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6 Vulgar Remedies (2): If You Hold a Dying Creature during Childhood you’ll have shaky hands all your life. I thought caffeine, a strained tendon from typing with my wrists curved back. I thought bad nerves. Instead, it was the bird—a brown cardinal—I scooped into my shirt from the middle of the street whose stunned neck rolled loosely from side to side. I tried not to rock the bird too hard in my hem. Seven years old. I walked slowly the whole way home. My mother helped me pillow the bird on tissues in a glass hamster cage. The next day I returned from school to find no bird. I believed my mother when she said she drove it to a special doctor in the country. A week later she told me she telephoned to find the cardinal had healed and flown. But since I’ve been grown, I’ve tried to imagine the woman who lives in the woods and makes the tiniest neck braces for wild cardinals. I’ve raised a book to my face at night and realized my fingertips shake. And there’s a current that curves up my arm like a broken-necked bird flying straight to the bone. ...

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