Maggie Levantovskaya
You were standing on the sidewalk when I jumped out of the car to check my parking job.
“I could move him for you,” you said, looking up at me and then back down, into the gutter.
I looked down too and saw the crow, lying in a shallow pool of dirty water, bits of crumpled paper and an empty soda cup around it. The bumper of my car was pointing at its body. My breath caught in my throat. I turned my head and shut my eyes, but saw the bird in front of me. The head was stirring, as if nodding slowly. One of the wings was twitching. The movements were mechanical, the products of erratic signals in the brain.
Your words came back to me. I looked at you. You were wearing denim, splashed with paint, and work boots. Your hands were at your chest, as if to show what you would use to move the bird.
But why for me? You said, “So you can have the parking spot,” as if you read my mind.
I had forgotten that my car’s rear end was in the driveway of the pizza shop. If you moved him, I would fit into the spot. But I couldn’t ask for this. It wasn’t what I wanted.
“He’s really struggling,” you said. Again you acted like you knew the creature’s sex and this annoyed me. But you didn’t know that, for years, I watched a man struggle to breathe. You didn’t know I saw his coffin lowered in the ground just three days earlier, at the first funeral I ever planned. You didn’t know that he had hands like yours—large, weathered, ready to do something hard for others. Or that those hands were soft and airy as proofed dough inside mine on his last visit to the hospital. Or that his feet kicked up and down while he was in distress but the nurse said, “He’s dancing,” to make me feel better.
But what you surely knew was that to move the crow was not to stop its pain. For that, someone would have to kill it. What kind of person were you then? The kind who moved the bird so it could suffer somewhere else? The kind to get a rock and break its neck in front of passersby?
What kind of person was I? The kind who said, “Don’t worry about me,” and got back in her car because a bigger space had opened up. The kind who wanted you to have some privacy while killing. The kind who begged for you to do what she could not.
But you were gone as soon as I had parked. I looked around for you, but didn’t see the boots, the jeans, the hands that I’d remember better than your face. The crow was still there—black, wet, quivering. I turned my back and started walking toward the campus. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw another car pull in behind mine. I heard the crunch of bones, or thought I did. The tears came but I blinked them back, afraid that I would run into a student. I didn’t get to fall apart in front of them.
I was disappointed in you even though I had no right. You didn’t know this was my first time back at work after my grandpa’s death. You didn’t know the night he died my mom rushed over even though she had a fever. That with my tiny grandma, she had somehow moved his leaden, suffocating body to his bed. That her hands shook as she squeezed out the morphine, eyes too watery to read the needle marks. That she was scared she’d given him too much. That she felt angry and abandoned by the hospice nurse who said that she would be there.
That the nurse showed up at the same time I did. When his body was already still, no longer thrashing for each shallow breath. And we could hold his hand again and ask him for forgiveness that we knew he’d grant us.
For days, I looked for you on campus, in case you worked there even though I never noticed you before. I wanted to ask you why you left. Was it because your lunch break ended? Or because I didn’t say “Yes, please,” when you said you could move the crow?
Maybe you knew I wanted something more and thought it was too much to ask of you.
#
Maggie Levantovskaya was born in Ukraine and grew up in San Francisco. She works as a Teaching Professor in the English department at Santa Clara University in California. Her writing has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, Current Affairs, The Rumpus, Lithub, Michigan Quarterly Review, Longreads, and elsewhere. She’s currently at work on a memoir about lupus.