I Guess Everybody Has Their Own Thing That They Yell Into A Well

Today my cat, who is usually purely ornamental, caught a bird.

We heard the birds making a big indignant noise outside, so I went out to investigate and sure enough, the squat, striped, furry form of Miss Missy crouched over a medium-sized bird, that looked up at her and opened and closed its beak at her but no sound came out.

Unlike her more feral and ferocious late daughter, Missy didn't pay enough attention to me to know to try and escape with her prey when I walked up. As it was, it was fairly simple to scoop her up and carry her inside and shut the door. It was such a good feeling to do this, to be the omniscient force to remove the predator from its helpless prey. Having read enough books as a child about the ferocity of otherwise benign household pets when they terrorize small talking mice or small talking rabbits and wishing myself into the scene to simply lift them away, my feeling at finally being able to do this was, as Nicholson Baker might say, an almost overwhelming sense of joy.

Missy was more animated than I've seen her in years, running from window to window and whining to get out. She's a pretty class A whiner already, but the whining at this turn of events was insistent and really focused and I was as proud of her as if she was my own quarter-life-crisis child, finally finding her Special Purpose.

I had high hopes for the bird too. It seemed more in shock than hurt. Missy never catches birds (this one must have been asleep on the lawn or something) so I don't think she knows what to do with them once she's got them between her paws. Just bat them around until they die, is what I guess she would do. That's the thing about Pepys; she ate those birds. She used every part of the buffalo if you know what I mean, so I had respect for her predatory ways.

The bird had a lot of bird friends around too, and I was hoping they would be able to hop around and stir this bird out of its shock and encourage it to shake off trauma and embrace life again. I knew I was interfering in the natural order of things, but it was for the betterment of all.

Several hours later, I went out to see if the bird had flown its ivy resting place and it was gone.

I felt like the carpenter of my own happiness.

I let Missy out again.

Then my dad spotted the bird's corpse in the pond. It had obviously tried to fly or hop away and it fell in the water and drowned.

I hadn't changed the course of the world after all.

I refuse to see this as an allegory.