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BYU Studies Quarterly

BYU Studies Quarterly

Keywords

BYU Studies, peace, death

Abstract

I killed a peace dove once.

It was spring. I was driving down a stretch of road lined with leftover remnants of apple and cherry orchards not yet bulldozed for new houses, new subdivisions. I don’t know where I was coming from, down that particular road, though one corner of my brain thinks it might have been the hospital, and that I was anxious and strung out from lack of sleep, which is why I didn’t see the dove in the road there, small, grey, invisible against the asphalt. I seem to remember it was early morning, the light just cresting the mountains like consolation, and I don’t know why I would have driven down that stretch of road in the early morning unless it was home from one of those hospital visits. Besides, something in my memory wants to connect the accidental suffering and death of a bird with my own human confrontations with death. But now as I write, I’m not sure it was morning, or even sure about the light. It could have been afternoon or evening, might have been a trip to the grocery store. Vacuum repair. Something banal.

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