Ronnie stared at the bird for a few seconds before reaching out to touch it, and as soon as he did, he knew what had happened: there was a neighborhood cat whose owners didn’t feed it very often, and they were mean to it most of the time even when it rubbed up against them and purred in hopes they’d pet it, and this cat (Reuben, that was its name—but how Ronnie knew that he didn’t understand) would run outside any chance it got to get away from its mean owners, and sometimes this cat felt mean itself, and it had been feeling mean earlier today when it hopped the fence into Ronnie’s backyard, and it was feeling meaner when it saw this little bird on the ground poking around for worms, and it felt the meanest of all when it pounced on the little bird and tore into its neck and clawed one of its wings until the thing almost came all the way off, but then Rueben heard one of its owners calling for it, and they’d sounded worried, like maybe they’d be nice this time, and Reuben had run off, leaving this bird lying here.

And the bird was Hurting.

Ronnie was very careful, very gentle, as he cupped his hands and slid them underneath the bird and lifted it close to his face, and no sooner had he looked into the bird’s eyes than he Knew: that the bird was in agony and was going to die a slow, terrible death; that the bird was a mommy-bird; that she’d been gathering up worms to feed to her children in their nest; and—worst of all, most terrible of all—that the baby-birds were going to die from starvation because Mommy was never going to return. (For an instant Ronnie flashed on the mommy-bird’s view from her nest, and he thought he recognized the street she saw, the one with the tree where her starving babies waited for her to come back.)

But first thing, he had to make the Hurting stop; so he did the only thing he could think of—he grasped the mommy-bird by her neck and quickly snapped it to the side, hearing a little crunch! at the same moment the bird’s eyes glazed over and her body went limp and lifeless in his hands.

He sat there and cried for almost half an hour before finding a spot to bury her, and then—not telling Mommy where he was going—set off to see if he could find the street with the tree where the bird’s babies were waiting on her, so hungry.

He walked all over the neighborhood, and even went beyond, looking for the tree, but he never found it. He cried himself to sleep for almost a week because he Knew that the baby-birds were all dead, having starved because Mommy didn’t come home and he hadn’t been able to find them. He cried so much that Daddy stopped hitting him (for a little while, anyway) and Mommy called the doctor to see if she and Ronnie could get in to see him a week early.