Burial

June 3, 2009

My doorbell rang. ND was standing outside my door.

“D'you wanna see something weird?” 

“Sure.” I followed her into her apartment.

“It's out on the balcony.”

Hm, mysterious, whatever could it be? Another hideous camel spider? I followed her out to her balcony.

“Look, isn't that weird?”

I looked. Lying on the ground were four dead baby birds, still in their embryonic stage. 

Scattered around the birds were shards of white, clearly the remains of the egg shells that had contained the poor babies. I bent down to take a closer look at the corpses. They looked more human than fully-formed birds! I remembered reading a long time ago about how all animals from humans to frogs looked alike at the embryonic stage of development. It seemed to be true with humans and birds. The wings had yet to fully develop so they looked more like tiny arms with mittens on the hands. Their peanut-shaped bodies were so fragile-looking, the skin on them gray and translucent. I felt surprisingly sad for these birds. They weren't humans, but still, they were a form of life, once living flesh. It felt strange and sad to be peering down so close to these now-lifeless forms. I realized this was the closest I've ever been to a dead creature aside from those belonging to the Arthropoda Kingdom, which I couldn't care less for. 

“What should I do with them?” ND asked after she'd swept up the shell fragments.

“Bury them,” I said. It seemed the proper and obvious thing to do.

We scooped up the fragile things with the broom and slid them into a Bakery & More box. The two of us walked with box in hand down to the dirt ground where the groundskeepers had planted a few trees here and there, not yet grown. 

“How 'bout here?” We stopped at a plot four trees down from the apartment entrance.

“Yeah, looks good. As good as any other spot, I guess.”

We each grabbed a stone and started digging. About six inches in, I paused. 

“Is that deep enough?” 

“How do I know? I've never done this!”

“Oh yeah.”

Throwing our stones down, we took the Bakery & More box, opened it and carefully slid the four bodies into the shallow hole. Tumble, tumble, tumble, tumble. I shuddered. We took up our stones again and threw the loose dirt back into the hole, closing it up. We stared at it for a minute.

“That's gonna be us someday,” said ND.

We stared some more.

“I feel like we should say something,” ND spoke up again.

“Here lie Huey, Duey, Louie,...and Gooey.” 

“Okay, that's enough. Let's go down to the greenhouse.”

We left the emptied Bakery & More box and picked our way across the uneven, stony dirt ground down to the greenhouse. We jumped across a shallow trench and ducked to climb through the opening along the side of it. Straightening up once inside, I gasped. So much leafiness concentrated in a tiny area! I tread the path surrounded on either side by cucumber vines taller than me, strings hanging down from the roof to hold up the growing plants and herbs, and all sorts of gorgeous flowers that one would never find growing naturally in this semi-desert region. 

At the very end, I found these really cool bright red, spherically-shaped flowers with spiked surfaces blooming from beds of leaves the size of two of my hands. I squinted through the back wall of the greenhouse. Through the translucent plastic sheet, the blurry red and gold tint of the sky was visible, hinting at twilight.  Another atypical view of sunset to add to my collection. We ducked out of the tent soon after, jumped clumsily over the trench and ran back up to the apartment, grabbing the empty coffin on the way. Huey, Duey, Louie, and Gooey lay decomposing back into the soil from whence they came.