The House Sparrows Battered the Window for an Hour Before the Call

I had a feeling that whole day, and I want to start there, because the birds were the second strange thing, not the first. I woke up wrong. There is no better word for it. A weight on me, a wrongness I could not point at, the kind of morning where you check the cooker twice and stand at the door unable to leave. I rang work and said I was ill, which I never do, and I could not have told you what was wrong with me if you had paid me. I just knew I had to be home.

I spent the morning trying to shake it off. Cleaned things that were clean. Made tea I did not drink. And a little after eleven the sparrows came.

We had house sparrows in the hedge, always had, a noisy little gang of them that I fed. That morning a dozen of them or more came off the hedge and started flying at the front window. Not landing on the sill. Hitting it. Throwing their whole small bodies at the glass, dropping back, coming again. Over and over. The soft thud of them, again and again, a dozen birds battering a pane of glass in a way I had never seen and have never seen since.

I stood in the front room with my hand at my throat and watched them do it. It went on for the better part of an hour. I could not make sense of it. There was no cat in the room, no reflection I could see, no food on the sill. They were not confused window-strikes, one bird fooled by the sky in the glass. This was a group of them, deliberate, insistent, hurling themselves at the front of my house while that wrongness sat on my chest like a stone.

The phone rang at about ten to twelve and the birds stopped. All at once. As if a switch had been thrown. I picked up the phone and it was the hospital. My son Michael, who was twenty-two and driving to a job across the county, had come off the road. They were careful with their words the way they are when it is bad. They told me to come.

He lived. I want to say that plainly because I know how these stories usually go. He was in a bad way for a long time, months, a lot of metal in his leg and a lot of frightening days, but he lived, and he walks now, with a limp he makes jokes about. The crash, they worked out later, had happened at around eleven. Around the time a dozen sparrows started throwing themselves at my window while I stood there already knowing, somehow, that the day had a hole in it.

I do not have anything tidy to offer about the birds. I have looked for reasons. A hawk over the garden might panic small birds, but a hawk would scatter them into the hedge, not send them at the house. Something in the weather, the light, some trick of the glass. People have offered me all of it and I nod and I let them, because it is easier than the other thing.

The other thing is that I had woken up knowing, and the birds had come to say it out loud, and both of them, the feeling and the sparrows, stopped the moment the phone told me what I already understood. My mother would have said the birds were bringing me the news the fastest way they could, before the wires could, and that the feeling in my chest that morning was the same news taking the even quicker road, straight into me.

Michael does not remember the crash. When I tell him about the sparrows he goes quiet and says, that's a bit much, Mum, in the way sons do. But he lets me tell it. And I notice he feeds the birds now, at his own place, without ever saying why.