Yesterday, a flock of birds swooped down, slightly to the left and headed straight for the windshield of our car as we leisurely drove around wasting gas. They hit with a thwack, that is, some of them hit, and M, in the passenger seat, let forth with a one-syllable holler. Just an “Oh!” but he doesn’t usually do such things. I’m the hollerer.
That’s what I was preoccupied with, more so than the birds hitting: my silence. Some number of birds hit us from that parcel of maybe 25 and their bodies now lay on the road behind us. There was a little mental calculation involved. I turned down the radio and pulled over to the side of the road which required brain and motor skills, but still: no sound from me.
I’m a reactor, often an over-reactor. I let out gasps and grunts when I think we’re going to sideswipe a side-view mirror. When two cars ahead, someone slows down and involuntarily I see the start of a 15-car pile up and a news headline. I was hit by a car while bicycling six years ago. Sometimes when I am riding my bike, my head neatly helmeted, and I come to an intersection and carefully cross with the closest car 50 feet away and going 10 miles an hour by my calculation, I say out loud, “Bam.” That’s my vocal rendition of the sound of being hit. I sometimes even move the bike a little like I’ve been hit.
Still soundless, I turned the car around and headed back to the little bodies. There were four, at first glance, all dead, but one looked seriously mangled and gutty. Two teenaged-looking girls, one in a pink terrycloth psuedo-sweatsuit type thing, one in an identical baby blue outfit, were examining the birds, shivering from the cold or the blood, giving nervous little laughs. I heard them because as I pulled over I rolled down the window and let some of the outside noises into our now-silent car.
“Are they dead?” I asked, though I knew the answer. It was kind of polite conversation.
“Yah,” pink clad girl said.
“We hit them,” I said. “I mean they hit us. It was very strange.”
“Yah, we saw it,” Pink said. “We saw it from the window and came down.” They both smiled and nodded, their high ponytails bobbing, and I felt forgiven.
There were only three dead birds. The one I thought was the fourth, the seriously mangled, bloody, gutty one was actually a bunch of colored wires, red and grey. It was in the shape of a little dead bird body.