160 kilometers an hour. He first saw it in the corner of his eye; something in the air moving toward the center of his pupil.

He stood up to demonstrate. Jutting both arms out directly to his sides, he tilted his body to the right and like a small child playing kamikaze, he prepared to dive bomb. He imagined that somewhere off to the right side of the road the bird had set its sights on a small field mouse or some other warm-blooded thing. It had come into his peripheral vision from the left.

He wondered — once the decision to dive had been made, was it irrevocable? The bird was not moving its wings at all. It was gliding in a graceful downward arc.

He had seen birds from time to time flying directly at his windshield; then they would suddenly drop to the road and vanish. The car passed him on the right. It had come up behind him out of Nowhere — one second in the rearview mirror and then just ahead of him. In that moment the bird and the car ahead occupied the same space. There was an explosion.

They all startled at the impact of the bird hitting the side window of the car. The car shuddered and instantaneously, all of the bird’s feathers were released from its flesh. He didn’t know if there was a biological mechanism that made this happen or if the flesh and blood and bones of the bird had been pulverized on impact and nothing remained to hold the feathers in place. Like a pyrotechnic display on the Fourth of July, the feathers blew out from the center of the detonation into the air in large fanciful circles answering to the calls of wind and gravity as their car pushed through the soft pulsing cloud.

It might have been a giant dandelion after a gust of wind but the feathers would not take root and make new birds. The three of them watched the feathers dancing in the air behind them. They never even slowed down.

Published in EYES WIDE SHUT, 2011

eyes wide shut, 2010
from the series: found birds, 2000 - the present