Found Bird was written by Susan Silas and selected by her Advanced Fiction Workshop instructor Lore Segal to be featured in Podium, the online literary journal of the 92nd Street Y Unterberg Poetry Center. Sign up for a summer workshop on Advanced Fiction or Advanced Poetry with accomplished writers Rachel Hadas (poetry in The New Yorker), Emily Fragos (Boston Review sampler), Sigrid Nunez (The Morning News interview) and Myla Goldberg (New York Times Q&A) and you could be published too.

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It began by accident. She was moving down the sidewalk and it fell headlong onto the cement walkway at her feet. A sparrow; soft and plump, radiating the warmth of life just extinguished. She leaned over and peered at its small body. No one else seemed to notice. When her back began to ache she became aware that she had been stooped over the small dead bird for some time. She stood up and determined to go, but minutes later she was still standing there. She stared down at the sidewalk; a few red ants strolled by. Then she decided. She picked up a small piece of cardboard and gently prodded the sparrow onto it and took it home to her cramped Brooklyn apartment. She laid the small corpse onto a sheet of white paper and photographed its lifeless body; first on its side, then on its stomach, then on its back. Satisfied, she put it into a Ziploc sandwich bag and placed it on the mantelpiece.

The next day she took the bird out of the bag, put it on the white sheet of paper and photographed it again. The sparrow seemed to have grown thinner overnight, but it was still limp and soft. When she finished, she returned it to its place on the mantelpiece. Within days, the sandwich bag exuded a sickly sweet odor that overtook the apartment. The bird looked sticky—a yellow ooze puddled at the bottom of the bag. When she opened it, the odor smacked her in the face. She shook the bird out onto the paper and watched a yellow stain spread onto the white sheet forming a halo around its thinning body. She leaned in with the camera. When finished, she rebagged its leaking body and placed it on the window sill. She opened the window a crack. It was several weeks before the odor fully dissipated.

Continue reading Found Bird.

[Podium: An Online Literary Journal]