By Megan Hanlon
Two springs ago, a pair of robins tried to nest in a corner of my children's wooden playset. Each home they began building, I snatched and tossed hastily into the woods.
One spring ago, I hung on the playset an iridescent plastic owl with huge amber eyes, clutching warning bells in faux claws. With every breeze, the robins feared death. They did not nest.
Yesterday, my daughter found a robin beneath the slide, stiff in its mortality. We scooped it onto a shovel and buried it gently in the woods.
Perhaps it was a suicide: if you won't let me give life, I will give you death.
Megan Hanlon is a podcast producer who sometimes writes. Her work has appeared in Anti-Heroin Chic, Scribes MICRO Fiction, Write or Die Magazine, Variant Literature, Gordon Square Review, MUTHA Magazine, and other publications both online and print. Her blog, Sugar Pig, is known for relentlessly honest essays that are equal parts tragedy and comedy. She lives in Ohio with her husband, two children, and a disobedient Boston terrier.