when gravity killed the birds

Harry Jackson woke up and looked out his window.  The sun perched distantly in the sky.  It was the sort of day where families pack a lunch and have a picnic.  The kid’s declare a lopsided war on the local ants.  Everyone has a snag.  The parents drink too much cask wine and risk the drive home in a sedate station wagon.

            Harry Jackson didn’t think much of the day.  He had always been more of a night person.  Harry Jackson’s eyes were incapable of producing tears. They were always dry and never adapted comfortably between sudden changes of light.  The glaring sun only reminded him that he was going to be partially blind for a large portion of the day.  His head began to ache as he let it float into his periphereal vision.

            Harry Jackson was about to go back to his bed when he noticed the three dead birds scattered around his lawn.  Two of them were pigeons and the other was an owl.  They had assumed the position that seemed most natural to a dead bird.  They lay spread-eagled on their backs with their thin legs pointing straight up.

            He was about to dismiss this peculiarity and leave the carcasses for the neighbourhood cats, but then Harry Jackson saw another random smattering of dead birds lying unmoving on their backs with their legs blending into the long grass on Mrs Stephanopoulos’ lawn across the road. 

            Harry Jackson was not a man whose interest was easily piqued.  He was most likely to dismiss any odd phenomena.  He considered them distractions. This ability to ignore distractions allowed Harry Jackson to lead a singularly focused life.  He never looked beyond the next horizon or even either side of the horizon.  Harry Jackson never searched for anything.

            Yet for some elusive reason that he did not care to grab hold of and examine, the sight of the dead birds strewn across his and Mrs Stephanopoulos’ lawn caused Harry Jackson to rest his forehead on the window and crane his eyes to peer down the street.

            There were dead birds everywhere. 

            Harry Jackson’s dry eyes sedately meandered back and forth. They took in the street and the birds’ graveyard it had become.  He counted different species and different sizes.  He noticed that they seemed to predominately cluster underneath trees on the nature strip. But there were also a few that had come to rest on the road, strangely unmoved by whatever traffic had passed.  There was little pattern to it, except for the uniform rigor mortis all the birds had adopted in death.  Their legs were in the air. Their toes were bent. And their wings were spread out either side of them.

            Harry Jackson stirred as if to leave his room. He wanted to inspect the birds.

Yet before disengaging from the window he noticed that Mrs Stephanopoulos appeared on her porch in a grey robe that clung to her portly figure.  Harry Jackson knew that if he went outside Mrs Stephanopoulos would engage him in conversation about the dead birds.  He didn’t feel like talking to her about the dead birds.  He didn’t feel like talking to anybody about it. 

Harry Jackson had so rarely been interested by anything that he wanted to focus on the dead birds that did interest him. The interest of other people could only be a distraction.

Reluctantly he turned away from the window and lay back down on his bed to think.  He reasoned that a strand of bird-flu was the most sensible cause of death. He was tempted to turn on the television at the end of his bed to see if the dead birds were unique to his neighborhood.  He decided against it. If this was a global happening he would have to deal with other peoples’ opinions.  So Harry Jackson lay on his bed in the quiet.  Occasionally he let his neck turn and lift so he could peer out the window at the two dead pigeons and the dead owl.

            If Harry Jackson had switched on his television he would have found that the avicide he witnessed on his street was indeed a global issue.  The plight of the Californian condor paled in comparison to the scenes of countless dead pigeons littered across cities and the thousands of toppled penguins being blown across the ice in Antarctica.  In ponds the world over ducks had overturned with their legs and webbed feet pointing to the sky.  Chicken farms were inundated with millions of dead chickens, battery and free-range, not yet ready for the market. 

            People were quick to jump to Harry Jackson’s conclusion and cried bird-flu.  People then noticed the dead bats, whose carcasses blocked cave mouths.  Then there were the insects. Ignored in the initial concern over the birds, people began to recoil from the mounds of dead flies, bees and mosquitoes that lay deceased on their backs like the birds.

            There were reports of mass ornithologist suicide.  Most threw themselves off high-rise buildings, flapping their arms and squawking. 

Chicken and turkey farmers demanded government subsidies now their income suddenly lay dead and unusable. 

Ostrich wranglers thought seriously about sheep herding. 

Like the ornithologists, entomologists cut themselves down, typically choosing to ingest huge amounts of insecticide.

Harry Jackson knew nothing of this.  His TV remained off. He had fallen asleep with his face turned toward the window. 

Harry Jackson was not one to dream.  Dreams are the product of a mind capable of appreciating distraction.  He knew this. He did not regret it. But Harry Jackson dreamed.  He dreamed that he was neck deep in a pool of dry, dead birds.  He could feel his naked legs being sliced by eagle talons. His midriff was soothed by peacock feathers.  He dreamed that he was trying to swim through this pool. It was hard for his stroke to get any rhythm. His arms were not strong enough to push through the birds.  If his dream had an end, it ended with him being pulled down by numberless beaks.

His eyes opened a little after midnight. Harry Jackson heard the sound of sirens and a sudden booming crash. He could hear ambulances, fire trucks and police cruisers.  The red glow of a fire flickered against his wall.  He arose from his bed and went back to the window.

Harry Jackson saw flame-illuminated smoke hanging in the air beyond Mrs Stephanopoulos’ house.  He saw again standing bulky in her grey robe on her porch. She stared at the sky with her back to Harry Jackson.

He was tempted to follow her line of vision. Instead Harry Jackson’s eyes went back to the two pigeons and one owl that lay still on his lawn.  In the dimmer light of the fires they looked more skeletal than they did earlier in the day.  Their black twig legs that had stood out in the sun seemed to disappear as the flames momentarily died down, then materialized back into existence as the flames sparked up again.

Eventually Harry Jackson was broken from his trance by the sound of Mrs Stephanopoulos screaming.  The sound of her desperate howl broke his concentration and for the second time that day he was distracted.  He looked up to where Mrs Stephanopoulos was staring.

In the sky Harry Jackson could see a plane dropping steadily.  There was not any resistance to its fall. It was not in a nosedive.  It seemed to be gliding. At the distance he was looking on from, Harry Jackson was sure it was falling much faster than it appeared.  He watched the plane plummet until it disapeared below the horizon.  He listened until he heard a booming thump and saw debris flying, spread out into the sky like ducks in formation.  Then he saw the glare of another fire begin and smoke gust into the air.

Harry Jackson turned his attention back to the two pigeons and one owl that lay fully illuminated in the fire of the most recent crash.  His head heavily rested against the window.  His nose was squashed and his lips slightly parted.  The bellow of sirens and planes falling to earth folded into the background. The black legs of the dead birds became Harry Jackson’s senses.

If Harry Jackson had been able to separate himself from the birds he would have seen a shirtless man running down his street crying out that the sky was falling.  If he had turned his radio on he would have heard similar chants the world over. 

Planes and helicopters with their motors still running and operating at full capacity were dragged down from the sky. Satellites were dropping from space. They pulverised the cities they hurtled into and, as they fell into the ocean, caused mini tsunamis to drown Bangladesh.  Tree houses were crumbling with toddlers still playing games of home and hospital. Kites refused to work. 

There was mindless panic.  People ran around in circles staring at the sky in hope of evading the next thing that would fall from it.  They feared that the moon itself would come down to collide with Earth.

People turned to science to provide a logical, coherent answer that would create a machine or theory or cure that would fix everything.  Scientists, though, said that they could not solve something that made no rational, scientific sense to begin with.

Religion proclaimed judgement day. God’s hand, they said, was pressing down on the Earth.  Hell was grabbing at the ankles of all who refused faith. Science and sin had too long been allowed in the sky. Humans had got too close to heaven. 

People formed pagan cults. They dedicated themselves to appeasing the sky. They argued that the sky had deemed itself too sublime for any mortal being or machine that crossed into and thus tarnished its realm.  They prayed to gravity for leniency.   

No one was bringing up the dead birds and insects anymore.

Harry Jackson heard and knew nothing.  Behind his open eyes that stared out the window, he walked through a field filled with dead bird’s feet and plane wings jutting from the ground at different angles.  Each step was harder.  The ground did not want to break touch with his shoes and with each step it gripped him tighter.

When the sun defied everything that fell and rose, Harry Jackson peeled his sweaty face off the window and lay back on his bed.  He propped up some pillows so he could rest comfortably and look out across his lawn without straining his neck to get a view of the dead birds.

Harry Jackson was a man who yearned for attainable goals.  He desired outcomes that could be fully dictated by his own clear actions.  It was because of this lifestyle that Harry Jackson was also a man who was short on hopes and dreams.  He saw no point investing in things that couldn’t be guaranteed.  He was not one to sit back and say “one day” or “I wish.”  Those hopes and dreams that float in the air were notably absent from Harry Jackson’s orbit.

It happened in a moment. Between seconds.  Gravity yanked hope and aspiration down from the sky.

Like Harry Jackson, people fell to the ground to stare at the dead birds that still lay where they had fallen.