Bruce Meyer
Sparrows Margot told me her father was God. She’d been watching television in the family room, her chin propped on the back of her hands as she lay on the broadloom. A bird thudded against the picture window. The impact left a smear. She ran outside to see what kind of bird it had been. A sparrow lay on its back on the ground, fluttered its wings helplessly, then stiffened. She screamed. Margot’s father, a doctor, heard her cry out, and ran from his study. He thought something had happened to her. She pointed to the sparrow on the ground. She tried to tell him the bird was dead, but the words wouldn’t come out. Her eyes were full of tears. Her father bent down, picked the bird up in the palm of his left hand, and with his right index finger began tapping on its breast, a steady, soft beat, faster than Margot’s heartbeat but gentle. He raised the sparrow to his mouth and with his thumbnail managed to pry open its beak and breathed into the dead body. She told me how she gasped and stepped back in awe. The bird awoke. Its eyes blinked rapidly and stared at her father. Then it spread its wings. Rather than fight the tiny animal’s impulse to be free, he opened his palm and settled the bird upright in his right hand as it spread its wings and flew away. “He really was God,” she said. “I had never seen someone give life back to a dead creature. We lived by a river. The picture window of the family room faced the shoreline, and the current flowed by as steady and mesmerizing as if one ripple chased the one ahead until they both vanished. That’s the way I think of my relationship with my father, the kind of futility where birds struck the glass and flew at it again and again thinking next time they’d enter another sky. 29
