LITMIR.BIZ

      It began with the birds. Dead birds. Dead grackle chicks. Had they tumbled out of their nest? Were they ousted by greedy siblings, dislodged by marauding ravens and beaked to death? Was it Shadow, the itinerant tomcat, the elusive feral feline that kept tongues wagging well after backyard gossip had turned to very small talk? The grackles’ eye sockets had been picked clean, their belly feathers plucked as if in haste, their slender legs broken at the knees. They lay there on the concrete patio, four of them, disfigured, stilled, frozen in time.

      Then there was the dead lizard at the bottom of the pool, a ten-inch striped little beauty with long, willowy digits and an endearing expression. I’d used a fine-mesh net at the end of a long pole to bring it to the surface, and I’d examined it for signs of life. There were none. The graceful reptile’s eyes were shut. Saddened, I’d cupped it in my hand for a while. Sadness turned to unease. I buried it in the shade of a honeysuckle bush.

      No, it wasn’t superstition, legend or a penchant for mysticism that triggered the disquiet, the premonitions. Many years earlier I’d come upon a dying seagull, a stately old bird that flapped its wings listlessly, its lifeless eyes turned skyward as it gasped for one last breath of sea air. The sight of the expiring ace flier had filled me with sorrow; it also produced a numbing fear I’d never known. I remember getting chills, feeling the hair on the back of my neck bristle as if caressed by a sudden, icy gust.

      Six months later, my mother died of pancreatic cancer. It’d taken months of pain -- constant, searching, tenacious. She’d turned yellow, gone bald, shed half her weight and slowly lost her mind. I’d witnessed this irreversible transformation with disbelief, helplessness, anger. Our evasions and lies had kept her hoping, fighting at first. Then she’d given up. One day, when the others left the room to stretch their legs after an all-night vigil, I’d touched her face and called her name.

      “Mama, mama, don’t go.”

      She’d winced and her eyelids had parted ever so briefly, revealing cloudy, swollen, lifeless orbs, like those of the moribund seagull. I knew she’d seen me, felt my presence, heard the words I’d whispered. She expired that evening. June was young and the air was filled with spring’s heady bouquet. A seagull flew by. Every vestige of childhood in me died with my mother that day. Only the dreams she’d dreamed for me survived, some as yet unfulfilled, others beyond reach except in the limitless regions of a mother’s love.

      I’d cursed her. No one understood the rage that surged within me. I felt betrayed, lost, abandoned. Taken for granted, often unnoticed in life, longed for in death, my mother would have been the first to grasp this paradox. No one else did, not even my father who, familiar with the contradictions of the human soul, had failed to recognize in his son’s calumnies the brittle fragments of a broken heart. Heeding her last wishes, we’d buried her ashes in a family plot where grandma Henrietta and Uncle Johnny would later be laid to rest. It’d rained that day; it would rain every time I came to the cemetery. And I’d grumbled because my shoes had gotten wet and caked with mud. It’s the nature of coincidence to deliver a hint of irony.

      All during my mother’s ordeal, and after her death I’d harked back to that fateful winter morning stroll on the beach when the majestic sea bird had expired at my feet. The sight of dead animals, road kill, but especially birds, would forever elicit surges of melancholy and angst. The grief I felt had not a trace of spirituality. What I sensed was visceral, dark, menacing.

      Many years later, as I went on assignment to Central America, the sight of dead birds would take on a new aura. Alive, birds symbolize freedom from earthly bounds. Dead, especially when placed on someone’s doorstep, they telegraph a warning, the threat of a looming calamity. Several investigative reports I’d written had earned me ill-omened accolades: a dead pigeon whose unfurled wings had been stapled to a small funeral wreath and propped against my hotel room door at the Casa Grande in Guatemala City; two dead sparrows similarly positioned on the stoop of my rented studio in Copán. I’d somehow managed to keep one step ahead of my would-be assassins but I would never look at dead birds the same way again.