A raven just jumped across the road in front of me. And I’m not using the term ‘jumped’ lightly here. Despite receiving the gift of flight the bird had chosen to stay earthbound and use both feet at the same time to hop across the road. He narrowly missed a speeding car before entering my lane and as I was about 50 meters out from hitting him I mused about his choice of travel some more. Even though he was infuriating to watch he was kind of adorable at the same time. I chuckled.
“You’re alright birdo”
At 20 meters out I saw the bird’s current rate of jumping wasn’t quite fast enough to get out of my way and I stopped smiling. At ten meters out my face had become drained of all colour.
“Oh damn, damn! Jump faster goddamnit!”
I yelled while honking my horn frantically.
At this point the bird took notice. He glanced down at his feet, to the other side of the road and then back to my car. As he fully grasped the world ending predicament he found himself to be in he stopped and stared back at me with wide eyes, his beak slightly agape.
“Damnit bird!” I screamed.
I quickly glanced over to my left and saw another car cruising along, the driver having the time of her life by not being embroiled in an imminent bird killing scenario. I noted there was just enough space between our cars for me to safely swerve away from the raven. Just as I readied myself for the manoeuvre though, I was transported back to a warm sunny day from a few years ago…
“Watch it!” I yelled out from the passenger seat. My brother turned the wheel sharply to avoid a rosy cheeked weiro who was ambling across the road without the slightest concern in the world. Upon hearing the screech of our car’s tyres, however, the weiro looked up and saw us hurtling towards him. Seeing his brief life flash before his tiny eyes he bolted across the road in a swift and sudden movement but in doing so put himself directly in line with our car’s left wheel. I turned around and looked out the rear window. A flurry of grey and yellow feathers were fluttering down softly from the sky.
“All good?” my brother asked anxiously while keeping his panicked eyes on the road. I didn’t have the heart in me so I turned to him and put my hand on his shoulder and spoke slowly.
“Yeah” I gulped. “All good”. My brother and I drove the rest of the way home without saying a thing. I don’t know whether he believed me or whether he could feel the truth seeping through the heavy silence.
With only a few meters now between me and the raven I considered my memory’s meaning and tried to learn from it. The weiro had made the first mistake by walking and not flying, that’s for sure, but it was my brother’s efforts to save the weiro that had in fact led to its death. In turning his wheel he spurred the weiro into action and scared it into running into the tyre’s path. In a cruel twist it was like my brother and the bird couldn’t avoid their fates. And then I found the answer. It wasn’t the raven but fate itself that I needed to outmanoeuvre.
“I’m not going to let it happen again sweet bird!” I screamed as I put my foot down on the accelerator. I drove straight towards the bird, keeping my wheel trajectory as predictable as possible, giving the raven a clear signal to jump out of the way. And then I barely even noticed the slight bump. This time in the driver’s seat, I looked at the rear vision mirror to see a flurry of black feathers falling down from the sky behind me.
As I drove home my thoughts lost their meaning. The world passed by carelessly. There were people walking dogs, running, holding hands, carrying shopping bags. Other cars were ghosts drifting past me. I looked at my hands on the steering wheel and noticed my knuckles were white from gripping so hard. A flashback of the raven’s slightly agape beak just before I hit him went through my mind. I remembered his cute yet infuriating hopping, him smiling so proudly to himself as he did so. And it all became too much. Every mistake I had made in my life up to this point ran through my head. I stepped on the accelerator again and began to speed. My brother and I were bird murderers. The same bird killing blood ran through our veins. My brother. I wondered if he kept making mistakes like me? And if he did, how did he continue to move forward through life despite making them all? I then remembered he had in fact said something to me that day he drove over the weiro. It was the thing that broke the silence, the thing that showed me he knew the truth all along.
“Sometimes you can try and do everything right and still mess it up” he said with his eyes on the road. I was too proud to show him that tears were rolling down my cheeks so I had turned and looked out the passenger window. He could hear my sobbing though. He put a hand on my shoulder.
“Sometimes you just can’t win” he’d said.
Speeding along the road with my brother’s voice playing through my head I couldn’t take it anymore.
“You knew that would happen all along, didn’t you?!” I cried out loud with tears streaming down my face.
“You knew it the whole time?! Didn’t you?!” I screamed. “Answer me!”
“Answer me!” I cried out one final time. And at that moment I no longer knew who I was yelling at anymore. The inescapable pull of fate or myself. I couldn’t even tell if there was a difference anymore.