The Silent Bird

I didn't speak yesterday, didn't tweet or post anything on facebook, no answering of the phone and finger signing to answer questions in class and being translated by my friend Lindsey. It was odd because I felt like the great observer. I read everything, I listened to everything, I saw everything, but I wasn't changing any of it. It was almost like being invisible. I was going to write about the Vow of Silence and the way it felt and seemed and everything described above, but arriving at my house I saw a wing poking out of the leaf gutter above my porch. A bird had died, probably by hitting my parents' bedroom window, and then fallen into the pipe with the leaves and the rain. It made me indescribably sad to see, because I love birds and find far too many of them dead.
I put my things inside, got out the stepladder and the rag of one of my swaddling blankets from when I was a baby, which I never use for cleaning because it just seems wrong, but I couldn't think of a better shroud for a bird than one that kept three consecutive babies warm and safe, and then their dolls got dragged around in it and indoor picnics were had on it and it got too ragged to be used again.
I climbed up on the ladder, but I wasn't tall enough to see what I was doing, and it's a deep gutter and the ground the ladder was on was slightly uneven and no one was spotting me and I just couldn't do it. I carefully tucked the silvery, strong feathers over the edge so that my mum wouldn't see, then put the stepladder and rag in the carport and wrote a note to my dad to deal with it, since he's several inches taller. Then I had a panic attack. The birds make me sad, but I take the shovel and dig a hole in the forest a stone's throw from my house, bury the bird and sink an acorn a couple of inches deep over the small animal's grave, so that someday there will be a tree there to guard the poor little thing. But this time, I couldn't bury the bird. The bird was in the gutter and I couldn't get it out and I knew that my father would call me crazy for burying the bird and throw it into the garbage bin with a joke about carbon sequestering. And then I couldn't breathe and my hands were shaking so hard that I couldn't get a glass of water and had to put my face right down to the sink and drink from the tap, trying to get water through my constricted throat, trying to breathe. Slowly, it went away and I went back to my business, but that little bird is still in my thoughts. My dad said it was dealt with, but I was too afraid to ask what he'd done with it, too afraid that I knew the answer.
Poor little bird.