A boy has a BB gun. It’s summertime in his childhood, a hot, weedy world. He pings BBs off metal cans. He shoots at a sparrow in a sunflower patch.
The little brown fluff ball is now at the feet of the sunflowers, in the dust, its eyes blank. Its beak leaks a drop of red paint that the boy knows isn’t paint.
The boy puts the BB gun away forever.
Another day. The same young boy sees sparrows fly across traffic, and one hits the side of a Buick with a bonk. A ball of brown fluff is on the street.
The boy takes it out of the traffic and puts it in his pocket.
At home he sets the unconscious bird in a shoebox with grass yanked from the lawn and covers it with a lid punctured to provide air.
Next morning, the bird flies quickly away, restored and ready to flap into the daylight. Still, the boy knows, then and now, that the books have not been balanced.
They can’t be. No such books even exist.
I don’t know if I as a kid I stepped on ants. No more.
The books are kept by a cosmic accountant named “Karma.”