The Curious Incident of the Dead Bird in the Bathtub

The other day I found a dead bird in my bathtub. Here's what happened:

Monday my friend and I took an accidental hike up a little road in the mountains that we imagined led to a really cool house. It was accidental not because we broke down, but because we couldn't find our FHE group who must have been on a different mountain.

In the middle of the road, the friend noticed an ant-covered bird--a bird with a broken wing that had minyons of ants crawling all over it. The bird was still alive and involved in a horrific scene. We quickly decided to defy nature and save the bird. It's bad karma to let stuff die from ant suffocation. As we grabbed for it, it flapped and squawked to get away, drawing the attention of the dog that was with us. The dog was faster than we were and snatched that poor bird right up. We hesitated a moment, hoping the dog would hurry and put the bird out of its misery, but it turned out the dog just wanted to swing it around a bit. We eventually saved it again, wiped the ants off it and ourselves (but let the dog fend for herself), and took it home.

I put it in a little drawer, complete with a magazine-shredded bed, some bread and water, and a little washrag blanket and then covered the drawer with a towel. Bird tucked its little head into its shoulder and fell peacefully asleep. Relief. The next morning, I awoke to a little chirper a few feet from my bed, which I thought was cute.

The two most important things you can do for a bird with a broken wing are save it from being someone's dinner, and keep it in a place where it won't further injure itself. So I left it in the drawer and put the drawer in the bathtub as double protection. I opened the shower window nice and wide so Bird would have some fresh air and made sure some of her magazine bed could double as reading material in case she got bored in the drawer. I left for work expecting to return to a refreshed, grateful, and current-event-apprised bird (she had Time magazine, after all).

Later that night, I ran up the stairs in the dark with my newly-purchased meal worms, hoping hoping hoping the bird was still alive.

A person ignorant of what a bathroom serving three girls is like would likely think they walked into a corner store in a small country when they stepped into the girls' bathtub. In it are all varieties of shampoos, conditioners, and other things that I don't even really understand. Our unmentionables sit on the window sill. The sill of that same window that I had left wide open.

When I went in to deliver dinner, much to my horror, I found the following things lying spread-eagle in the bathtub: one ginormous bottle of super-smoothing shampoo, pomegranite dream body wash, frizz + death defying conditioner, and a dead bird.

I was sad she was gone, relieved I didn't have to open up the meal worms. I wondered how long I had to dispose of the body, but when someone said the word "carcass", I pulled out my head lamp and camping shovel and buried the bird under the bushes.

How Bird passed will forever be a mystery. It could have been old age. It could have been sustained injury. Maybe despair. It may have been death by the bottle. It could have been a heart attack caused when wind threw everything down. We will never know.

The moral of the story is this: sometimes when you're focused on little things, you forget to look at the big picture.