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There was nothing to do.
“We could watch TV,” Mike suggested.
“There’s nothing on,” I said.
“We could play some more video games.”
“I’m tired of video games.” We’d been playing video games for the last hour. Mike was over at my house, because his house was boring.
We sighed.
The doorbell rang. “Jacob,” my mom called. “One of your friends is at the door.”
We went to the door. It was Kevin. “Hey,” Kevin said. “You want to do something?”
Kevin, Mike and I stood around in a huddle by the front door. You wait the entire school year for summer vacation to roll around, and at first it’s great, but by August… no one would ever admit it, but you kind of want school to start again.
“We could — ” said Kevin.
“Or maybe — ” I said.
Long pause. I could hear Mom in the kitchen doing something — sweeping, throwing stuff away.
“I have an idea,” she said, poking her head out of the kitchen. “You guys could help me clean the refrigerator.”
“Mom,” I said. “It’s summer vacation.”
“Okay, then why don’t you go down to the park and feed the birds?” she said. “You can take these bags of stale bread. I was going to throw them out.”
I groaned. “Mom, that is so lame. We’re too old for that. I mean we’re almost in seventh grade.”
“Suit yourself. But you guys either come inside or go out. Don’t stand there in the doorway; you’re air conditioning the whole neighborhood.”
In the end, we went to the park. No one could come up with a better plan. We sat on a bench and threw crumbs at maybe six or seven birds—some pigeons, a couple robins, a cardinal.
“This is stupid,” I said.
“Yeah,” said Kevin. “That one’s not even real anyway.”
Mike said, “Kevin!”
“It’s not,” he insisted, pointing at the cardinal.
“Kevin, I don’t want to know which ones are real and which ones aren’t,” Mike said. He sounded testy.
“But it’s so obvious,” Kevin said.
We all stared at the fake cardinal pecking away at the bread as though it was following a metronome. It bobbed its head exactly every two seconds. Up, Peck. Up, Peck. On every fourth peck, the bird paused and warbled a song. It sounded strangely canned, like a recording of a bird singing. Which of course it was.
“Roboto-bird,” Kevin said, then. I laughed, but Mike got really mad.
“What?”
“Kevin,” he said. “Why can’t you just let me pretend, okay? I mean if you hadn’t pointed it out, I would have been perfectly happy to convince myself it was a nice wild bird out in the sun.”
“Sorry.” Kevin backed down. “I was just saying.”
“Well these robot birds creep me out,” Mike said. He looked at a robin — a real one — struggling to dismantle a huge crumb. Suddenly, for no apparent reason, it dropped the crumb and flew away. “I always just like to think of birds as free, you know? Not programmed.”
“Yeah, I guess,” Kevin said, without much enthusiasm.
“I don’t know why the government wants to make all these robots anyway,” Mike said.
I cleared my throat. “Well, I guess they figure it’s better to have robot birds than no more birds at all.”
That nearly killed the conversation. I hadn’t meant to say it; it just popped out of my mouth.
I was about to change the subject — to talk about the new phone I wanted, or something, anything else — but then Mike spoke up in a grave voice: “I saw this TV show the other day about the birds. This science show on public television. It had a theory about why they were all dying off.”
There it was. Dropped like a bomb. Out in the open.
We were quiet for a few minutes.
“These scientists on the show, they called it the ‘canary in a coalmine’ effect,” Mike resumed, at last. His eyes were huge. “They said back in the old days, coal miners used to take canaries into the mines with them, because the birds had more sensitive systems than people did.
“As long as the canary kept singing, they knew the mine was safe. But if there were any toxic fumes in the mine, the bird would stop singing, and even die. The miners would know they had to evacuate.
“And then, you know, the scientists went through all the statistics.”
He didn’t have to explain “the statistics.” We knew what they were. You couldn’t log on to the Internet without confronting a new headline about toxic air pollution levels in Shanghai, or mutated flu in Sao Paulo, or yet another U.S. national park closing to make way for urban development. “We’re safe out here in the suburbs,” our parents would say, whenever the news came on. But then they’d give each other dire glances when they thought we didn’t see.
A robot sparrow landed near my foot. It pecked monotonously at an enormous crumb, unable to ingest it, yet still going through the motions of bird-like eating.
I thought about what Mike had said, and I wondered: What if the miners couldn’t evacuate when the canary gave its warning? What if they were trapped in that mine, with nowhere else to go? How long did they have before—
Kevin broke the silence. “God, Mike, you’re such a dork,” he said. “I can’t believe you watch public television.”
I took a deep breath. “I know,” I added, lightly. “I mean, we’re on vacation. What are you doing watching educational TV?”
“Yeah.” Mike shook himself, affecting a laugh. “I guess I was pretty desperate. There was nothing else on.”
Kevin said, “Let’s go play video games again.”
“Awesome,” Mike said.
“Great!”
We got up and headed back to my house, joking carefully about inconsequential things. Anyone who saw us would think we believed the summer was going to last forever.
Erin Ryan is an editorial assistant and copy editor who lives in Vermont, where she writes lots of science fiction.
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13 Responses to “GOING THROUGH THE MOTIONS • by Erin Ryan”
Comments
« THE WEATHERMAN • by Ed Buchanan | Home | September’s Table of Contents »
August 31st, 2010 at 2:02 am
Great piece of writing.
I loved the way that what appeared to be a coming-of-age piece changed tack effortlessly into a scary future-shock piece, then back again.
August 31st, 2010 at 5:16 am
Well written. So well written I’ll probably be depressed every time I see a bird this morning.
August 31st, 2010 at 5:18 am
This is a brilliant and subtly terrifying piece of work. I’m positively creeped out. I think I’ll go check the birds in my backyard.
August 31st, 2010 at 6:39 am
I was expecting some of the boys to be robots unknowingly and give it away through behaviour, and I was trying to guess if the narrator would turn out to be one.
August 31st, 2010 at 7:46 am
A very depressing but well written story with a necessary message. All to often, you hear things about different species of animals disappearing. I liked the way you had the government trying to cover it up, if we’re not too careful we’ll end up as uneducated as those boys.
August 31st, 2010 at 10:44 am
Yes, but which character was the roboto-boy?
August 31st, 2010 at 5:36 pm
This is one of the best storiss I’ve read on “Every Day Fiction”.
August 31st, 2010 at 7:13 pm
Thanks to everyone for reading.
August 31st, 2010 at 10:12 pm
Neat story. The only comment I have is that the voices didn’t sound true to those of 12-year-old boys. If the narrators were a little older, even teenagers, the story would have been more realistic for me.
September 5th, 2010 at 12:50 pm
Great story. Reminds me of the day I fled from Three Mile Island with 3 small children hoping the birds would keep on singing.
September 29th, 2010 at 7:26 pm
Love the sublety, the mundane revealing a terrifying and tragic reality.
July 28th, 2011 at 2:47 pm
Pretty good, especially when I found out they were feeding robot birds, make u imagine how the future could be!
September 25th, 2011 at 7:10 pm
We’ve already killed off 90% of the large fish in the ocean, so I can’t imagine birds are that far behind. 30% of the carbon dioxide emitted is absorbed by the oceans where it turns to carbonic acid.
The Caribbean has already lost about 80% of its coral reefs to bleaching caused by rising temperatures and by overfishing which removes species that normally aid coral growth. Acidification threatens to do the same for the rest of the world’s coral reefs.
Acidity is measured by its pH (power of hydrogen) value. Fresh water has a pH reading of 7. Readings below that are considered to be acidic. Those above 7 are alkaline. Surface sea water had a reading of 8.2 a century ago. Today it has dropped to 8.1 because so much carbon dioxide has been absorbed by the world’s oceans. That may seem a small amount but the pH scale is logarithmic which means that 0.1 difference actually represents an increase in acidity of 30%. By the end of the century, the pH of surface sea water could have dropped to 7.8, which represents a decrease in alkalinity – or an increase in acidity, depending on your viewpoint – of around 150%.
My parents generation has often been called the “greatest generation,” presumably because of the sacrifices thy made during WWII. Ours could be called the deadliest, because our consumer driven system of economics counts even the destruction of the environment as a plus to our “gross” domestic product.
For another really scary story (and Erin’t is great), read Bernard Mandeville the Fable Of The Bees, written in 1714.
The Root of Evil, Avarice,
That dam’d ill-natur’d baneful Vice,
Was Slave to Prodigality,
That noble Sin; whilst Luxury
Employ’d a Million Poor,
And Odious Pride a Million more:
Envy it self, and Vanity,
Were Ministers of Industry;
Their darling Folly, Fickleness,
In Diet, Furniture and Dress,
That strange ridic’lous Vice, was made
The very Wheel that turn’d the Trade.
Think of how many people will be desperately employed as the inhabitants of earth try to rescue something of a salubrious environment out of our toxic morass.