#windows notepad

None of it sunk in until I walked out to the barn and found the family of owls dead. Dad let me hold a little funeral for them, and we buried them out by the pond where they used to catch field mice in the long grass on the banks. A few weeks later, we got a cat to live out in the barn and catch the mice that began living there again in the owls’ absence. I couldn’t get the sight of the owls out of my head, though. They had just been lying on the ground, perfectly still, wings splayed outwards as if they were napping, arms outstretched as they lazed on their backs. There were no signs of injury or sickness on any of them. But something had killed all of them. Something had killed all four of the perfectly healthy, well-fed, sheltered owls in our barn, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It only got worse when a migrating flock of Canadian geese rested in the field by the pond for the night and didn’t wake up the next morning, or ever again. Dad had to call the neighbors to help remove them. I stood and watched from the back porch, silent and finding breathing difficult. Then it was the nesting robins on the ledge below the roof of the shed. I remember looking at the little blue eggs when Dad pulled the nest down. They were cold and fragile, and I remember wanting to cry when I thought about how long they may have laid there, how if maybe we’d have only found them a little sooner, I could have pulled out the old incubator we used to use back when we had chickens, and maybe they would have been okay. In hindsight, I realize it would have been pointless regardless, but the fact doesn’t bring me any comfort, just twists the knife into the feeling of uselessness and helplessness that settled into the depths of my belly long ago. After the robins came the mourning doves by the mailbox, then the neighbors’ canary, then the songbirds in the bushes, then an entire flock of crows on the road to the grocery store. I threw up on the side of the road while Dad stared at them in silence, looking every bit as lost as I felt. He called what seemed like half the town to help clear away the bodies, and we buried them in a clearing a little past the treeline by the road after some of the researchers at the bird rescue looked a few over. They had no answers to the questions none of us knew how to ask.

By now, we’d all already realized something was deeply wrong. We’d had to get a second cat to deal with the growing rodent problem in the barn and along the pond. I would sometimes sit by where we buried the owls and cry. Dad would stare out the window, a bird-watching book open by his side, and mark in a notebook whenever he saw one. The entries became fewer and fewer as the months dragged on. I learned to whistle and recreate bird calls in the hopes of receiving an answer one day. I never had any luck. The news had a lot of names for it. “Bird Panic.” “Bird Flu.” “Flight from Existence.” “The Great Winged Escape.” They all boiled down to the same thing: imminent total extinction of all species of bird on Earth, for no traceable reason. Sure, scientists tried to offer explanations. Changing wind patterns, global pollution, pesticides. All things that may have contributed, but nothing that really accounted for the rapid destruction of the entire avian species worldwide. Dad and I began making sure we ate every meal together. It alleviated the distress that laid heavy on our minds. Our recipes became increasingly creative as we learned more and more substitutes for eggs. I missed omelets and eggs benedict, and crepes didn’t taste the same, but even the memory of the taste faded with time. One particular night, after National Geographic declared the death of the last blackbirds, I sat on the couch with my legs curled up under me, face warm from the fireplace while Dad stared into the flickers of flames, resting back in his chair. We debated moving to one of the cities closer to the coast, away from our home out in the forest where the absence of the birds seemed so stark. Neither of us really wanted to leave though, even as the lack of bird song continued to gnaw at our ears and minds. The bunches of birdhouses we’d built into the trees surrounding our house lay dormant, save a few filled with families of opossums or squirrels. We left them be, grateful that at least something found use in the green and blue wooden houses we’d hammered together before the fall grew too cold.