A Single Individual Magpie

The sheds behind Larkin Court are all the same shed, which is the only reason any of this happened. Same green door, same little metal hook, same smell of oil and dry grass. But the hook on the shed behind number 9 doesn’t quite close. Push the door with your chest and it opens two fingers wide, which is plenty if you are a bird and not a human.

Inside there is a shelf, and on the shelf there are screws in glass jars, and if you knock a jar over you have forty small silver things at once. That is my week, most weeks.

In June the humans started losing tools. A saw, then a green watering can, then a hedge trimmer that had cost more than the rest of the garden. A notice went up on the lamppost by the mailbox. The woman at number 6 read it out loud to her neighbor twice, which is how I know what it said: a single individual magpie is believed to be involved.

Involved. As if I had a lawyer.

A magpie cannot carry a hedge trimmer. A magpie can carry one screw, or one bottle top, or one ring off a garden table — and I will come back to the ring. But nobody on Larkin Court asked how heavy a bird is. They asked what a bird wants, and then they decided, among themselves, that it wants everything that shines.

The camera went up in August, screwed to the corner of number 11. Four days later it filmed a man from the next street walking out of the shed at number 9 with the good shovel held down flat against his leg, and after that nobody on Larkin Court talked about birds at all.

No one came to apologize. Humans don’t apologize to things that exist below their eye line, and on the whole I prefer it that way.

I did put the ring back on the table at number 6, one morning in September. A week of that woman looking under every plant in her garden was more attention than I enjoy.

I kept the little silver key from the shed at number 9, though. It doesn’t open anything. That’s why I like it.