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( 🦇 ) ━━ chapter one, When Eliot was nine she found a dead bird on the playground. It was an ugly little thing with lifeless, sable eyes that reminded her of two black holes on either side of its head. It was a starling — invasive species, but isn't everyone in America? Some would probably say that it's a good thing for the creature to be dead. It wasn't good, it wasn't bad. It just was.
Eliot blinks, her youthful features scrunching up as she stares down at the still bird. It looks at her with its dead eyes and she looks back like a reflection. Then she picks it up, feeling it's stiff body in her tiny hands, and lowers it into her backpack. She takes it home to her mother, though Christine can already smell the rotting corpse that had spent way too much time in the sweltering sun. She throws it out as soon as Eliot enters, and Eliot is left to sit out on the back porch and watch of the bird's body — it's not like it has anyone else to.
She buries it in the neighbor's garden under the veil of night with only the moon to mourn the little bird. Later, from the dirt grows a patch of wildflowers, and this is the closest Eliot comes to believing in rebirth. Her neighbor rips them out as soon as they appear and tosses them into the Walkers' yard. Eliot presses them between two books — Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar and Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five. The world is ugly and Eliot learns that people don't appreciate beautiful things.
Now, as Eliot sits in the hard seat, slumped back with her legs stretched out in front of her, staring out the window at anything but Ms. Marks, she wants to be that bird more than ever. Eliot had always been too smart for her own good (as Christine would say) and she had a bad habit of being too condescending to her superiors — though in Eliot's opinion they weren't superior at all. Age doesn't mean intellect, after all.
If Eliot was the starling then she wouldn't have to deal with any of Ms. Marks' nonsensical babbling and desperate attempts to sound profound. She's monologuing about the meaning of life — where we come from, what purpose we have here — and of course, the million dollar question: what does it all mean?
Eliot doesn't raise her hand — she never does. Instead she leans forward in her seat, leaning her elbows against the desk as she cuts the babbling woman off. "Are you familiar with Kurt Vonnegut?"
"Miss Walker, we raise our hands in this class," Ms. Marks responds as benignly as she can to the snide thirteen year old staring her down.
"So you're not familiar with his work?" she inquires in a way that suggests she's bored, pursing her chapped lips as she clasps both hands.
"I am."
"Well in his novel, Cat's Cradle, Vonnegut says this: In the beginning, God created the earth, and he looked upon it in His cosmic loneliness. And God said, 'Let Us make living creatures out of mud, so the mud can see what We have done.' And God created every living creature that now moveth, and one was man. Mud as man alone could speak. God leaned close to mud as man sat up, looked around, and spoke. Man blinked. 'What is the purpose of all this?' he asked politely. 'Everything must have a purpose?' asked God. 'Certainly,' said man. 'Then I leave it to you to think of one for all this,' said God. And He went away.
