***
, so he left, closing the door behind him, and went into the other room and
turned on the TV, searching for some mindless wreck of a show, but instead
landed on some nature show on public access, being drawn in by the sight of
two birds circling around one another in mid-air, furiously
clawing and pecking at each other, obviously fighting over
something, and each one’s peck seemed to be perfectly dodged, perfectly
countered by the other’s flying parry, and the two were locking claws and
spiraling toward the impatient unforgiving earth and he had the slightest natural
inclination to warn them but obviously he knew it wasn’t live and they couldn’t have
heard him if it was, but it still didn’t seem that anything could be
important enough that both were willing to smash into sun-burnt stone,
so engrossed in their struggle that they were completely oblivious to
death’s uprushing inevitability, but since he had missed the
beginning of the show it was impossible to tell why any of this was happening,
because if there was a narrator he had yet to explain it,
***
