THE CLEANEST OF ENDS Gretchen Fletcher I didn't see the birds, myself. I heard about them from the neighbors, though, how they came all that day and the next, circling above your house, your shelter from beaks and talons, as you lay where you died - alone - not twenty feet from your neighbors' homes. They swooped in circles around your yard - the birds, that is, settling now and then in your orange trees, on the antenna on your roof, and on your clothesline where your clean sheets flapped uselessly. The birds were drawn to a scent the neighbors couldn't detect, closed up in their A/C watching their TV. It wasn't till someone, alerted by the birds, thought to call in the authorities to dispose of what you had cast off already as unnecessary and to get those birds out of the neighborhood. But in so doing they robbed you of the dignity of the cleanest of ends, to be stripped down to the soul and released to fly free and soar.

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