Magpie in Sandbox

We’re sitting on the wood planks that line the sandbox. Next to the local elementary school. You sip beer out of a vodka bottle and I look at the dead magpie in the sand.

“Somebody ‘ought to get rid of that poor fucker. Can’t be sanitary.” you say. If I wasn’t worried you’d make fun of me, I think I’d tell you it’s almost poetic. In, like, a morbid kinda way. Winged angel sentenced to life on Earth.

“Yeah,” I say instead. 

It’s Wednesday and it’s getting dark and it’s cold so there aren’t any kids around. I watch goosebumps rise on your skin and I wonder if you’re even aware of your own chill. You’ve got a lot of scars on your arms. I notice them, but what is there really to say about that?

I tilt my head back, and open my mouth like I can swallow the moon. I imagine it tastes like candy cigarettes. My dad used to bring them home from business trips, and I remember pressing those little white sticks between my fingers and resting them against my lips and breathing so deep, as if I could inhale grownup-ness. 

“You good?” you ask, but you’re not looking at me. You’re never looking at me.

My hands have started shaking regularly in the evening now, and I wonder if you’ve noticed how gaunt I really look.

“Mm,” I respond. I poke a stick at the dead magpie in the sand. Your fingers are stiff around the neck of the bottle, like wooden puppet hands. You’re waiting for me to say more.

I say: “You know they say that the stars we see in the sky are like, old images or something? Like they could be dead I mean. But we wouldn’t know because it takes the light so long to reach us. Which is kinda sad, I guess.”

You’re quiet for a long time. You sit there and absorb the silence. I let you do that without interruption. And in the meantime I wonder if the dead magpie knew something about the stars (or even just the sky) that we didn’t. I wonder if the dead magpie had the intellectual capacity to  keep secrets. I really hope so. For its sake.

I had figured we were ignoring each other now, so I am surprised when you bring your fingers up above our heads, and pinch your pointer and thumb so close there’s only a tiny sliver of a gap between the pads of your fingers. Your veins grow more blue against the night sky. If I shift my head the right way, a star slips between your fingers, and then I realize that that is the goal. You're trying to pick up the stars. For a half second, we’re teenage gods.

“Maybe it’s a good thing,” you say, and it's in that way where it’s half dismissal and half hesitancy to be vulnerable.

“Huh?”

“That we don’t know if they’re dead, or whatever. The stars, I mean. Maybe it's like a good thing that they can just, I don’t know, be there forever.”

And because you don’t like conversations like this, I don’t drag it out. But I am really thinking that some of the parallels of the universe are so uncanny. It’s real funny how we can evolve a million times and always end up in the same place, y’know? How in every timeline of every life, we will find ourselves sitting by the sandbox at the park.

“You think the magpie knew if the stars were dead or not?” I ask.
You take a sip of beer from the vodka bottle—why is it even in a vodka bottle?—before you respond: “Seriously?” 

I don’t say anything back.

The night gets heavier on us, and at some point I’ve started digging a hole near the trees behind the sandpit. There’s dirt underneath my nails and I can’t feel my feet. I use sticks to push the magpie into the hole, and then I slowly shuffle dirt over it with my sneakers. I feel like crying, but I don’t.

You finish the beer. For a long time, we just look at the mound of dirt where only we know a dead magpie is buried. Buried with its secrets about stars (and the universe), maybe. It’s very melodramatic but I can’t find it in me to be self-conscious.

The next time we come back to the park, there will be no visible mound, nor any visible dead birds. I will think about candy cigarettes, and whether or not the universe really is infinite. And while we will never talk about it again, I will often think about that magpie, its body turned desperately meaningful, half a star itself.