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.