Lost
It was the shadow he saw first, the shadow of a bird sweeping the wall from right to left, and abandoning his game, he swiveled and saw it in the top left-hand corner of the large pane, holding in midair. The window was shut tight, as it always was when he was left alone in the house, and so he stood at the sill, content simply to watch. It hovered in place, gently rising and falling, wings beating so hard that they were almost invisible, like the blades of the red fan in the living room. Then it cocked its head, fixed him with a stare, and flicked away.
He sat down abruptly, his breathing almost at a standstill. At last he’d seen it, the sparrow that his mother said watched him for her, which told her everything he did, which he’d always hoped he might catch sight of and never had. He’d dreamed of the moment when he could go to his mother and inform her, triumphantly: I saw your bird!
But he never had. Her bird was very good at hiding. It hid when he was at home and even managed to stay out of sight at school, where the stern sentries Miss Amal and Mr. Esam saw all. Even there it would slip in and watch him. He knew it must be there because when he’d get home his mother would tell him off for not finishing his sandwiches, for talking in class. And it came on the bus, too, tucked away so it could inform her how bad he’d been on the way to school and back. It told her things that he himself had forgotten. He longed for a glimpse of it, if only in the moment it was whispering his news into his mother’s ear; to catch them in the act. There was a lot of time spent peering through the keyhole of his mother’s vast bedroom, silently observing her as she leaned out the window or stood on the balcony. But nothing, and he came to the conclusion that the bird must visit her at night, once he was fast asleep. He would fight to stay awake, to wait up, but every time he’d find himself suddenly delivered to morning with no idea how or when he’d slipped into slumber.
Right now, as luck would have it, he wasn’t doing anything wrong. Shut up in the house and playing fisherman. Green and yellow fish slowly circled the blue bowl to a soundtrack’s beat, mouths gaping upward at his dangling hook. He’d been given the game the day the bus broke down and his mother had come to take him home. He was crying outside the school gate when he looked up to find her, and as she hugged him and wiped away his tears, he asked her if it was the sparrow that had told her the bus wasn’t working. She smiled and nodded. One of the rare occasions the sparrow had done him a good turn; a brief respite from its dispassionate surveillance. On their way home she took him to a huge store full of toys, and he chose the fishing game, remembering the cartoon he’d seen with fish just like these, and a boy who sailed across the big blue sea.
So today, at least, he felt himself innocent, and his joy at the sparrow’s sighting was unclouded by anxiety. The bird had nothing to tell.
