The Leaf Bird

        “Is it dead?” she asks, lying against my back with her ankles crossed, her head on her elbow looking towards the foot of the bed. I’m only barely awake. I half open my eyes and stare down at my feet in fear that whatever she’s talking about may not only be alive, but possessed with the munchies for my big toe. Beyond the old electric heater with the perpetual habit of melting things, or smelling like it, and beyond the double bay windows, it is snowing. The moon makes it surprisingly bright outside, like a candle above a layer of whipped cream. “Is it dead?” she asks again, and I start to panic.

        “What?” I ask, pulling up my feet and wishing I’d worn socks to bed, “Where?” I’ve kicked the blanket into a pile in front of the heater sometime in the night, and there are plenty of shadows for it to hide. I push myself up on my elbow, partially to look for whatever is presumably threatening my toe fuzzy collection, and partially to alleviate a sudden fear that the burning smell emitting from the heater really is my comforter.

        “There,” she says, pointing to the window. “Out there.” My glasses are on the nightstand. I squint at the blur where her finger is pointing, thinking of the family of squirrels that eat from our bird feeder near the rosebush. I wonder how they could have gotten in, and what they could possibly want with my toes. I’m still not quite awake yet. At first all I see is a snow-covered tree limb that meets in ice just under the upstairs balcony, and ends along the top seal of our window, but after a moment I see what Casey is pointing at. There is a lump of snow midway up the branch, an egg shaped white bulge with feet and feathers puffed up like popcorn. Even given the speed of the snowfall, it is obvious that the bird has not moved for some time. The undisturbed layer of powder that curves gracefully over his body testifies at least an hour.

        “Is it frozen?” Casey asks again. “Why would it be like that? Did it freeze to death?” Four days ago students on the local campus were wearing shorts, and the hazard of colliding with a Frisbee had been very real. Now the flowers that bloomed by accident in the unseasonable warmth, their violet eyes opening a part-season too early, have been drowned by Idaho’s own special recipe for yellow street slushies. The flowers have been fooled; their bodies will decompose by the time the rains come to take the snow with it on the journey to irrigate California. Why not the birds, too?

        “No,” I say at last, “I think that’s how they sleep. They pull their heads down and puff up their feathers to keep warm.” I lay my head back down on the pillow, but I don’t close my eyes. Casey is silent for a moment. I must have mumbled my words, because she leans over me, her hair spilling down like a curtain in the dark.

        “Are you talking in your sleep?” she asks. It’s a fair question. I’ve been known to do weird things in my sleep. Two nights before I sat bolt upright and wearily eyed the ground by the bed as if watching some creature make its way by. After a moment I turned to Casey and gently touched her shoulder with the tips of my fingers, my eyes dark and foreboding with their un-laughing intensity.

        “I think,” I said in an utterly serious tone, “that I really pissed off the bookworm.” Casey now has every right to ask me if I’m asleep. I, of course, am indignant.

        “No,” I snap, and turn my head to glare at her. “I just don’t think it’s dead.” My brain is foggy. In a way, some part of me is still trying to figure out where the squirrels went, and if I should put on socks to keep them from my toes. Casey lies down beside me again, but I can feel her eyes still, as clearly as I can feel her breath on the back of my neck.

        “Are you sure?” she asks at last, watching the lump of snow as more flakes slowly bury it.

        “No,” I mumble as I close my eyes, and truly hope that by morning the bird is gone.

__________

        The sky is clean except a white smear from the remains of a passing airliner heading east toward New York, and that’s been caught by the wind and stretched like cotton candy into a nearly transparent film on the otherwise cold blue backdrop. The sun is shinning, but there is a chill in the grip of the wind, the sky a vacuum without the clouds, and it draws out the heat even through our coats as Troy passes me the cold length of the twenty-two.

        “How long has it been since you shot one?” he asks as I take the gun and cradle its stock under my arm, the base of the wooden grip resting on the bone of my forearm as I hook my finger through one of the loops at my waist.

        “It’s been a while,” I say. “Probably a year or two at the least.” We’ve been out most of the day, Troy and I and Casey, hiking on a trail that runs by three dependent waterfalls, the water of one feeding the others. The sun has settled a quarter inch off the horizon, and God is already pressing the dim key. We’ve found a large gravel pile, a pit open to the sun during the day where most of the snow has melted, with a mountainous collection of black, glassy pebbles on one side that we can set the targets against. I lay the rifle down on the jacket I’ve thrown out, and get two pumpkins, a full water jug, and a couple empty soda cans from the bed of the truck. There are two other rifle cases there, these for hunting. The 7mm can travel the full length of a deer – into the chest, through the lungs and into the liver -- as easily as it can shoot through a car. The shock from the impact of the bullet is as likely to kill you as the wound. Troy steps around me as I carry the water and lifts both cases by the black vinyl of the handles, one in each hand. He waits until I’ve set the targets and then brushes some rocks on the ground out of the way with the toe of his shoe.

        “This is the firing line,” he says with a jab of his finger at the mark, his eyes flicking over me and back to Casey. It‘s clear whom the instructions are for. These are things I’m already supposed to know. “No one can cross if someone has a loaded gun.” Casey has never fired a gun before, never even touched one. We’re doing this for her. He holds a rifle up, the 7mm, with a black metal nose, a tiny pockmark on the end to aim with. “When carrying the weapon, keep the barrel pointed at the ground, and don’t put your finger on the trigger until you’re prepared to fire.”

        I rub my arms in the cold, since my jacket is to be used as a sitting cushion, and Casey puts her arm in mine.

        “Do I have to do this?” she asks, and I look at her.

        “Of course not,” I say. She looks uncertain, her brown hair pulled back into two pigtails, her head several inches shorter than the edge of my jaw. “Do you want to?” She hesitates, and then nods.

        “I want to,” she says, looking up at me. And then, “Are they loud?”

        I smile and run my hand up her back, ending at her shoulder.

        “Why don’t you try the small one, and then you can decide on the bigger guns,” I say. “And Troy has ear plugs.”

        I don’t want to press her, but I want her to fire the gun. It’s something of mine, an experience I own in which she can share. She takes the .22 and sits on my jacket, balances the gun on her knee and shifts to find purchase on the rock under her. She lines up the barrel and pulls the trigger. The gun barks and Casey makes a noise.

        “It’s so loud,” she says with a nervous laugh, and looks over her shoulder at me. The targets are unmoved. A plum of dirt is rising a few feet ahead of a Dr. Pepper can full of water.

        “Try to keep both eyes open when you aim,” I suggest. We haven’t checked to see what’s on the other side of the rock pile in case she were to miss entirely. She looks over her shoulder again so that I can see the outline of her face, her lips, her delicate chin, her small hands still on the barrel guard in a long sleeved shirt that reaches over her wrist to the flesh of her palm.

        “How do I aim?” she asks, and I realize we’ve missed a few things. We explain about lining the thin post at the tip of the barrel between the split legs of the site, and she hits a can.

        When she pulls the trigger the final time, her body jerks when the action slips forward and finds no cartridge. She thrusts the gun to Troy as soon as she stands, extended like a dead fish with both hands gripping the stock on either side like a sandwich, the barrel dangling downward, and brushes off her bottom. Her hands are shaking when I touch her.

        “It was loud,” she whispers, and stands by the truck with her arms folded.

        When my turn comes, Troy sets the .22 aside, instead unlatches one of the other cases and draws out his hunting rifle. Carefully, he shows me how to load a shell, brass longer than the crease running across my palm that a gypsy once told me was my lifeline, and then passes me three more to load myself. Aside from a shotgun I’d shot when I was twelve, it is the largest gun I’ve ever fired. The bullets loaded, I raise the gun to my shoulder, pressing it firmly in lest the kick leave a dark bruise where the blood runs under the skin as it did when I was twelve, and hesitate. The first star has become visible, and the targets are difficult to see.

        “Should we check behind the pile?” I ask, gun still aimed, the warm wood of the stock just right of my heart. “It won’t shoot through, will it?”

        “It’s ok,” Troy says. “It won’t.”

        I’d been shooting once as a child at a rock cove similar to this one. It wasn’t until after our shots were fired that we found the shattered beehive amongst the debris, as bullet riddled as our targets. In even breaths, I level the gun at one of the pumpkins and squeeze the trigger. Pain radiates through my shoulder as the roar of the gun echoes off the mountains in the distance. Even prepared as I had been, the shock still catches me by surprise. There will be a bruise. I will bleed. What is more, the pumpkin doesn’t even move. I fire twice more. The third. There is no flinch in the pumpkin. I wheel my arm in a circle as I stand up, and rub my shoulder.

        “It’s too dark to shoot anymore, I think,” Troy says as way of my excuse. “Too dark to see anything.” I slip on my coat as he and Casey stoop to gather the spent cartridges from the pit floor, picking up the brass amongst the rubble. I walk past the firing line to gather the targets, climb, my feet slipping as my shoes dig into the gravel and are covered by a bout of mini-slides, to the top of the pile. I slip, my palm rolls on the glassy rocks, punctures a well for blood to fertilize the crease, and I peer down on the other side. There is nothing save a patch of snow where it’s shielded from the sun by the forest trees and the rocks, a set of human prints, deer tracks in some frozen mud. Only human and deer. No one is here now that hasn’t run away. I turn and make my way back down, careful of the abrasion on my hand, and look at my pumpkin. There are four perfect holes on one side where the bullets have punctured through like the rock through the skin of my hand, the other side a messy soup of grey and orange matter, and splintered seeds. The exit has vaporized the backside of the pumpkin, but it can’t be seen from the outside. It hasn’t even moved. Not even a flinch.

        I’m turning an empty 7mm in my hand when I return and find Casey by the truck.

        “Look,” she says, and opens her fist to show me a small pile of bullet shells, some .22s and a shotgun casing from someone before us.

        “You can keep them,” Troy says as he loads the truck with the ammunition, the guns, the aluminum remains of the soda cans. “They’re pretty cheap.” I look at Casey. Her face is gray in the light, her lips pressed together. Her eyes shift too quickly when she looks at me.

        “Are you alright?” I whisper, and she nods too sharply, and curls her lower lip under her teeth. I know that she’s feeling stressed, scared. Something here has brought back bad feelings. She starts slightly when I touch her shoulder in a way the pumpkin didn’t, side steps unconsciously, then hesitates and steps back into me.

        “Did you see me shoot the hunting rifle?” I ask, and she nods again, slipping her hand into my coat pocket and resting her head against my chest. I put my arm around her.

        “It was loud,” she says, and I hug her as tight as I dare.
_________

        Two days later I wake just as the sky starts to lighten, before the sun has even appeared from under the tundra covering the wheat fields east of town. It is just before dawn. Beneath a cool layer of frosting, muted gray in the half-light of morning, a motionless feathered snowball greets me from its perch as unable to move as a leaf that has grown naturally and forgotten to fall at the onset of the winter. I sit up and put my bare legs on the floor, my heals on the tight knit of the native carpet, my toes over the center lip and buried in the soft off-white fibers of the throw-rug we’ve laid to cover the discoloring. It makes a centerline through the room. Casey rolls over on her side of the bed, and I fold the blanket up against the vulnerable part beneath her chin, tucking her in as I quietly rise, up the thermostat, and slip a long-sleeved shirt over the dark mass of my morning hair. On the floor photographs are scattered where we left them the night before, images of Casey’s family, her father with a goatee and no shirt, his potbelly full and luminescent in the summer sun as he smiles into the camera, his daughter in a sun dress on her knees playing in the dirt at his feet. Most of the photographs are years old. The dangerous ones are in a cardboard package, the lid folded over the delicate edge of each picture, an extension of the flap fitting into the slit cut on the bottom half. There are some memories Casey doesn't want to remember. An apparently innocent two-story tree house with green paint peeling from the outside walls; Casey as a little girl in a swimsuit, her feet buried in the sand, the choppy water of Lake Ontario lapping in on the beach in the background. The tree house locked from the inside. Seemingly odd things to want to forget.

        I take the red blanket from the couch and wrap myself as I fold my legs and sit on the floor beside the pictures, and the twelve-dollar phone we bought at Wal-Mart. I’m waiting for a phone call. I tuck the blanket under my ankles with special fondness. It was under this blanket that Casey and I first kissed, when it was brand new and bright and left small red fuzzies on every piece of clothing we owned. As Casey sleeps, I repeat my speech over again in my head, mouthing each word as I’ll say it into the phone in just a few moments, the plans I’ve thought of, my ideas. It will be my first major assignment, the first time I’ve written for a company whose name people will remember, will recognize over the local papers that have previously shown interest. Hemmingway was a fast-footed reporter at the Toronto Star by the age of twenty, an elitist imported from France in a world I’ve always longed for in partial awe, Morley Callaghan the same. At my age, Fitzgerald had been mistakenly painting himself as the drunken abandon of high society in just a few years’ time. I need the man who will be calling to nod his head as I speak, to agree with me, to say, “All right, send me a thousand words then.” I long for it in the very marrow of my bones.

        The phone rings loud in my ear, and Casey jerks in the bed, sits up and swallows hard as she turns her head first one way and then the other as she comes out of her sleep. I lay my hand on the cool of the phone, and hesitate as she draws a trembling breath and seems to calm down, patting the sheets on either side of her legs with her open palms as she struggles to release her breath again. I pick up the phone before it rings a second time.

        “This is Richard,” says a voice rich with the sense of an underlining laugh. I watch Casey with the phone to my ear. She draws a long breath and slowly releases it. She’s told me of her nightmares in the past: the invisible men who beat her in our locked bathroom, throw her through the plastic curtain of the shower so that the moisture wraps around her face and her open mouth, or her brother plunges the open blade of a knife into his own heart.

        “Hey, Richard, how are you?” I say and attempt to untangle the cord from the base of the phone, and accidentally pull it from the shelf. Casey jerks again and shakes her head as if saying no and pushes on the bed, sliding her palm down the sheet to her knee, and then lifting it at the elbow until its pushing outward at nothing, and then drawing it back to repeat the motion. She draws in one breath on top of another, her muscles clamping down on each bit of air and refusing to let her exhale. If she doesn't calm down, I know she’ll pass out. I take my own breath as she buries her head in a pillow, an effort to hide the drowning noise from the man on the other end of the phone, and I close my eyes. When I open them, they fall on the dead bird in cold memorial, and say, “Rich, can I call you back?”

        “I’m on my way to Tokyo,” he says. “You won’t be able to get hold of me.”

        There’s a pause.

        “I’ve got to go. I’m going to have to call you back.”

        “E-mail me,” he says. “Let me know what you’re thinking.”

        I set the receiver on the cradle and go to the bed. Casey jerks at my touch, looks at me without recognition and pushes on my chest, and I hold her as best I can as her muscles go limp, the breath rushes out of her in one release, and she slips into unconsciousness. The silence is complete. The rays of the sun first appear over the trees, playing on the snow, up the branches of the rose bush, over the silent bird on its perch beneath the winter white. It’s then I decide that I must deal with the bird, take it from the branch so that each morning of the winter we don’t have to wake to its stare. When Casey comes to, she buries her head in a sheet as her eyes brim.

        “I’m sorry,” she repeats as the tears trickle down her cheek, “I’m sorry.” I run my hand along her hair until she closes her eyes again and her breathing slows. Gently as I can, I lower her head to the pillow, careful not to jar her as her legs twitch in the midst of an unpleasant dream. In the past I would have awakened her when her muscles convulsed like that, convinced I could save her a nightmare, but now I know she won’t sleep at all if I did. Sleep is terrifying for her now. It’s a symptom of her abuse.

        My feet rattle the metal of the spiraling staircase leading to the kitchen and bathroom, and I sit on the arm of the thrift store couch as I pull on the rough rubber of my shoes. The gray of morning is starting to fade outside, the snow fresh as I shrug into my heavy black coat, adjust the arm where a ring of duct tape holds a rip in the fabric together, and slide open the door into the morning scent of winter air. I make my way around the house, down the hill, slip once and hurt my wrist, my wound from the rocks, when it plunges into a snow bank and bends backwards, but I am finally blinking at a mass of snow on a branch where there was once a bird. I look at it for a minute, a pane of glass between me and the green comforter on the bed in the room, and Casey underneath, nothing between the bird and I as my breath crystallizes and vanishes. I don’t want to touch it. I want it to be gone because of what it represents, a life no longer present, an entity caught by surprise and drained of its soul, but I don’t want to see it fall. I don’t want to see the puncture it will make in the winter coat of my patio when it breaks through the crust and disappears to rot come spring. I find a stick and timidly tap the base of the branch with it, hoping to dislodge the animal without claiming responsibility for its fall. It remains steadfast. I hit the branch again, hard this time, so that the crack of the wood on wood echoes against the window and into the yard. A clump of snow falls from the place over the bird’s head, making its own hole in the snow covering the cement, and I stare. A gathering of leaves, their ends brown and curling together to form a round body, a stem perked and curled into a head and shrunken eyes stares back at me. It isn’t a bird after all. Almost casually I reach out with the stick, hesitate as the tip hovers a moment beside the hollow snow pack, and slice it in half. Only part of a leaf remains standing, persisting in its perch on the branch, frozen in place and as unable to move as my imagined bird had been. The rest disappears into the snow, and I turn to go inside. Behind me as I make my way around the house, once again slipping and shoving my hand into the ice, is the broken continuity of the branch’s frosting, and in its place, half a leaf.
__________

        The engine is sluggish to start. It turns over once, the oil light coming on as the pump struggles to shove liquid through the system, the cylinders turning once, twice, and then revving with a chug as I press the accelerator. After a moment, the engine runs up into a roar and then backs again to the ground as I let my foot up and shift the gears into neutral, setting the emergency break before taking my foot off the clutch. I eye the power gauge on the dashboard; see it rise a bit above twelve volts and then dip down to about ten. The car’s electrical system hasn’t worked right since I’d driven it back from my uncle’s in California. Casey eyes me from the passenger seat with the same analytic concern I’d turned to the gauge.

        “Is it going to work?” she asks. I purse my lips and nod slowly, watching as the needle swims into the red, and then settles in the transparent area somewhere between the good and the bad.

        “Yep,” I say, and let the car roll backwards into the road. Who knows if it will make it or not? The weather is warm today. A bit of the snow is melting over the dirt in the lawn like flavoring on an ice cream cone, and a squirrel has been defending the bird feeder for several days, arguing with the birds who think the black sunflower seeds we put out are still for them. Inside the car, our winter coats keep us warm. There’s no fan, and we keep the windows down to prevent fogging, so that the wind blows our hair, and when we get out again we do so with a mess of curls, and depending on the day, a bit of snow or rain.

        “Are you nervous about the appointment?” I ask. Casey shrugs with her face towards the window, not moving except to nod once very slightly. People with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder become startled easily. An unexpected touch, a loud noise, anything that takes them back to the touches, the noises -- the caresses -- they felt as children. It doesn’t take a war to burn an image into someone’s mind, only fingers on the inner thigh at nine years old. Panic attacks are nightmares that you see with your eyes open. I signal right, look over my shoulder and drift into the turn lane with a twist of the wheel. There is a man with a body sign on his shoulders at the corner, facing Casey as we rotate around him and pass. I miss it as we go by.

        “What did it say?” I ask.

        “Save America’s schools,” she reads. “Import Canadian students.” The needle is back in the red. There are others around town with similar signs, only saying different things. Save the children. That’s one of them.

        There’s a loose baggage claim ticket lying in the small compartment behind the gearshift, the last evidence of the trip that Casey and I took to Arizona over the Spring break. It was warming up only slightly by then, a bruise on my shoulder from the 7mm Magnum still healing under my t-shirt, hurting whenever the strap of my backpack fell across it. I was sitting on one of the plastic chairs in the terminal, the texture wearing an abrasion on my back as I watched a man in military fatigues go by, the strap of an M-16 uneasily wedged in the sweaty womb of his bicep and chest muscles. In the foreground a square pulpit sat with a different advertisement on each side, a man’s face smiling at me from the cover of the religious magazine called, Sign of the Times. If I’d had a camera I’d have won the Pulitzer.

        “Did you take your knife out of your backpack?” I’d asked Casey, setting my bag at my feet and watching as a team of security guards dismantled the carry-on of another passenger. Casey nodded and re-centered her pack on her shoulders.

        “It’s in the box,” she said, referring to the cardboard crate we had dug from the trash and reconstructed with twine and duct tape before turning it over to the attendants at the airport door. “Do you think they’ll want to search our bags?”

        Casey had managed to fit the square footage of a small nation into the two small burgundy packs we’d brought with us, wiping her brow and leaning against the counter with a backpack that reminded me of the cans of Root Beer I’d shaken up and exploded on the concrete as a kid.

        “I hope not,” I said, cautiously tapping the bag, now at my feet, with the tip of my toe. “Someone could lose an eye.” Casey gave me a withering look. Her hair was down, the dark lockets turning outward from her neck just as they reached her shoulders where she had pinned the stem of a purple crocus between the plastic and the nylon of her shoulder strap. Every other day it seemed we’d read about another airport that had been shut down because someone found a nail file in the trash. At the speed the line was moving, the flower would either die or bloom in the time between it and the gate. I felt Casey’s hand on the skin of my arm.

        “You’re getting warmer,” she drawled with a grin, and slowly slid her hand farther up toward my neck. I backed up in surprise, and then followed her eyes to where she was looking. Advertisements lined the walls of the terminal, and one of them, along with the image of two English muffins with a steaming egg in the center, had the catch line, “You’re getting warmer,” published atop the poster. I laughed as Casey slipped her hand into my coat pocket.

        “You’re silly,” I said, but she wasn’t smiling anymore. Instead her eyebrows were raised, her lips slightly parted beneath eyes filled with fear.

        “Aaron,” she said, and slowly drew her fist from my pocket, cupping her hand as if afraid blood may run onto the gray matter of the floor. At first I thought she had cut herself on my knife; the edge was partly exposed even when folded, but I had deliberately left my pocketknife at home in the basket beside the bed. She stared into her hand for a moment, and then extended it delicately with the palm turned so that only I could see. A slew of metal bullet casings tumbled into each other in the well created by her hand. Fifteen .22s, a 7mm, a spent shotgun shell with dark burns around the ruffles of the mouth. “They’re in your pocket,” she whispered. I quickly closed my hand over hers.

        “There’s lots,” Casey said. My heart beat faster. A woman stood and watched as people emptied their pockets and passed through the screens, and behind her was another rifle tooting soldier. I doubted that filling the transparent tray with used ammunition before passing it outside the metal detector would be interpreted as a particularly benevolent gesture.

        “Throw them away,” I urged gently. There were two covered trashcans between the gates and us. “With discretion.” Casey looked from the trashcans to me, holding the bullets in her hand against her stomach.

        “Should I?” she asked, and I nodded. It took three trips to empty my pockets, two to the first can, one to the second less than four feet from the gate. Each time Casey held the swinging lid open with one hand we listened as the shells hit one another, and hoped no one else could hear as well. The head of the crocus was taken off in the scanners in Boise, and the stem lost somewhere in Arizona.

        I accidentally stop at a yield sign before making a right turn onto the roadway next to the park. The car’s voltage meter has dropped into the red again.

        “Can we stop at the store on the way back to buy penny candies,” Casey asks, turning over the plane tickets to search the well of the gearshift tray, finding a nickel that she picks up with her two fingers.

        “Sure,” I say. “I have a dime in my pocket that you can have too.” And then, “No.” And then again, “No,” only louder, as if I’m telling a child not to put her hand on a hot burner and she’s ignoring me and about to anyway. There’s a squirrel on the road, his haunches on the bridge of the yellow paint and the asphalt, the base of one heel on the hard road, his left toe curling over the centerline. He hesitates when he sees the car coming, his heart beating faster, starts into the other lane and then turns back and starts across mine.

        “No,” I tell him again, but he doesn’t listen and moves, blocking the wheel as it  goes over his back legs with a bump, the bone shattering under the weight of the tread, and he keeps crawling with his front until he’s by the curb.

        “Did you hit him?” Casey cries, turning in her seat to see him finish his crawl, his back legs useless behind him as he makes it up the curve and into the grass where there isn’t any snow. I stop the car, slowly, with my eyes watching for other cars. We’ve gone a hundred feet. “Go back, Aaron,” Casey pleads. “Go back.” I shake my head. There’s nothing we can do, even if we go back, but she’s pleading. I back up slowly. “Where is it?” she asks, and then I see a squirrel and I think maybe that we were wrong, that I’d missed. His legs are fine, he’s cleaning his paws, and then I see that the pile of leafs beside him are not leafs at all, but the body of another, this one not moving.

        “Ok,” I say, “Let me park.” I stop at the edge of the street, his body on the other side, Casey crossing before me, and all I can think is that I don’t have a box. I turn to the trunk and look around the spare tire, finally empty a paper sack from the groceries and crumple it in my hand and turn to come back. I try to see cars, people watching from windows as I cross the street. It is as if I’m at the scene of an accident, Casey crouched on both knees, her head down almost in prayer, something I can’t see before her; I’m a paramedic looking first left and then right as I cross with my stretcher folded at my side. There is no blood on the ground. Casey is petting its head when I get there and crouch next to her. The other squirrel is gone.

        “Don’t touch it,” I say. “It’s not clean.” His chest is jerking, his legs and back noticeably thinner than the rest of him as muscle spasms force his lungs out like a twitch.

        “Can’t we do something?” Casey asks, the tears still there in the lids of her eyes, but held from spilling onto her cheeks, her left hand in the grass with dirt on her palm, the other hovering just above the rodent’s head as she leans over it. “We can take it to the Animal Shelter.”

        I shake my head, on my knees beside her now, but my hand hovering over her shoulder instead of the squirrels, my eyes on the creature on the ground, the gasps for air coming slower than natural, alive enough that I know they can’t really be the muscles twitching on their own yet.

        “He won’t make it,” I say, pretending that I don’t have the paper bag, that I haven’t wanted to take him, that I haven’t thought that maybe we could. Casey leans over and touches the soft fur on the top of its head, running her finger down its back, and I prepare to tell her not to touch it too low, not to touch where its been hurt. She takes her finger back, and I don’t have to. I watch his eyes, look for a blink, but its chin just stays, the breaths coming in spurts, no sign of the fear he should be feeling of us, or anything else.

        “It’s suffering,” she says, and leans over it so close that I worry she might kiss it gently on the spot her finger has touched, her face hidden from me, but instead she whispers something, and I touch her on the back between the shoulder blades. When she sits up her tears have come out. “He’s suffering.” The jerks become farther apart, until five minutes have passed and there are no more jerks, and I finally take her by the shoulders and turn her away, look at her so that she doesn’t see the last twitch it makes, a real muscle spasm of the spirit letting go this time.

        “I think it’s gone,” I say. I put the paper bag back into the trunk, sit in the car next to Casey, look out the window at the sign beside the telephone poll and the tree where we’ve left what remains of the squirrel.

        “First and Lincoln,” I say. “We’ll call the city when we get home.” Casey sniffs, and wipes her nose.

        “What time is it?” she asks, and I look at my watch.

        “We’re five minutes late,” I say, and then put the key into the ignition. “The clock’s stopped.” I point to the second hand on the dashboard that always freezes when I take out the battery and is a novelty whenever the battery is charged and it runs.

        “That’s because the engine isn’t on,” Casey says, and I shake my head.

        “No, it always runs when we have power.” A bird sings at us from a branch. A car passes outside. The green of the road sign gleams in the sun, and Casey looks at me before I turn the key.

        “I prayed for it to die,” she whispers, and corrects herself. “I prayed for it to stop suffering.”