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.