Found Bird

It began by accident. She was moving down the sidewalk and it fell headlong onto the cement walkway at her feet. A sparrow; soft and plump, radiating the warmth of life just extinguished. She leaned over and peered at its small body. No one else seemed to notice. When her back began to ache she became aware that she had been stooped over the small dead bird for some time. She stood up and determined to go, but minutes later she was still standing there. She stared down at the sidewalk; a few red ants strolled by. Then she decided. She picked up a small piece of cardboard and gently prodded the sparrow onto it and took it home to her cramped Brooklyn apartment. She laid the small corpse onto a sheet of white paper and photographed its lifeless body; first on its side, then on its stomach, then on its back. Satisfied, she put it into a Ziploc sandwich bag and placed it on the mantelpiece.

The next day she took the bird out of the bag, put it on the white sheet of paper and photographed it again. The sparrow seemed to have grown thinner overnight, but it was still limp and soft. When she finished, she returned it to its place on the mantelpiece. Within days, the sandwich bag exuded a sickly sweet odor that overtook the apartment. The bird looked sticky—a yellow ooze puddled at the bottom of the bag. When she opened it, the odor smacked her in the face. She shook the bird out onto the paper and watched a yellow stain spread onto the white sheet forming a halo around its thinning body. She leaned in with the camera. When finished, she rebagged its leaking body and placed it on the window sill. She opened the window a crack. It was several weeks before the odor fully dissipated.

Eventually the sparrow dried out; its body rail-thin and odorless. She could take its fragile form out of the bag and place it in the palm of her hand. She had seen an art exhibition years before by a French woman, hundreds of dried-out birds lying inside a glass vitrine. The artist had knit a little dress for each one. She thought about making an outfit for the sparrow. In the end, she put the naked bird back into the bag and returned it to the mantel.

Her ex-boyfriend's mother was a birder; she spent countless hours with binoculars watching birds eating, drinking, flying—doing what living birds do. His mother had a poster of Common Feeder Birds of Eastern North America attached to her refrigerator with big colorful magnets. The birds had names like Eastern Towhee, Dark-eyed Junco and Tufted Titmouse. She herself could not identify her birds by species; there was the yellow one, the brown one, the dark brown one with long legs. To her, anything that wasn't a pigeon was probably a sparrow.

Sandwich bags began to accumulate on the mantelpiece. She tried not to think too hard about the meaning of all the little desiccated bodies in her apartment, but it reminded her of something. At first, she watched intensely, as if she believed that each bird might suddenly come to life and fly around in the apartment; she would open the window and watch it take flight. That moment she longed to observe seemed so intangible, so fragile as to be nearly reversible. Then, after a time, she took pleasure in watching the certainty of life recede; warmth and roundness turning to dryness and stiffness.

In her teens, she spent a lot of time visiting sick relatives, sometimes very distant ill relatives or elderly family friends. She would stare at those poor puzzled people who would accept this intrusion into their few remaining months or days. She was dimly aware of hoping to see something in particular. But she never saw it. Her father died when she was nine. She understood what this meant in her nine-year-old mind, and that understanding had formed a chrysalis inside that had failed to mature with the rest of her. She had not been allowed to attend his funeral. Her two younger siblings were sent to a friend's home, she to another's.

One afternoon, walking far uptown on 116th street near a small neighborhood park, she came across a new arrival on the sidewalk, its wings spread as though still in flight. That was before she began to carry Ziploc bags with her everywhere, like the dog walkers; that would come later. She spotted a bodega across Second Avenue and the man inside kindly gave her a sandwich bag even though she didn't buy anything. She found a stick to push the bird inside the bag and unintentionally flipped it onto its back. Its underbelly was roiling with maggots. She recoiled. She felt a special revulsion for shiny invertebrate things; earthworms emerging from the ground, glistening wet after a hard rain, or slugs leaving a phlegm-like trail on the ground as they passed by.

A friend had given her a copy of a magazine article on forensic science. He thought it would tickle her morbid fancy. The article explained the way in which the close study of maggots could be used to determine the time of a subject's death. It was full of facts. The height and weight of the maggots would divulge how long they had been feeding. The type of maggot found could reveal that a body had been moved from one location to another. In the study, the researchers had left a set of bodies strewn around a remote property to enable ongoing observation.

The maggots on the underbelly of the bird were small, shimmering. Day-old larvae are only 2mm in length and are almost transparent. This bird had been lying on the sidewalk undisturbed by passersby for an entire day. She didn't know what would happen if she sealed the bird, along with the maggots into the plastic bag. Could the maggots still breathe in there? Would they live long enough to gestate into flies? Would the bag, suddenly vibrating from within, filled with a swarm of flies desperate to escape into the open air, slowly inch its way off the mantel and come crashing to the floor? For the first time since she'd begun, she abandoned a find and walked away.

Her apartment was a five-floor walk-up. Uncharacteristically, the stairs wound their way up the exterior of the building, creating walkways in front of each apartment. She liked to think of this walkway, barely wide enough for two people to stand side by side, as her balcony. On warm days she occasionally put a chair out and watched the ebb and flow of the expressway; the industrial river five floors below. She could hear the expressway in every room of the apartment, it had its own special cadence, loud but slow in the morning, lighter and brisker in mid-day, rising again in late afternoon.

It was a skin-prickling, humid day. She sat in her bedroom listening to the expressway, when she became conscious of a quiet but distinct humming, a sound that laid itself softly on top of the highway sound. Her window was covered with a cheap wooden shade; a set of tiny rounded wooden slats strung together with a crude piece of string. It let in a lot of light and, at night when the courtyard lights were on, it created delicate line drawings on her ceiling. The window was closed. The shade was swaying gently in and out, as if to the count of her own breath. The air was thick and still, there was no breeze, no movement except by the window. She got up and took a few steps toward it. The hum became more audible. Sometimes in summer a bee or a wasp would make its way inside and get caught between the pane and the shade searching for the way out. She leaned forward and grabbed the thick string that raised the shade; then pulled. A black mass of frenzy: hundreds, thousands maybe, of the smallest flies she had ever seen. She didn't think she had seen baby flies before. Like pigeons, they always seemed to have matured elsewhere.

To spray them would be to fumigate herself. She grabbed a magazine, rolled it up and began swatting. The immature flies were too inexperienced and slow to outwit her. After twenty minutes there were small black carcasses covering the window sill, the radiator, and much of the floor beneath the window. Some were still wriggling. She began to sweep them up. Suddenly it occurred to her to look inside her small workroom. It also had a window with a wooden shade and it faced out onto the same courtyard.

As soon as she crossed the threshold she sensed them in there. She went back for the magazine and began again; sweat seeped out of her pores, down her face, out from under her armpits, along her sides. The soles of her bare feet left wet marks on the floor. She brushed a small clump of squirming flies off the sill. She brought the broom in from the bedroom and swept a legion of tiny winged babies into the trash, then sat down on the floor depleted.

The day before, she had passed a neighbor coming up the steps and he remarked how terribly it smelled out there. On the ground floor, near the entrance to the building, was a small alley leading to the interior courtyard. Four garbage dumpsters sat there. They were overflowing. In the stifling heat, she imagined that the uncollected trash was creating the stench, but she should have recognized that smell. Years before, an old Jewish man in Williamsburg called the police at night complaining that someone in the neighborhood was burning dead bodies. He was dismissed as a crackpot, but he persisted. He had been in a concentration camp as a young man and, while fifty-odd years had gone by, he knew that smell could only mean one thing; the police had better have a look. The charred bodies turned up in a dumpster two blocks from his apartment.

The next day, in the stairwell, she overhead one of the tenants being told that the man in the apartment directly above her had died. He had been dead on the floorboards above her head for five days and no one had noticed his absence.

Maggots travel in "maggot masses." They like company. They have something on their bodies called a posterior spiracle that allows them to breathe while eating twenty-four hours a day. A maggot mass can heat a corpse up to 127 degrees Fahrenheit. It can get so hot that even the maggots need to take a break on the sidelines just to cool down. Warm temperatures speed decay and make the maggots' work easier. The warmer it is, the faster they grow. It must have been 90 degrees that entire week.

There was no smell in her apartment. Outside, the stench had been vivid, but lying in bed, with his body on the floor directly above hers, she hadn't sensed him.

A fly can lay blow-fly eggs twenty-five to a hundred at a time. In warm weather, maggots can eat sixty percent of a human corpse in less than a week. Based on the number of tiny migrants that had gathered by her windows, there couldn't have been much left of the man upstairs when the police arrived. A good portion of his material remains had found their way into her apartment. A second coming. And she; she had not understood and, unwittingly, she killed him.

This short story first appeared in Podium, an online literary magazine of the Unterberg Poetry Center at New York's 92nd Street Y, 2007.