I find myself a granola bar and sit at the table across from the boy to watch. Though his head remains bent forward, I can see that he looks sickly, insipid. His eyes are two dark smears of charcoal in the darkness and his nose juts to a sharp aristocratic point; that is all that I can make of his face. I’d like to ask him who he is, but we cannot interact through the span of time. He is a memory; I am not here to him. He would neither see nor hear me. I am an invisible observer.

His fingers find the bird’s tiny heaving chest, and he caresses the soft black feathers with fingers that look clumsy but strive to be delicate and adroit. The tender moonlight puts me in a state of calm, and I understand why it is so easy for Mother to get caught up in the past.

He begins tugging gently on the feathers, lifting them to see what lies beneath, to see what secrets they hide. The bird struggles vainly. His tugging grows more insistent. What is he doing? What is he looking for? He yanks hard on a feather, which snaps free, and he brings it close to his night-blurred face, inspecting the fine black filaments curiously, scientifically, before letting it go and watching it drift and twirl back to the table, where it settles among the other feathers.

The granola goes dry in my mouth and I find it hard to swallow. How dare you, I want to tell him. How dare you. It is a poor, injured creature, and just because you are bigger than it does not give you the right to be cruel.

The boy continues to divest the bird of its patchy coat of feathers, and more and more skin shows through. He plucks them one by one while the pitiful creature lies prone, its black eyes staring dementedly at the ceiling through the pain of its denuding.

“Stop it,” I whisper, horrified, repulsed, even knowing the boy cannot hear me.

He hesitates with his fingers on the next feather, his head cocked as if listening, but the moment passes and he finishes his plucking. He does this methodically, with neither malice nor anger but with a clinical detachment.

When the bird is fully stripped, retaining only a few pitiful tufts here and there, I see what the boy sees, what the boy perhaps wanted to see all along: a scrawny wretched creature that hardly looks like a bird anymore at all but instead like some hideous alien from whose frightful skull bulge round black eyes and a predacious beak. I should feel sorry for the bird, but now I can feel only repulsed by the ugly thing it is. I want it to go away, to die, not to have existed in the first place, for how can such a lovely bird look so hideous in its naked skin? It is not at all like a proud tree shed of its autumnal cloak, stark and spindly; it is sad, vile, unnatural.