This is not a job I ever expected to have, but I couldn’t keep farming, not enough land, machines too old. I retrieve dead birds from the base of wind turbines and stuff them into plastic sacks. I keep a weekly death tally and give it to my boss on Fridays, a count of birds common and uncommon. I’m not supposed to tell anyone else what they are or how many. It’s a big secret. I’m like a secret agent or a private eye. If I tell anyone, my ass is grass.
Today is deep winter, always my favorite time of year, more so now that icing conditions have halted each of the 56 turbines that now dominate our world the way the sky once did. It is silent today, death stops for a while.
Yes, I have a job. Everyone needs a job, but as I cross-country ski along the unplowed road I am again reminded of what has been taken from us.
Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois has had over nine hundred of his poems and fictions appear in literary magazines in the United States and abroad. His novel Two-Headed Dog, based on his work as a clinical psychologist in a state hospital, is available for Kindle and Nook.