THE DISPATCH
By Benjamin Reed
 

After he got fired from his job, he decided to walk home.

Well into a Texas summer, the sun scorched so deep into the concrete it burned his feet, straight through the thin soles of his shoes as he trod the three miles home to his tiny, one-room apartment. He kept his eyes on the urban horizon. The heat vapor seething off the asphalt washed everything further than a city block into veil of boiling air.

In this heat he wore all black, not knowing he’d be anywhere other than the air-conditioned cave of his now former employer. He wiped the sweat from his brow and unstuck his shirt from his belly. His drenched thighs rubbed against each other mercilessly, making him wince with every step. By now his t-shirt was stained with sweat, staining his underarms and spreading into a damp halo around his neck, the black cotton pasted to his shoulders.

Halfway home, he ducked into the frigid air conditioning of the post office. He reached into his damp pocket and extracted the key to his box. There were four pieces of mail. Three were 5x7 manila envelopes, all addressed to him in black sharpie, written in his own hand. Rejection letters from various literary journals, manuscripts thoughtfully enclosed. One of them was from Australia and he contemplated the foreign stamp. The fourth and final piece of mail was a small white envelope, mailed from the same town, addressed not to his name, but ‘Mr. Nice Guy’. Presumably more hate mail from a girl he hadn’t seen in months. The last piece was also a rejection letter, in a sense, although more persistent and less indifferent than the other three. He put the mail in his pocket and walked back into the heat.

He had to cross a strip mall on the way to his apartment. The strip mall housed a grocery store, a Sears, a Western wear outlet, and a pet store. The architects had made a crude attempt to disguise the monolithic concrete monstrosity with tall, sickly-thin trees every ten yards. He clung to the meager shade of the trees, broken by the intense heat reflecting from the bleached white concrete of the colonnade. Bored, he contemplated opening his mail, for something to read on the way home. Form letters are always amusing. He reached into his pocket but suddenly stopped in his tracks. He had nearly stepped on a baby bird. He paused, withdrew his hand from his pocket, and stopped for a closer look.

Leaning on his knees, a bystander might have thought he was praying. The baby bird was in the onset of its death, barely hatched from its egg, weakly trying to turn on a little patch of dirt in the dry grass around the base of the tree. Far too young to fly, its dark feathers didn’t even cover its body. What few feathers it had were wet, still covered in the fluid from the egg. The skin under its scrubby little belly was translucent, as thin as rice paper. He could see all of its organs caged behind its ribs, the little body heaving in the unforgiving afternoon sun. Its organs, black and purple and pink, flexed, filled and deflated as it barely managed each feeble breath. He looked up the tree, squinting in the sun. On the highest branch, he saw a nest, twenty-five feet up a tree no thicker than his arm. He looked back at the bird, the helpless dying infant at his feet. Its little body was twisted, its head turned around on the ground, as if looking over its shoulder. It had probably broken its back in the fall.

Then something caught his eye. He paused. A little black spot. No, dozens of little black spots. He rolled the bird over, gently, with the toe of his shoe. Ants. A hundred or more. Something fell from his chest and landed in his stomach. Busy, frenetic ants, going about their dispassionate business. Drinking the yolk from the feathers, taking little bites from the bird who laid there, limply writhing, helpless as it was being eaten alive. His first thought: It’s not a tragedy, it’s just nature. There’s nothing I can do. Second thought: No. I can’t just go home after seeing this. Something . . . should be done. How long, he wondered, would the bird lay in the scorching sun, on a bed of hard earth and flesh-eating ants, if he did nothing? How would he feel, sitting in his apartment later, knowing the little hatchling was still suffering on the sidewalk of a strip-mall colonnade?

He patted his pockets and looked around. He looked up, at the pet store before him. He walked around the corner, down a small alley next to the store’s back door, further back to the dumpsters. Next to one of the green steel dumpsters he found a greasy black tire iron, L-shaped, with a socket at the end of the short arm, the long arm ending in a wedge like a large, dull screwdriver.

He walked back to the bird and knelt down beside it. He gripped the tire iron in his hands, but paused when he noticed a Mexican family walking by. A mother with three little boys trailing behind. She yanked on the nearest boy’s hand and pointed at the bird, saying something to all three. “Mira,” and “muerta” were the only words he understood. The mother smiled. She was showing the boys death, almost cheerful for the opportunity. He watched the little boys’ eyes on the tiny, writhing little bird, hoping they wouldn’t look him in the eyes. He waited until the family disappeared, until the lesson was over. After they passed, his hand slowly moved the tire iron from behind his leg.

He took one last look at the baby bird, turning, churning in the heat of the afternoon, stung and writhing from the ants, its visible organs pumping in agony. He placed the dull blade of the wedge against its neck. “Sorry,” he said under my breath. He shoved down. Only then did he see how much life was left in the bird. It’s eyes widened, its tongued gagged out of its soft beak in a silent scream, every cell of his own heart screamed for him to stop, but his mind knew, soberly, that he had commenced an act that couldn’t not be stopped, nor taken back. He had begun, and was now committed to finish. The little newborn squirmed and tried to scream, but now air could not cross its crushed neck. Its tiny beak gasped and clamored for air, for the pain to stop, looked into its killer’s eyes in the violent throes of a strangled silence. But still, the neck did not sever. He plunged again, and the tire iron went an inch into the ground. But still, there was no break. The bird squirmed, pinned to the ground, its neck buried, “Jesus,” he said aloud. He would have given anything to not be doing this. He plunged a third time. His arms moved mechanically. Still, the bird did not die, only screamed in silence. He became nauseous. He wanted to stop. He hated himself. Finally, on the fourth stab, he felt a tiny cracking reverberate through the iron into his hands and the wedge went deep into the dry earth. The bird’s head came off and rolled a few inches away. It was done. He wanted to vomit. The decapitated body twitched, and was then still.

“What the fuck did you do that for?” he heard a voice scream from behind him. He winced, feeling his shoulders pinch to his ears. He turned around to see a girl, only five feet tall, with long blond hair, wearing the blue uniform shirt of the pet store, a red apron slung across her hips. More young than pretty, she couldn’t have been older than seventeen. “Did you just kill that bird with a tire iron?”

“It, I—,” he stammered, hands out, palms to the sky, “It was suffering. I—uh, look, I—”

“I don’t care! you didn’t have to do that!” She pleaded.

He tried to explain how the bird was suffering, how it would never fly, how its parents had abandoned it, how the ants were eating it alive. How it didn’t have a hope in the world. He took a step toward her and she recoiled like he was a leper. “Wait, please—” he took another step toward her and she took another back. Then she turned her back on him, running back into the pet store, half disgusted, half terrified. He took another step after her, then hesitated. Suddenly, he realized what he must have looked like. A six-foot four, twenty-four year-old, unemployed, unshaven face, wearing sweat-stained, all-black clothes, military-style trousers with a crumpled handful of unread envelopes sticking out of one pocket, a flesh-stained tire iron clenched in one fist. For one moment, he saw what she saw: a psychopath.

He tensed. It occurred to him that she might have gone inside the store to call someone. Security. Cops. Security who’d call cops. Her manager. He suddenly realized that he might be in trouble. He was about to take off when he remembered the bird. He looked at its dead body, the head that rolled, like a golf ball, a foot away. A piece of newspaper blew by on a hot gust and he snatched it out of the air. He knelt down and wrapped up the bird. He deposited the package in a trash can and walked away.

Thirty steps to the street corner, thirty steps until he’d be out of sight of the pet store, thirty steps and thirty times he wanted to look back, over his shoulder to see if anyone was in pursuit. But he didn’t look. He just kept walking. He didn’t have the words to explain his actions to the girl, and didn’t want to try with anyone else. He hotly tried to reason that it wasn’t a crime to kill a bird, even a healthy one. But when he realized this was true, it made him feel even worse.

He walked back to his apartment quickly, sweat evaporating from his arms as a chill overtook his skin. On the way home, he avoided his reflection in storefront windows. He wondered what the girl thought of him. Wondered if she was talking about him now, to some other employee, telling the whole tale of the horror she just witnessed. ‘I know types like that,’ she’d say. ‘First they start by torturing cats. Then they move on people,’ as she ran a bag of dog food over the infrared light of the barcode scanner. ‘Jesus,’ the listener would respond, nodding, ‘How do people end up like that? Was it his parents? I mean, are people born psychopaths?’ ‘I don’t know,’ she’d respond sorrowfully, almost sympathetically, ‘I don’t know.’

Finally, he made it home, to his little room. He stepped into the bathroom, splashed cold water on his cheeks, and spent a long time staring at his face in the mirror. He took the mail from his pocket. He pulled out the one addressed to ‘Mr. Nice Guy,’ and threw it away without opening it. Then it was just him and his reflection. His eyes. Maybe, he thought, I am a psycho. I feel like a psycho, like a shadow in a doorway, like a childhood gone wrong. He felt horrible, for what was supposed to be a mercy killing. He told myself, for the twelfth time, that he had the best of intentions. It was only then that he realized, when he had disposed of the body of the bird, that he had forgotten to pick up the head.
 

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BENJAMIN REED'S short stories, poetry, and prose have appeared in print in Mobius, Blue Mesa Review, Snow Monkey, and Taj Mahal, and online at WordRiot, Slow Trains, Clean Sheets, Somewhat.org, and Ascent. He self-publishes chapbooks, has published a novel, The Bow Tie Gang, and was recently nominated for the Pushcart Prize.