When the twisted blue feathers, sunken red breast, and closed over black marble of an eye peered through the lush green leaves at me, breaking my aloofness, a chilling sensation arose in a wistful kind of breeze; coupled with a small, faint, uncontrollable tremor of gooseflesh.
I firstly came to wonder if, in fact, I’d feel the same awkward sadness for a human. Within the very shallow and illusory surface of antecedent conscious thought, it comes to me that it would not be so, and I know that is taboo, wanton; a criminal thought even.
Over the course of a few protracted days, I sat in contemplation, smoking in front of my door without any kind of haste, yet attempting to quickly pass time. I considered burying the body: carrying it to the heap of waste at the bottom of the cracked and crooked-tooth-like stairs at the end of the yard, at least. Yet, something has prevented me from doing so.
It's not the shovel, nor the trowel. Because both are within reach. Their splintering and aged handles leaning against the equally sun-worn and splintered fence. It isn’t indolence persay. Nor lethargy specifically.
I can’t be sure how it had come to be. Had it fallen from the ether? What audible sound had it made when its small body took its place; falling to the lively summertime blades of plush grass with an elegantly triumphant thud? Had it fumbled gracelessly through the air attempting to remember how to fly; as I sometimes flail about momentarily attempting to remember to breathe or swallow? Of what decibel is the breath of the robin?
Perhaps the small thrush had not fallen at all. Perhaps it’s stillness was dragged to me by one of the many feral cats who make their paths through my garden. Their offering to me for safe and unbroken passage. Their frivolous apology for the deafness cast over them in regards to the clicking of my tongue, and mock rodent sounds of my lips. More feasibly, their impenitent move to present to me the spectacle of my own need.
This, their wasted feast. Their plaything. The bounty of their facility. Their very own ancient spectacle. Their practice of effortless inquisition. This body. They hunt simply, for the maintenance of their own capriciousness. Mere boredom. With full bellies, they wake from quiescence to exercise instinctual malice in the name of primal sadism.
Even the standard house cat has no grounds for understanding why they must bite and kick that which encroaches upon their bellies. Only the limitless mysticism that automates their ritual.
I sat with the body to envisage the spirit of everything and commenced to recognize that a comparison may be found in my own instinct of mystery to feel a sort of malefic playfulness when that which encroaches upon my own vulnerabilities approaches. A subsequent preoccupation with trepidation and premonitions of turpitude. My vacillation is a plummeting bird. My proclivities are a spirited cat. In either case, substantiation is the lone desideratum.
That is why the body is there, in amenable performance; a feathery and deflating bag of tiny bones sinking into earthen acquiescence. And I am here, in observance, sitting in the wake of it. Somewhere between melancholic and euthymic. Among a dandelion shrine to the boundless need which I possess.