Seasonally monogamous (Prose)

I admired a pair of mourning doves flirting under one of our front yard's three-ball topiary trees. They played hide-and-seek, smiled, squeaked, bounced around, touched, and ran away. They pirouetted, circling each other in awe. The world's a lover's playground.

In the garage, I tapped the button to close the door. As it started to shut, I opened the house door, and then the male, like a bullet, darted past me. Trapped in the mudroom, it whipped around the ceiling's corners. It was too fast to react. The bird shot past me again, swooping over the car toward the light before slamming into the garage's only window with a hollow donk. I thought I'd have to shoo the bird out, so I grabbed a green Swiffer Sweeper. I hadn't realized it couldn't move.

The morning light shone on the broken-necked dove, gasping for air. His bony face, how his beak trembled open and shut— I shook my head and grabbed a shovel from the side yard. It took four tries to scoop it up; using the wall helped. As I held the bird on the shovel, it screamed, and I gazed into the endless blackness inside its open beak.

The shovel was the bird's hospital bed, and I had to choose the room. I debated whether it was kinder to hide the bird in the blue trash bin or leave it in nature for the animals to take. I went with the latter, and before slipping it off the shovel, I looked into its wet, black, domed eyes and saw my reflection. I placed it on a thin pile of leaves under the oak tree in the side yard near my neighbor's. The bird's neck flopped over, its body tilted with it, and its wing gave a final desperate push to get up but failed. It fell like a sinking ship.

My daughter came with me in the evening to put away the trash cans. When the garage opened, she found the female mourning dove searching for her mate. It paid us no attention and did not fly away when my daughter followed too closely. It walked a line, tracing its steps around the front yard to the spot where I had disposed of its mate. When it reached that place, it turned and found another route, always ending where its mate had last been. It did this for several minutes until it finally stopped and placed itself in front of the neighbor's fence. It did not move. My daughter and I put away the three trash cans and answered each other’s questions about what had happened that day. When we went back inside, the bird was like a statue.