Blood on my hands

This story involves a cold-blooded killer.

That being me.

You have to understand, first and foremost, that I never meant to harm anything. I went into the day with innocent intentions, oblivious to the repercussions of my stupidity, and left with a surreal experience that still haunts me to this day. If you're actually going to read this, please erase any judgmental inclinations, and try to see things from my perspective.

Here we go.

Twas a sunny spring afternoon during the ninth grade, my final year of Timberline. I was hanging with my homies at the time at my friend's mansion in Alpine. At this point, we had wasted a few hours taking frequent trips to the kitchen, raiding her pantry for junk food, whilst observing the wonders of the Animalia Phylum Cordata.

Positioned in the middle of a round wood table on my friend's back porch was a hummingbird feeder. Like a shrine to nature, stunning hummingbirds of varying hues and iridescent feathers flocked fearlessly to the feeder and partook of it's nectar, zooming right past our heads without a second thought. Little did they know their thirst would come at a cost.

My friend then goes on to tell us about how she's tried to catch hummingbirds before. We seize the challenge immediately and hatch a plan, gathering all the supplies. It was a basic operation that consisted of setting up a cardboard box over the feeder, placing a stick underneath with a string tied to it, and sitting a distance away, dropping the box while they were distracted underneath.

Hummingbirds flap their wings fifty to two hundred times per second, and can fly up to 34 mph forward and backward. We were no match for this specimen, and it took an hour and a half for everyone to accept that. Well, everyone but me.

I was frustrated with the whole thing, becoming dangerously passionate in our cause. While everyone retreated inside to get popsicles, I stayed outside and continued the endeavor, holding the box instead and slamming it down with newfound aggression.

One parched hummingbird entered the trap, it's feathers a breathtaking mixture of vibrant blues and greens. It lingered at the feeder, and I waited until my instincts told me it was right, then let the box come crashing down. Inside, I heard it rustling about, indicating fleeting success. All at once, it became eerily silent.

"I think I caught-"

I stopped mid sentence when I saw what I had done.

This image is still vivid in my mind. As I lifted that box, I saw the hummingbird laying on the table, it's head moving rapidly side to side as it took it's last dying breaths. Somewhere in the process of capturing the bird, it had acquired fatal injuries, along with the crippling loss of it's left wing.

I wish I could say that I saved it somehow, had gently given it CPR and nursed it back to health, but that wouldn't be the truth. Reality was a bitter and unbearable thing that day, but reality told me that I had just killed a hummingbird. 

Naturally, I screamed bloody murder. My friends came running out and witnessed firsthand what I had done. I explained exactly what transpired, tears filling up in my eyes, and they comforted me best they could, the horror of the situation crackling in the air around us. We slipped the corpse into a box, gave it a proper burial in her backyard underneath a flowerbed, and agreed to never speak of it again.

I learned an important lesson that day about taking things too far, where to draw the line between desire and insanity, and how unfathomably precious life is. I hope sharing this story with you can serve as a release to the guilt I've harbored for all these years, and perhaps prevent you from doing anything similar to this... Make good choices guys.