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Betrayals
By: Sadie Marks
It was Vermont during the sloping, blistering end of summer– muggy and treacherous– and our day was lagging with monotony until we found the baby birds struggling in the puddle at the end of the dock. They were already half-dead, their feathers glistening cerulean and silver as they thrashed about in the shallow water. Henry and I crouched next to the puddle and shouted for everyone to come see– the aunts and uncles and the rest of our cousins– and we all crowded around to ogle the spectacle of a slow, torturous drowning. Everyone watched, mouths agape, as they warbled, their waterlogged wings failing to keep them afloat. We were all frozen until my father, tall and already sunburned, his brow furrowed in concern, used a cup to scoop them onto dry land, his large hands steady as the birds chirped miserably. Their immediate suffering was relieved and the crisis, for now, averted; everyone else shook it off and moved on.
But not Henry and I. We were already hooked– the stagnance of summer disrupted, our boredom alleviated, and our interest piqued. The birds were delightfully helpless and we thought ourselves heroes for finding them first, and so we laid on our stomachs on the hot concrete beside them, the lake water plastering our hair against our foreheads. We named them and adored them and at first watching them was captivating, but as they trembled and twitched frantically against the pavement, it got harder to believe in their survival.
We’d started out as wild eight-year-old optimists, excitable and naive and so unfamiliar with death, but as the birds grew weaker, our resolve began to dip. Their fate was out of our control; we began to understand that to hope for them was utterly fruitless, and our devastation left us crying beneath the hot August sun.
My dad understood this, too. My father is the gentlest man I know. He falls asleep on the sofa, head falling back against the pillows as he snores. He would use blueberries to make smiley faces in our breakfast cereal when we were small. He cries at every film we watch no matter the genre; he’s moved by the simple act of creation. He likes to take walks in the evening because of the way the sunset filters through the trees. He’s never been in a fight, he says, and I’ve never heard him raise his voice. My father is the gentlest man I know; this is why he killed our birds.
Henry and I knew they’d been dying already. They were beyond the breaking point before we’d even discovered them, yet we’d grown attached and cherished their tiny wings and the pathetic way they tried to move about. We had ignored our mothers when they told us to leave the birds alone; now we had to suffer the consequence of loving something we couldn’t quite save. We sobbed at their suffering, but we couldn’t look away, united in our stubborn refusal to let them go.
Something had to be done– it was cruel to let them suffer– but no one wanted to commit to putting them out of their misery, not any of the older cousins and certainly not Henry or I. We were horrified by the very thought of them succumbing to death naturally, let alone the suggestion of a mercy kill.
No one knew what to do. Henry and I were distraught; the day was thrown off-kilter; something had to change, but no one could fathom it, except for my dad.
In all the fray, after our mothers had finally managed to coax us away and distract us from our birds and our tears, my father had taken them elsewhere in secret– to a secluded patch of beach he thought we couldn’t see from the dock, a hiding place to end their agony and ours along with it. But we ruined it. Henry was the first to see him, turning and letting out a panicked shout. I whirled around at his yell and was faced with the sight of my dad, standing with a rock hoisted over his head, our birds– tiny and innocent, quivering in the fractured sunlight– at his feet. Our eyes met right as he brought the stone down upon them with a great, sickening crack , stifling their pitiful cries.