New corpse of a bird

The new corpse of a bird turns
obscenely under her tyre, its
fat grey ball of a body drawing nearer
too quickly to be avoided. One wing
rests erect after the bird has been
run over, waving a lissom goodbye
through the rear view mirror.

On their only family trip to England
seventeen years ago, her father hit a bird,
unceremoniously, while driving a skinny lane
banked with snow on both sides. In the
nearing dusk he couldn’t find the lodge
they were to stay in, and he was driving and
living slow enough not to kill anyone. Its
dying thump was too loud. Her brother woke
with a start and asked, voice coated
with the shock of rent sleep, “What was that?”
“A branch,” her mother replied,
not looking up from the map,
and she realised then that her parents could lie,
so casually, the desire to shield from
unpleasant truths automatic and diligent,
though her brother was watering down the
vodka in the sideboard by then. She never told them
that she saw a pulse of red as its body split.

And after those seventeen years of
thinking about the bird her gentle father killed,
it is so easy to roll over a body; it feels like
nothing, like a patch of uneven asphalt, buckled
and waiting for repair. She thinks about the
tiny crunch of its bones, and if she
could have got close enough to hear it. What would
biting into its cooked body feel like?
Would its organs pop like grapes? Or like
the tumescent pearled hearts they got in
callow handfuls at the chemist, which fell apart
slowly in the bath unless she burst their silky skins
between her fingerprints. Catching her own
wide-eyed gaze in the mirror, she imagines
she can see its contorted wing sticking up,
still waving, all those hundreds of metres
behind her. It was already dead,
before she ran it over.
She’s sure.