The Fish and the Not Fish Read Online Free

sky.
    Bird fell.
    As Bird fell, he did not move his arms to try to make him fly. Bird held his arms straight out by his sides. Like this, Bird dropped like a big drop of rain that fell from the sky’s blue sky.
    Most of us closed our eyes.
    Some of us ran so as not to get hit.
    When Bird hit the ground, face first to the dirt, Bird did not die the way we thought that he would.
    Bird got back up is what Bird did. He rubbed his head. He brushed the dirt and the dust from his hands.
    Bird looked us then all in our eyes.
    What we said to Bird then was, We thought you were a bird?
    When Bird spoke, he spit out two of his front teeth.
    I am, Bird said.
    I’m a bird in the sky.
    A bird in a tree, Bird chirped.
    We thought you’d be dead, some of us said, when you fell the way that you did.
    Some of us said, We could not look up to see it.
    One of us then asked, Why’d you do it? Why’d you jump and choose not to fly?
    I had to know how it would feel, Bird said, to fall and not have the sky be there to hold me up in it.
    I’m a bird, Bird told us. I’m not an egg, Bird said, that breaks when all you do is drop it.

    The birds in our town, when they’d see Bird perched up in a tree, or up on a pole, they saw Bird, not as just some boy up in a tree, they saw him for what he was, as one of them: a bird. Who or what else but a bird, or a cat, would sit perched up in a tree?
    But there was this one bird in our town that did not see bird eye to bird eye with most of these birds. This one bird with a stripe of red that ran down its bird head, this bird saw Bird as what he once was: a boy and not a bird. This bird cawed at Bird to get, to go, to fly, to leave, back down from this, its tree. Bird looked at this bird in its black bird eye, but Bird did not want to fight it. But Bird did not want to leave. Bird did not want to be seen, by this bird, to be not a bird. So Bird and this bird that did not see Bird to be what he was to the rest of us boys—a bird—they fought. This bird took a peck at Bird’s left eye. This bird bit down hard on the tip of Bird’s nose. Bird did not bite, but Bird fought back. Bird took hold of this bird by its black bird wing and he pulled back on it twice till the wing pulled loose from its bone. Bird held this bird wing in his hand and looked at it for what it was. He did not know what to do with it, this wing, though he knew he should make some use of it. He looked at it some more. Then he held his mouth in the shape of an O, but no, this time, Bird did not sing. What Bird did, with this wing in his hand, when he held his mouth in the shape of an O (though he did not with his mouth sing), he took this wing, he brought it up to his mouth, and then like this he ate it.

VI.
    One day the boys in our town took some fur from some things that we found run down dead on the side of the road, this road that runs its way through and out of our town, and we stuck this fur with dirt and mud so that it stuck to the skin on Bird’s back. The fur, we thought, would make Bird look more like a bird and less like a boy and this would help him to fly. We took dirt and mud and mixed in the fur with it—black and white and brown, all mixed to make a shade like the sky at dawn when the birds like to wake up and sing—till it stuck to the skin on Bird’s back. The fur, it did, it made Bird look more like a bird than he did when he did not have fur stuck with mud and dirt to the skin on his back. Some of us boys said, so that Bird could not hear it, that Bird looked more like a dog—a dead dog run down on the side of a road—than he did like a bird, but if you want to know the truth, what Bird looked most of all like was like a boy who had the fur of some dead things stuck, with mud and with dirt, to the skin on the back of his boy back.
    One day Bird came to school with twigs and leaves and bits of bark stuck to the clothes on his back. It looked as if he’d