She is babysitting only in the loosest sense of the word. The two boys are in the deep end, sitting on some pool noodles. She’s in a deck chair, reading a novel that is neither literary nor pulpy, sipping red bull through a straw, sunglasses on. The boys are playing a game of hit the shit, where they slide one of the three pool noodles out from under their bottom, swing it around like a lasso and thwack the other over the head with it, screaming hit the shit, hit the shit, hit the shit. The noodles throw off high arcs of water with each shit that is hit.

     She reaches the end of a chapter and rests the book on her abdomen. Her whole body is in shade. She cannot tan, merely burns. Her skin is medically pale. What should they do for dinner tonight? An enormous hawk swoops in and dives at the children. Screams erupt from the pool. She shoots up from the deck chair, thumb still inserted in the book, and her sunglasses fall off and sink to the bottom of the shallow end like a diving stick. The hawk is back up in a tree.

     “I could feel it,” says the boy who doesn’t live here, holding his head as if searching for scratches. “It felt like a bullet,” he says excitedly. He means the wind off the wings of the bird. “It almost took my head off,” he insists, pointing to his head. The boy who lives here has fallen off his noodles and is standing on his toes, keeping his chin above the water, jaw open in a wide grin. The bird came no closer than ten feet to the boys.     The hawk shoves off towards the woods. “Everyone okay?” she says, looking around the pool area, as if to include the deck chairs in the question. Yes, they say, yep. After a few minutes, the boys are back to laughing. They do some water-based impressions of the hawk and find their way back onto their noodles, pinging around the pool like billiard balls in slow motion. She lays back down and reads another chapter.     

     The afternoon sun hides behind a sheet of cloud, chasing the boys from the pool. They change, leaving their wet bathing suits on the floor of the laundry room. The ornate tile is cold to the touch. She’s supposed to dry them, but can’t figure out the machine. There are too many options, with terms like Cool Start and Air Fluff. After a minute of searching for just Dry, she pushes buttons at random until the thing starts up. When she walks by the door to the finished basement, she hears them talking about how cool it was, their surprising animal encounter. They have only seen an animal like that in captivity, never in the real world.

     Dinner is Chinese food and a two- liter of soda, paid for with a hundred dollar bill from the envelope marked pizza money in the desk drawer of the father’s office. “Nice house,” says the delivery person, a young man around her age with a broccoli haircut. “Thanks, I don’t live here,” she says. It’s a long walk back to his idling car, down the stone path lined with fairy lights.

     She makes them eat at the counter instead of letting them take it downstairs. Fried rice with pork and egg. Noodles. Plain rice. Orange chicken, all hoovered with surprising speed. She doesn’t know if wood goes in the compost, so she scrapes the teriyaki skewers into the bin labeled landfill in a neat script. The only things in the compost bin are three banana peels from that morning.
     She thinks about texting the parents. Not about the compost; about the dive-bombing hawk from earlier. The ginormous birdie. Thinks about texting the mother specifically, but it seems like the kind of thing that could only cause long-distance worry. What time is it for them, anyway? The bird is gone. It’s just one of those weird things that happens. She’ll tell them when they return. She doesn’t want to call animal control; would they shoot it? If only there were a neighbor with a great bird call and a long, effective net.

     She kind of puts the boys to sleep by letting them drag blankets to the finished basement to play video games until they pass out. She sleeps in the guest bedroom on the ground floor with the door closed.

§

     She wakes before the boys are vertical. Games are being played, likely in the exact position the boys fell asleep in. The kitchen is the size of her apartment, light and airy with a marble island and the maneuvering space of a suburban grocery aisle. Sipping coffee, she can see the pool through the window, lined by waist-high copper statues of frogs playing folk
instruments.
    She makes a big plate of eggs and shouts “breakfast!” in no particular direction. They stampede up the stairs, beelining to the nook with the stools. She puts out a carafe of orange juice, no pulp. The boys seem impressed, though it’s no more than a two-star hotel might provide. She suggests they find time to go to the park or the lake, but there’s no force to the
suggestion, and they both nod yes in that way that really means “no.”

§

     The boys waste the rest of the morning on their phones before finally getting outside for hoops in the driveway, the basket short and tilted, the sand uneven in its base. She watches them from the step while vaping. Strawberry, low nicotine, nearly off it entirely. Her exhalations make the front of the house smell like fruit soda.

     The boys shoot long threes like Steph Curry, miss all of them, often hitting the garage door, which is luckily windowless. Now the hawk returns, appearing like a vision above the house, drafting up over the roof, wings full span. It tucks and goes for the head of the visiting boy again. “No!” she screams, leaping off the step, waving her hands like she is trying to flag down a boat. The bird peels off at the last instant, a few inches from his face.
     The visiting boy is down crying. She looks him over, and he isn’t hurt. The hawk tilted its wings, talons extended and grasping, before deciding to go wheels up.
     “You’re okay,” she says. “You’re okay.” Now she’ll need to call. She scans the sky; it’s a pale, empty blue. No bird-shaped mass in the tree line either. She can hear a mower from a house next door, down the street. She ushers both boys to the stoop before stepping out into the yard, using her hand as a visor, turning in a circle as if the hawk could come from any direction.
     The visiting boy is curled in an egg on the step. His friend is scared back into his own home, inside the screen of the front door, looking up for the hawk. Will he ever swim in his pool again? Will he ever walk without fear to his mother’s car? She stops searching the sky and and again tells the visiting boy he’s okay, lets him put his head in her gut.

     She gets them both fully inside. The boys duck downstairs silently. She orders Chinese food again, different dishes than last night, and an order of specialty ice cream—the visiting boy’s mother had mentioned how much her son was enjoying this vegan place that had just opened. Did they deliver?They did.
     Now she’ll have to call about the hawk. First, she should call the homeowners, communicating the incident with the proper level of worry. Speaking to them; not a message. Not leaving a voicemail like, “Please call me when you get this,” which could mean the store only had one percent Lactaid, or their only child has been murdered, or anything in between. Then a call to the parents of the visiting boy. Calm. After all, everything is fine. The hawk cannot open doors.
     Then animal control. Will they kill it? Will she get it killed? She’s been cornered into it. If she doesn’t call animal control, the parents of the child will ask her to. If she refuses, they’ll do it themselves. If she doesn’t mention it, the children will describe it first thing in the door. You’ll never believe it, a hawk tried to kill us. Then the parents will call animal control. 

     And what is wrong with it, the bird? It was vast, maybe eight feet across its span, but entirely lacking the heft needed to pick up an eleven-year-old and carry him away. A hungry but deluded bird. She sits at the kitchen island, waiting for the food. Maybe the hawk is old and senile, its vision fading, its ability to identify field mice and baby stoats severely impacted by the cataracts that have formed in its eyes, the little hawk tumor on the back of its brain. That’s where vision is processed, she recently learned. At least in humans. She pictures the hawk trying its best on a sad, empty stomach. She wants to put out food; she wants to wait for it to land, feed it leftover satay and teriyaki so it can stop dive-bombing children.

     First, the call to the parents of the house, then a call to the parents of the weeping boy, now washing off his fear with a first-person shooter. Finally, a call to animal control to report the bird. They’ll probably send over a man with a gun for birds. The bird is all but dead. Could she scare it off somehow? It will be hard to spot in the fading afternoon light.
     She feels for the visiting boy, crying in front of his friend, fifth grade a little too old for that. Will his friend tell? Will his friend mock him at school?

     But why does she feel for the hawk? She’s never been one to coo over every non-human creature. She finds those people strange, the ones more moved by an abandoned dog than an abandoned child.

     The hawk is trying to do a thing she was born to do. Programmed. The claws honed over eons of feedback into talons, and now one confusion, a glitch, and she’ll be snuffed by whichever town employee is the most crack shot and likes to earn animal control overtime.
     She opens the door to the basement and sticks her ear into the void. She can hear the sounds of the video game and does not hear crying. The boy who lives here is a good friend. He has shown nothing but care. Why both times the visiting boy? Does the hawk recognize the boy who lives here and view the other as an intruder? Has the hawk imprinted onto the boy who
lives here? These are silly thoughts.

     She walks into the guest room, plugs in her phone to charge. Now for the calls. First one to the parents of the house boy, away in Spain. It will be 10 p.m. there, Google says. They’ll either be asleep or just sitting down for dinner. They are in Malaga. She has it all in a printed-out spreadsheet, which Andalusian city they’ll be in on which dates. The other boy is sleeping over the whole week, the parents of that boy paying as well, but both families saving a little money. One house to watch, one babysitter to pay. A little extra, but not double the price. Two boys, one sitter. One hawk.

     She gets the machine, says she apologizes for calling late, just an update call. They’ve been playing video games, eating pretty well, being good about bedtime. Swam in the pool. Weather’s been good. Hope you’re having a nice trip, oh Oh by the way a hawk swooped in and buzzed the boys, it was scary for a bit, but everything’s back to normal now.
     Better to get the information out right away, she justifies retroactively, even though her plan had been to wait until they picked up. The end of the call rings in her ears. She can hear guilt in her voice, but can’t think of anything she did wrong. She remembers the boy tucking into her gut, how small and decidedly unadult he was. She is the one temporarily in charge of this echoey house and everyone inside it.
     She calls the visiting boy’s parents, who are in Japan or Korea, and they do not pick up either. Leaves another message, prepared this time for the beep. Sorry to call, there was a strange thing today with a hawk that swooped down close to the boys. Everyone is fine, but wanted to let you know I’ll be calling animal control. A bit of a scare, but no harm was done. Otherwise, everything is good and the boys are having quite a fun time.

     The boy who lives here makes his plate and rushes it downstairs. The visiting boy asks if she can make him sugar rice. What’s that? He does a poor job describing it; something his parents make for him that she won’t find in a recipe online. It sounds simple enough, though. She pulls down one of the small bowls with a painted blue ribbon around the edge. She dumps half a
container of white rice into the bowl, pours milk onto it like cereal, and adds three spoonsful of table sugar. Like this? Basically cold rice pudding. She can tell it meets his standards because after a bite, he is off with it downstairs, balancing a plate and a soda in the other hand. She eats a plate of garlicky rice and vegetables leaning against the counter, staring off into space before putting the food away.

     Back in the guest room, she can finally finish the calls. The one she is dreading the most, that will require work, attention, and the death of an animal. She Googles and calls animal control.
     A machine, too. Huh.
     Hi my name is and I’m babysitting at. I’m calling to report some odd behavior from a very large bird. A hawk, I think. Twice now she’s buzzed the heads of one of the boys I’m babysitting. No one’s been hit yet but the bird has scared them and is behaving quite aggressively. Hope the situation can be resolved without the death of the bird; let me know how I can facilitate.
     Someone else’s voice coming out of her mouth. Each time she gets a machine, a new, more professional woman leaves the message.

     The boys go to bed playing games again and she sits on the front step with her vape. Really down to such a low percentage of nicotine now. Mere weeks away from fully quitting. Under two weeks. Really quite close.
     The sky is black. The neighborhood’s streetlights create yellow UFO landing spots every forty feet. A safe little pocket of a town. A place different from where she grew up, where it was bustle. The boring simplicity of these upper-class families and their nice trips. The well-funded town, still with no one at animal control. She walks inside, sliding silent on the floor in her socks. Cracks open the door to the basement. Puts an ear in, then an eye. The quiet sounds of sleep. One boy has left shoes on the top steps. She bends down, moves them gently to the mat by the front door. This way, no boys will trip on their way up if she’s needed in the night. She heads down the hall for bed; leaves the bedroom door ajar.
     Maybe it was for the best. Maybe no one will get back to her. Maybe no one will even listen to the messages. Maybe the hawk overheard and has moved on; found some escaped ferrets to gobble in the town over. Maybe there’s no need to worry about her anymore, her beady bird eyes indicating vulnerability rather than viciousness, a trembling thing, and she remembers
just then that in an early grade she actually held a bird like that. A professional brought animals for a presentation, and she got to be the volunteer, standing in front of the entire elementary school, putting on the big thick glove, holding the bird on her hand. She remembers how the
glove itself felt heavier than the bird, her wingspan mostly feathers and hollow bones, a light little lady, just trying to feed herself and her family.
     There’s a bit of light leaking in through the window. The ceiling in the guest room is high, much higher than in her apartment. And did this really happen, this bird encounter in grade school, or is she remembering it wrong? Some other kid got to hold the hawk, or just the presenter, or maybe there was no bird at all, just a zoo employee in khaki wilderness shorts and a
baby alligator in their hands.