In the wee small hours of the morning, after I’ve been roused by strange noises, strange intestines, strange movements, or strange music, I often think about my dog. Muriel’s sleep is deep enough that on my own sleepless nights I can (quietly) move around a bit upstairs, as long as it’s not yet 4 am. Any later than that and if she hears me, she begins to stir downstairs. Once she’s stirred, she’s hungry. And once she’s hungry, she’s loud.
This regularly leaves me stranded in bed, wide awake at 4:30 am and annoyed by Crankenstein’s extravagant and obscenely sonorous sleep beside me, but unwilling to move lest I curse things with Muriel, whose breakfast time is 6 am. By 5:45, she’s usually up anyway and demanding food, and I cautiously make my way downstairs to feed her. It’s a time of day when I’m very slow, and she’s impatient, and if I fall then I could hurt us both. Our routine from there is a well-oiled machine, one that went off without a hitch today until we heard a mighty boom.
By then we were in my office at the back of the house. Muriel, having already eaten and gone outside, was dozing in a nearby armchair as I yawned at my desk. Crankenstein has observed that I’m “uniquely terrible” at discerning from which direction noises originate, and living in a house with plaster walls has only made it harder. On top of everything else, our ancient boiler was clanging away in the room beneath us when the boom sounded, startling us both.
Muriel instinctively leapt from her chair as I rose from mine, and I silently cursed Crankenstein, still fast asleep, for not being able to point us in the right direction. Following a quick sweep of the first floor to make sure nothing was out of place, I trudged to the basement to check on the gas and boiler, Muriel still on high alert. Nothing was amiss, but I continued to feel jolted by the mystery noise until, a couple hours later, I heard something nearly identical — and this time saw the cause. A large bird had flown into a window at the front of the house.
Rushing over to check on it, I noticed a couple of feathers lodged in the newly punctured screen of a neighboring window to the one I’d just seen hit. The first boom had probably been caused by a bird, just like the second — this time of year, fermented fruit and the position of the sun conspire to send birds drunkenly, and sometimes fatally, into windows.
For various stupid personal reasons, I’m spooked by dead or injured birds. On the day I moved into my previous house, a lifeless one in front of the mailbox seemed to be a harbinger of doom. And so I spent the rest of the morning unsuccessfully trying to forget the booms, unnerved by the vulnerability of migrating birds, so confident they know where they’re going, even as they plow headfirst into dangers that anyone else could see.