OWL, by Brandon McNeice • Cleaver Magazine

Flash by Brandon McNeice
OWL

A distant relative I barely knew once gave me the gift of sponsoring an owl.

I was nine or ten. The relative was my mother’s cousin, or my mother’s cousin’s wife, the kind of person who appeared at holiday meals and was introduced by first name and a direction. That’s Pam, she’s up from Hartford. She had decided that what a child needed was a relationship with a bird he would never see, touch, or hear from.

The gift arrived in an envelope. Inside was a typed letter on thick paper congratulating me on my generosity.

My generosity. I had not been generous. I had been in the other room eating a roll.

The letter said my sponsorship would support the care and habitat of a wild owl through a sanctuary’s conservation program. There was a photograph enclosed, a studio portrait with a dark background, something between a headshot and a mug shot. The owl stared at the camera with flat yellow eyes, looking neither grateful nor aware that somewhere in another state a child was being praised for caring about him.

I studied the photograph. The owl studied whatever owls study. We were now, apparently, connected.

For a while I tried to make the relationship real. I pinned the photograph to my bulletin board, next to a baseball schedule, a birthday invitation, and a school lunch calendar curling at the corners. I told a friend at school that I had an owl.

He asked if it could come to his birthday party.

I said it was a wild owl and could not attend social events.

He said okay and went back to sharpening a pencil with his teeth.

The sanctuary sent updates. Not often. Every few months a newsletter arrived, printed on recycled paper with a font that suggested prestige and a budget that suggested otherwise. It included facts about owls in general. They could rotate their heads 270 degrees. They swallowed prey whole and regurgitated the bones in a pellet. They hunted mostly at night.

Occasionally the newsletter mentioned “your owl,” though never in a way that made clear which owl was mine or whether mine had personally approved the arrangement.

Still, I read them.

I pictured the owl sometimes. I imagined it on a branch, swiveling its head in the dark, eating a vole with the unhurried confidence of someone dining alone, but by choice. I imagined a forest ranger kneeling beneath the tree with a clipboard.

“Good news,” the ranger would say. “A boy in New Hampshire is aware of your existence.”

The owl would blink once and return to the vole.

I never saw the owl. The owl never saw me. I was not its owner, keeper, friend, landlord, or godparent, though I would have tried. Had the owl written, I would have felt better.

At Christmas, Pam from Hartford asked if I was still enjoying the owl.

She asked this while passing the rolls.

I said yes.

My mother looked up from her plate. My father kept cutting ham. Pam smiled as if something good had been completed between us. The butter dish moved from hand to hand.

“Isn’t it wonderful?” Pam said.

I looked at my mother for help and received it via a mother look.

“Yes,” I said. “It is.”

Pam reached across the table and touched my wrist.

“You’re doing a good thing,” she said.

I nodded with my mouth full.

Eventually the photograph came down. I do not remember deciding to remove it. One day the owl was on the bulletin board, and later it was not. The newsletters went into a pile on my desk, then into the recycling. The sanctuary stopped writing. The owl and I lost touch.

For a while, the pinhole remained in the corkboard.

A tiny dark mark above the baseball schedule. Nothing dramatic. Not even an absence. Just the place where the owl had been fastened to my life by someone else’s hand.

Brandon McNeice is a Philadelphia-based writer and educator. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Commonweal, Plough, Hunger Mountain, SmokeLong Quarterly, BULL, and Terrain.org. A two-time Best Small Fictions nominee, he writes about the daily negotiations by which people seek dignity, faith, and decency inside systems that are anything but simple.