Death of Natural Causes

There is this odd silence hanging over the park as I walk in wary, looking for a bench, totally stunned by the emptiness.  You must have felt this pinch of vexation before when, unable to single out a suitable bench among dozens of empty ones in an empty park, you wish it were jam-packed so that your task would become less arduous. At the farther end, below a cypress on the side of an artificial pool, I spot a bench over which the filaments of light and shade are drawing altering shapes. That's where I will sit and digest the searing coffee I've swallowed in haste this morning. Did you ever have to drink a coffee hastily on a Sunday morning? Don't suppose I am the athletic sort, -I have not gone jogging since sixth grade at high school - and I don't get up in the early hours to marvel at daybreak either.  I woke up early today simply because I forgot it was Sunday, like I did many times before.  Picture yourself waking up at six thirty, having the usual shower with eyes yet semi-closed, feeling for all the world like giving yourself up to an additional five minutes doze under the warm water, then, to complicate things further, you burn two fingers while ironing your clothes. Only when you get inside the bus do you realise that this is not only the wrong bus, but also the wrong day.

I hurl my overwrought body over the bench and extend my arms flat over its back in a typical posture of possession which feels like a little relief after the total muddle I've gone through this morning.  You have certainly had that short-lived feeling some time when earth, sky, walls, mountains and trees all felt to be yours, although now and then the buzzing of a passing engine or the screeching of the birds between the twigs of the cypress reach my shady spot to remind me I am not all alone.  I have never seen the park in such state of desolateness before, but it has never occurred to me to come there on a Sunday, like the rest of the park-goers. You will be perhaps more eager to take the kids to the carousel or simply prefer to lie inert on the sofa to count the hours slide by, than in sitting on a bench in an empty park.  This bench is a good spot however, a little shady with the sun warming my back. But you know what will spoil a nice feeling of warmth? It is this reeking smell hanging about the air. It must be coming from the pool, they never clean the water or change it - you can see that from the layer of manure drifting over its surface.   An army of flies is feasting on the shrubs of weed on the banks. No.  Not the weed.  They have rather gathered on an auburn feathered pelt burnt by the sun and a pile of spiky bones which constitute the leftovers of a dead bird resting on the rim of the pool.  There is no head, and it is hard to guess what kind of birds it is. Did the files eat the head?  It's a big bird but it cannot be a raven or a hawk. It must be an owl, not one of those you see in the outskirts of the town, but I can tell from the size that it was one of those large migrating owls.  I can distinguish between a few kinds of them without much difficulty, but I need to see the head to be able to tell. Strange that it chose to die in this abandoned park. It might have fallen from the sky while it was flying, shot at with a stone, or it might have alighted on the tree for a rest then fell to earth and had what you'd call a natural dead.

I had an owl when I was young.  It was my dad who brought it for me, not as a present, but for my natural science class.  You must have done natural science as school. It is not quite pleasant, with all the smells of chemical drugs with which they preserve dead animals, but for the same reason, your never drowse and struggle to keep your head from tilting on its side. The teacher asked us to bring birds to have them dissected.  Birds of any kind, she said.  My mother refused to forgo one of her precious hens, so my father bought me the owl for fear I would fail the class, from the strange old man who sold chameleons and dead dried lizards on the side of the road.  It was such a big owl, all white, like snow.  I had never seen real snow then-, I had only seen it on TV- but that bird looked like a flimsy bust moulded of snow that would melt into water as soon as you would give it a stroke. Well, as you might expect, I didn't possess the mettle to take it with me to school and to I let it be assassinated, white and majestic as it was.  It was not an ordinary owl, and I was very much convinced then that it was the queen of owls. Bees have queens, ants have queens, and so must have owls. So I kept it with me and fed it mice and lizards and things like that, because it would not eat worms and stuff hens and ducks ate. 

I never knew whether it liked its life in the cage or preferred to go back to the wilds. If you expect owls to tell you some of what goes in their minds, you are quite mistaken. They are the most secretive of all birds, and it is perhaps because of this caginess that you'd sometimes feel repelled by them.  The owl did not live for a long time; it died three weeks after my father bought it for me.  Not of natural causes.  It was poisoned by my grandmother and my younger sister, with what means, I am still eager to know.  You need to live under the tyranny of a younger sister and a grandmother to understand what it felt like to be caught between the extremities of old age sulkiness and the conceit of youth. These two women ruled over the entire household and decided what its general mood would be like from day to day. My grandmother lived in the second floor of a two-storey household entirely owned by her. It was partitioned into two smaller houses, and we were lodgers in the one in ground floor. I've never seen her house from inside, because every time I went there for something, she never let me pass the threshold.  She would keep me waiting outside, even on winter days when it rained, while the smell of gasoline of her stove invaded her balcony, burning my nostrils and outlining the perimeters of her property. The fat-tailed cat that she had brought for my sister would stand on the door to look at me and purr covetously against her lame leg when she stood talking to me, probably, as you know cats do, stating that it would not tolerate an impostor. My sister wanted the owl for herself -she had never wanted anything that was mine before that, I was always the one who nursed the stealthy dreams of acquiring everything her chock-full wardrobe enclosed- because there was nothing worthy of attention in all the objects that I could call properly mine.  But for once, my owl made all the difference: it was a queen owl! My grandmother took my sister's side: 'What good will you get of it? You've never offered your sister a toy in all your life!' But for all her grumbles, I stood my ground firmly, taking in all the charges of meanness and acrimony, only to preserve the last shred of dignity that my owl epitomised.  My father brought another owl for my sister shortly after, brown and smaller in size, but she still wanted mine, which only solidified my obduracy. One day after I came back from school, I found the owl lying lifeless on its back, with its beak slightly open and its claws clasped as though they were gripping at something.

On the other side of the park, I see a man gathering litter with a spade-fork to pile it in a wheelbarrow. I have always wondered where they took the filth they collected in parks.  Once I ventured to look inside a waste-bin, probing over the kind of things that people dispose of.  I saw a number of different things: cans, plastic wrappers, paper bags, broken toys, magazines and newspapers - some of which looked untouched- and there was also a book.  If a book comes your way in the street, the usual thing is that you bend and pick it up.  So I put my hand into the waste-bin to take the book, which to me did not seem different from picking it up when you see it on the ground. I heard someone shout from a distance, as I looked, I saw the same man darting my way, waving his portentous spade-fork in the air.  He pulled the waste bin violently out of its crutch and emptied its content into his wheelbarrow then left without a word, as though the rubbish was a property of his that was on the point of being ripped-off.

He gave no sign that he recognised me today. He reached the pool after some minutes, planted the teeth of his fork in the dead bird's remains and tossed it inside the wheelbarrow, then left without even looking my way. I must have turned invisible, sitting long in this corner with the shade of the tree growing bigger and ingesting the contours of my shape.  After the man left, the putrid smell of the cadaver was still loitering in the air.  I spared the owl the humiliation of rotting and gave it a burial.  I buried it in a dump-ground adjoining my old school, because it was the only place where I could dig a hole without attracting too much attention, and because my grandmother didn't allow me to bury it in the garden, lest my sister's cat would find the cadaver and eat it.  When I crossed the gate of the garden after I buried the owl that evening full of loathing and anger and humiliation, I thought for a moment that I heard the sum of these feelings bubble out in a strange kind of drone. As I walked into the garden, I saw the eyes of the fat-tailed cat shining in the dark.  It was growling at me, emitting the strange drone that, for a moment, I had taken for the language of my turbulent sensations. It was dark, but I could picture it arching its back and batting its paws in a stance of defiance. I stepped back in alarm - for you can only feel scared in the presence of an animal when it stands before you in the dark all set for a confrontation - and as I did, I trampled on the fork that my father used to clear the garden with now and then.  When it hit my back, a quick idea nipped in my mind. You are there tired, irate and deeply affronted, and before you, your worst enemies are standing incarnate in that ill-fated chubby bundle of fur, leaving you with a narrow range of choices.

An ambulance goes by, tearing the silence with the blow of its siren.  Sickness, death and all the calamities of the world do not idle on Sundays.  My grandmother died on a Sunday, I remember.  It was a heart attack that killed her, one of the things you would call, when it reaps the life an aged person, a natural cause of death.  Strangely, no body mentioned anything about the dead cat that hang from her doorframe, or even assumed it to be the cause of the fright that petrified and immobilised her feeble heart.  Someone removed the cadaver in silence, thinking it to be the deed of some impish child- which it was as you may have guessed- that needed to be given no heed at all. But deaths of natural causes that you see taking place all the time around you and which you take as part of the natural course of life, don't always happen without they bring injury to some other souls, and you barely realise, until long after, that yours could be one of them. You may breed the habit of speaking to yourself, or you may wake up and you run and mess and dress frantically to go to work on wrong days, or even mumble words in your sleep about persons who died and whom people remembered little about. But the worst thing is when people's eyes brush over you without seeing you at all.  It is not their mistake if they don't.  Someone wise said that if you sit too long in the shadow of a tree, you become part of it, and even when you walk away, you would have totally sucked up the colour and the thinness of the shadow.  I don't know how much time I have spent sitting here, but it must be a long time.  The shade of the tree is still growing bigger and bigger without moving an inch away as though it has died. Sundays are such slow and lifeless days.

Reviews

[raining]

Ah... so much to say. You have built the suspense, pulling from the real world (or the suspension of the fantasy one until it changed it) This is such a good story.

The writing shows experience. Thank you for letting me read it. I would appreciate being writing friends. I at this time could use the support to write my stories.

I like the style, the subject, the form if there is such a critical word for it. There is a whole fabric feel to your writing as though the story were still alive after the reader reads it. To have the story then and carry it with one...that is part of the rare gift that you have,. thank you raining (keith Martell)

[Chloe..Across the Unive..]

be back later .. got half way and have a customer..