This flash fiction piece questions whether animals know grief, like humans.
What The Animal Teaches Me
Sometime during the night, the bird’s nest fell to the ground. When I came out of my room for breakfast, I saw it lying on the path that snaked through the quadrangle of the college. The toppled twigs, still caked together and cemented with mud, had three little baby-blue eggs spilling out of them, their viscous, yokey contents running all over.
If seeing the nest itself didn’t make me stop, the sight of the mother bird standing there did. She was a bright, brilliant robin, one of the first I had seen in spring. Her body was all smooth, dark feathers, except of course for the flash of red on her front. She could have been any of us standing in some somber cemetery grieving over our fallen in battle. From time to time, a thin quail quavered from her beak as she looked on. It sure sounded like crying.
The porter who oversaw the college came over from her office by the gate. She looked on with me, her arms folded in front of her.
“Must’ve been the storm last night knocked the nest down,” she said.
“Yep,” I said. The porter stood there for just another moment, then went off to get a box and a broom to sweep up the last leavings of the broken eggs, even as the mother bird stood looking over the scene with her dark eyes.
For a few moments while the porter was gone, the mother bird and I stood staring at each other. Of course, it could just have been that she saw me as a random but pleasing configuration of shapes and colors, just a wave of energy through space that supplanted in her mind her recent loss. I wondered if she had already forgotten the tumbling of her babies down to the earth. Did she see the viciousness of nature in the act? Or even remember that it had happened at all?
Soon the porter was back with the box. She had dug it out of the corner of her office, where, she said, it had been stowed a long time ago for just such a purpose as this. I helped her brush up the remnants of the nest into the cardboard, the little twigs settling there to rest – and to be easily disposed of. While we were doing this, the mother bird, planted squarely in the center of the flagstone path, watched us with a steely eye. So dark were her eyes. Perfect black, like night, absence of all color. Time and again she let out a trilling quaver of sound.
“Guess that’s all we can do,” the porter said when we had finished the sweeping.
“Yep,” I said. We stood there a few seconds in silence.
“Gotta get back to work.”
“Yep.”
The porter left with the twigs and the caked mud, box in hand. I stood there a while longer, still watching the mother bird, who had remained steadily beside us as we swept up the remains of her babies, trying to invite some measure of comfort into her existence. From the way in which the robin cocked her head in her own, bird-like way of reckoning the situation, I thought that maybe she did in fact understand that I was trying to soothe her.
The two of us held that pose for a long time. And yet, after a moment, I couldn’t help but wonder: Was it arrogant of me to think that I could impart to this creature anything she did not already know? In my tradition it’s said that God gave us the earth to watch over, including the animals that are on it. But I don’t think the birds or the creatures of any kind have ever needed us humans to tell them what to do or how to deal with grief.
In the end, the robin ascended into the sky and up above, around the top of the brick walls of the college. As she flew away, I wondered if she would ever start another family, and if she would come to see those little ones hatch and thrive. I didn’t know if the memory of this day would persist for her, or if she would remember me as anything more than just an assemblage of colors at the scene.
Did I bring any shred of comfort to the mother bird? And, if our roles had been reversed, would she so have tried to comfort me?
Leave a comment