Just then, she sees something on the long ribbon of empty road up ahead; something fluttering, hovering low over the broken white divider line. Her mind tries to fit the shape and action to something known: a busted cardboard box flapping; a piece of someone’s clothing; a chunk of shredded truck tire. She lets up on the gas and drops all connection with her dead mother or her living pissed-off sister. She’s in her body now. She thinks it might be feathers; a red-tipped wing rising, then slapping back down to the pitted asphalt. A giant bird! She’s almost on top of it now, mashing the brake and swerving off onto the shoulder. She sees a piercing yellow eye as she passes. A scared eye buried in a tangle of blood and feathers pasted to the blacktop, the enormous wing thrashing to get airborne. “My God, it’s a hawk!” she says out loud. “A beautiful hawk! Oh my God! Oh my God, what am I going to do?” She jumps out and slams the door, then runs toward the wounded bird through the chalky dust the car has kicked up. She stops short and cradles her open jaw with both palms, a gesture she’s picked up from too much daytime television. She coughs from the dust and starts repeating “Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God!” as though it were a mantra that might somehow deliver her from the situation. The huge hawk keeps screaming and beating itself to death in the middle of the road. She looks up and down the highway but there’s not a car in sight. The heat coming off the asphalt is already broiling the crepe soles of her tennis shoes as she hops from one foot to the other. She inches in closer to the bird, still clutching her face with both hands and taking little mincing baby steps like she’s afraid she might fall into a deep hole. She tries to speak to the hawk in a voice she used to use on puppies and painted turtles. “Oh, you poor baby. You poor little thing. It’s all right. It’s going to be all right. It’s a terrible, terrible thing.” The hawk settles down for a second, smoothing its neck feathers, as though it finds something soothing in the voice; as though it were actually listening. Its torn chest is throbbing. The yellow eye blinks mechanically. The head cranes back over itself and then the whole bird explodes again into wild flailing and high shrieks, blood shooting in strings across the blank sky.