"Dead Birds Tell No Tales."
The bird wasn’t quite dead.
It hung there, upside down, its little talons or whatever still clinging to the wooden bar in the cage.
I opened the cage door and whistled at it. It shuddered and opened an eye. I tried to set it upright, but it just swung down again. It had no interest in living.
This was back in ’68, or ’69. I loved that bird. “Chirpy” we called it. I had just that day received my walking papers from Penn State: a bright career as an English professor down the drain because a few radical students in a group called RADIANT UNION talked me into serving as their faculty advisor.
Outside my window, the familiar sound of gunfire, a strangled scream. The police and the hippies, going at it up and down the alleys. The thump thumping of a helicopter overhead. A man’s voice on a bullhorn. The distant and then closer wail of sirens. It would keep up all night, because it was hot, 88 degrees at 11:30 pm, and there was another brownout. The lights in the windows of the tenement houses across the way flickered between dark urine yellow and blackness.
I stripped to a t-shirt and shorts. A drink in hand. With ice.
Then, suddenly, a pounding at the door. I stood mute. The bird opened its eye again. I was afraid it would chirp, its last living sound giving me away. I tip-toed across the floor as the pounding on the door resumed. I put down my glass, gently took the bird in my hands as I had a hundred times before, walked slowly to the open window, and tossed it out.
I hoped it would fly, not fall.
The sound of gunfire growing closer. The pounding on my door louder.
The birdcage empty.
Me alone.
