The Magpie

The magpie crunched a still-kicking beetle in its cadmium yellow beak while perched on the skull that had once been used by a special-needs schoolteacher named Stacey Dobbs, but which presently housed a cacophony of insects harvesting the few remaining bits of soft tissue. Mrs. Dobbs’s last favorite student had been Max. Seven years old. Adopted from Ethiopia by Steven and Miranda Schwartzberg. He was so sweet. And the way he beamed every morning when he arrived at school was that year’s reminder why she did what she did, despite how heartbreaking the job could be at times. Yet, for some reason, the last image to light up the hippocampus, neocortex, and amygdala—all long-since digested into the biosphere—happened to be the inscrutable frown worn one afternoon on the face of little Eileen Davis, one of her first students. Strange. She hadn’t thought of Eileen in years.

Food was abundant for now. No need to steal from each other or forage with much urgency. Beetles, ants, spiders, grasshoppers, even the smaller snakes were plentiful in locations where they had never been found before. And the remaining protein in the larger carcasses—like Anthony Barrow, the truck driver from Stockton, who left almost 400 pounds of matter slumped against the mailbox on the corner—still provided plenty of nutrition as well as an unfamiliar succulence for most of the diners feasting at the intersection at 8th and N Streets. There must have been a few thousand yellow-billed magpies, crows, jays, sparrows, and pigeons working the capitol mall without a squabble among them. Other than the arrival of a hawk or some other raptor, there was hardly a reason to interrupt a meal and take flight. Certainly not as often as there used to be. The birds of course had no capacity to consider why things were different now. They could only sense that there was a diminishment in the overall level of anxiety.

Stepping off the left parietal that used to belong to Stacey Dobbs, the magpie spread its elegant fan of black and navy coverts and white outer web and beat an ascent until it reached an altitude of about twenty-five to thirty feet and then glided southwest along the center islands of the mall, scanning the battleground for movement. The tangle of carcasses and detritus was much denser near the domed mountain of the capitol, as this had been the epicenter of the real clashes. Where the clubs and fists and batons flailed, the blood spattered, and the bones broke. The magpie dove toward the pile, believing it saw some activity near the cracked skull of James Archer, whose wife had begged him not to go, and when he didn’t listen, she packed a bag and drove, furious and weeping, to her friend Barbara Toomey’s house in Rio Linda, where she would stay a few days or a week while she “figured things out.” At least that’s what she told herself, knowing that she would probably give in and return to James after cooling off for only a day or two.

It was not the Rawlings baseball bat wielded by Peter Linker that killed James, but the shots fired from the Bryco Model 38 handgun and the AR15 belonging respectively to Leslie and David McTavish, the YouTube conspiracy-theory millionaires from the community of Abbeys Gate, where they had left their children Brianna and Thomas, ages 10 and 12, in the care of the nanny Carla Blexner, while they went to the capitol to make a stand. It was Officers Lydell and Bancroft who dropped the McTavishes; and then, as irony would have it, it was Ken Silverstone, whose clothing had marked him as the McTavishes’ next target, who wound up battering Officer Lydell with the crowbar he had brought with him “just in case.”

The yellow-billed magpie alighted in a small clearing just a few yards from the capitol steps where it used its beak like a pry bar to flip over what used to be Amelia Alvarado’s C7 vertebra, sensing there might be a cricket or something underneath. Instead, the bird was startled by a bright gleam of sunlight reflecting off the little gold, heart-shaped locket it had uncovered, lying on the patina of sand that was steadily piling up on the concrete walkway. (The dessert would return very soon.) The locket had of course been a gift. Todd Clemson finally worked up the nerve to ask Amelia out on a date in February of their senior year at River City High School, and by mid-March, they were going steady. At prom, which was the same night Todd gave her the locket, most of their fellow students thought they looked like a golden couple but, there were others, especially Sam Butler, who felt it was their place to expound upon everything that was wrong with a white guy dating a Hispanic girl. Had there not been chaperones, it might have come to blows. Interestingly enough, at the very moment that the magpie turned its black head away from the bright sun-glint off the locket, a mother coyote happened to be carrying the femur that used to belong to Sam Butler down Shasta Way, where her pups waited in the shade of an olive tree in front of a house that had been the home of Amelia’s best friend, Maria Rivera.

The magpie found one more morsel. A trapdoor spider scurrying in the folds of a nylon flag that was mostly buried in the sand with just a few fragments of red, white, dark blue, and a couple of stars still poking above the surface. The bird plucked the spider from the shadow in the folds and then soared once again above the battlefield, feeling energized by a good morning’s hunt and the warm sun that turned its blue coverts iridescent as it beat the air in a climb, flew over the capitol building, and glided to the nest in the orange tree in what used to be the Civil War Memorial Grove. The magpie would have to migrate soon. The garden behind the capitol was already failing. But there would be trees on the bank of the river where, a long time ago, gold was found and started the stampede into the West. Still, the magpie could not comprehend the fulsomeness of its good fortune. After all, if things had gone according to plan, the yellow-billed magpies were on track to lose one hundred percent of their territory in just a few years. At least that was the prediction the Audubon Society published on the same web page that dispelled the myth that these birds steal shiny objects, which is why this magpie did not take Amelia Alvarado’s gold, heart-shaped locket. That was something magpies only did in stories, and stories no longer existed. In fact, they never did.