grey

It's early evening on a gloomy English summer day: heavy overcast, the hint of rain.

On the roof ridge opposite, a pair of wood pigeons are grooming themselves. Periodically they stop and look around, seeming lost. In my anthropomorphic oversensitivity, I imagine I know why: when I parked the car this morning after driving back from my parents' place, I unloaded my pile of stuff from the boot and, hands and arms full, started walking towards my front door. I noticed a grey mass of feathers in the road and thought, "ah, squashed wood pigeon' - it was too small to be a whole live bird. Then it moved.

I looked a bit closer: it was an unfledged youngster, with blood on its back and some small feathers scattered around it. I took all that in in mid-stride, saw its slow-blinking eye (or maybe imagined that bit). All the way to my front door, I was rationalising to myself that there was nothing I could do to help it, so I might as well just go in and forget about it. As I opened the door, I had a vision of a car backing out of the drive and over it, or of a cat coming and finishing it off.

So I had to go back, didn't I?

It was pathetic and feeble there on the damp tarmac: wings only half formed, clawed feet clenched tight, its body expanding and contracting with laboured breathing. As I stooped over it, it registered my presence and made a strange gasping noise, paddling its legs in an attempt to get away. It opened its beak wide, and I could see that there was blood there, too.

Horrible.

I picked it up, gingerly, not wanting to frighten or hurt it. I could feel the softness of its feathers against my fleshy palms, and its ribs and wing bones. As ever, I felt that sense of the bird's heart palpitating, not sure if it was really my own. I could see the wide-open beak, the extended tongue, the frightened-looking eye, the bloody back and feeble wings. The legs stretched and tensed..

I put it in the undergrowth under someone's hedge. It tried to drag itself into the shadows.

I felt rotten. What a horrible way to start the day.

The adult birds are resting on the roof ridge now. I must stop anthropomorphising.