Nonfiction assignment, Samantha Markey

Black Bird and a Yellow Bus

I have fond memories of childhood, of school, and of being young and naive to the experiences of adulthood. I have memories of long days of play and laying in the sun as song birds and buildings’ silhouettes traced tiny and shifting shadows across great green lawns, bigger than oceans under small sandaled feet. I did not know experience more than I knew an elm tree and just how to scale up to its lowest branch. There are a lot of things I didn’t know then because knowing is something that occurred to me, like it does to many people, over many years as experiences build and childhood fades. That’s how my life seemed to change – like something slow and Blake-like that is too abstract to be anything but poetry. When I think of childhood, I think of that romanticized version of which Wordsworth or Longfellow feverishly philosophized, but The Child was no more I than a child of their time. Still, their thoughts of gardens and innocence were not as far off from what I lived before a black bird and broken trust shaped one of my first experiences.
Unfaltering affection was what I had for my elderly neighbor, Dot. She was a gardener, and she took pride in priming and potting the flower beds all around our suburban neighborhood. I can remember watching her with her shovel and gloves like I would watch the next page of my picture books – with eager eyes drinking in stories spanning smooth pictured pages, come to life. She was not smooth, but she had stories, a shovel, and my trust.
We were walking to the bus stop, one autumn morning – the windy kind of morning that crunches under your feet as leaves skitter over pavement – and I was hopping to stomp on the strays before they got away. It was game. I was five. The little corner marked our bus stop and the parents stood tall and muted next to our brightly colored coats and lunch boxes. Excited squeals sounded as we continued to stomp the leaves. I wandered off towards a tree in my pursuit and only paused at the flap wings and gripping feet.
A black bird had flown right into my chest and clung to the front of my coat. I was so still in that moment, afraid any movement would send it flying away, but even when I lost that brief hesitation, and curled my hand over it, it did not move away. I knew it was hurt, and as I held it to my chest, I hurried back to Dot. I wanted to save it.
“We have to take him to a Vet,” I said, as Dot took the bird from me. She assured me she’d take care of him and I knew she would.
“I think his wing is broken,” I said, and Dot assured me that a vet would be able to fix him right up, and I knew he would.
The lurch of the big yellow school bus was the only thing that ever drew my attention away from the bird as Dot carried him back towards her house. I filed into our multicolored lunchbox line and found my seat next to the window. I looked for Dot again and craned my neck to watch her as she paused before a great green dumpster with my tiny black bird. As we began to pull off, she tossed the bird into the big black square and I experienced death for the first time. I cried.

-Samantha Markey