The big elm in the center of the park is vast and sacred to Hare Krishnas. Sometimes they wrap it in garlands of flowers, or scatter petals on the ground nearby, or drum and sing beneath its branches. Two separate trunks push up through the ground, forcing aside hexagonal pavers, but I guess it’s still one tree, or counts as one organism, which is maybe the whole point, come to think of it. 

It was dark on my way home from the Happy Wok so I cut through the oval under the streetlamps’ orangey glow. The ground around the elm tree was empty except for one lump on the pavement, a small animal, a brightly colored bird. It had high-contrast red and yellow feathers and seemed especially far-fetched. As I approached the little bird it hopped a couple lame hops away from me, appearing injured and distressed. I stood very still and, glancing around, spotted a hawk perched on a bench twenty feet away, glaring over at us. I tried to shoo the hawk using an exaggerated clapping gesture, but it just flapped up to a shadowy branch of the elm tree and continued to glower and sway from one foot to the other. I looked around again, hoping vaguely for some kind of authority figure to intervene. We were alone, so I set down my vegetable fried rice and pulled off my coat. I crouched low and edged closer to the wounded bird. 

The little mass of feathers didn’t struggle when I scooped it up, just poked its head out from the folds of fabric and silently nodded back and forth at me on an awkward, diagonal axis. I gathered the coat and bird into one arm and picked up my food with the other. The hawk was either gone or covered by night.

Halfway home I realized that the small bird had died. I stopped and carefully unwrapped it, examining its limp little body. It had a deep puncture wound in the center of its back from a beak or talon, whatever mechanism hawks use to mete out death. For a while I thought about what to do with the dead bird, then finally emptied my fried rice into a nearby trash can and transferred the body to the cardboard container. I got my phone out to take a picture of the bird in its greasy coffin and winced a little when the flash went off. The photo was bright yellow and red and blurry. I folded the box flaps closed over top of the tiny corpse and wrote NOT FOOD on the sides in black pen. Then I tucked the box down inside the trash can and shifted some newspapers on top of it.

On my way home I texted Sarah what had happened while trying to think if I had anything in my fridge for dinner. Outside the post office, a man propped up against the wall asked me for change and I said sorry and felt ashamed about having just thrown away a whole thing of clean food. Just as I was starting up my block, Sarah texted back that the bird did not belong in a trash can. I immediately recognized that this was true.

The rice box was now halfway buried under the guts of a beef burrito. I fished it out and confirmed that the bird was still inside and still dead. I walked all the way to the river and gently shook the little bird over the railing. There was no sound as it hit the water. I watched as the small lump drifted away downstream and eventually lost all definition. The guy who’d asked for change was gone when I passed the post office. At home I dug around in the kitchen and came up with a Nature Valley granola bar and a jar of weird peanut butter. Sarah texted that she was eating barbecue from a place we once broke up in. I stood over the counter and spent ten minutes trying to reintegrate a thick layer of oil that had floated to the top of the peanut butter. In the end it never really came together.