I forgot to tell you about the sparrow

On the way home from work last night, I saw a sparrow sitting on a bicycle. When I approached, it did a singular thing: nothing at all. Singular because I am accustomed to the flight (in two senses of the word) of small creatures at my approach.

So the sparrow neither fled nor flew and so I very naturally stopped walking and dug about in my parcels and pockets for a bit of rice to offer him or her and when I found it, I remembered that the rice was heavily spiced and that I should do what I could to make it more palatable to this singular creature and so I chewed it a bit and sucked the pepper from it and then I wadded it up and placed it right under the sparrow's beak.

The sparrow was unmoved. So I extended a finger and stroked his (or her) little sparrow skullcap.

The sparrow moved, but only a bit, and only to express annoyance. And so I sat down on the sidewalk and I stared at it, the sparrow, for a bit.

Until a German woman on a bicycle asked what I was doing and if I would move so that she could lock up her bicycle and so I pointed out to her that the sparrow was unconcerned by our presence and then I poked it in the beak (softly) and she (zee German) said to me, "Well, maybe it's waiting to die."

Which, oddly, hadn't occurred to me, though I had supposed that maybe low blood sugar was to blame which I had already tried to rectify with the rice and I explained that to zee German and she said that maybe it was too late for rice and we left that sparrow there to die on its bicycle while she went off to park her bicycle and I joined Bridget on a trip to Dairy Queen.

On the way to work this morning, I stopped to look for the sparrow, but all I found was the rice on the bicycle.