This area proliferates with seagulls. They're the rat of the coastal New World, really. Beautiful as they are in flight, and as much as I loved the book Jonathan Livingston Seagull, they're really disgusting, filthy birds - lice-ridden scavengers with no majesty and no sense of fear.

But that's not their fault, and they don't carry the plague, and I'm not in favor of pointless cruelty to animals. I usually just leave seagulls alone.

This morning, driving to work, I was singing (mumbling - it's early) along to the radio and pondering what to write for my entry today and wishing that blue car would get off my ass, and I absently spotted a pair of gulls having a little conference in the median.

I don't know what they were doing. Swapping stories about where to go for trashcans with loose lids? Enjoying a fine breakfast of roadkill? Just as I spotted them, one of them took wing and flew off across the other side of the road. The other seemed content to stay in the middle of the road.

That is, it seemed content to stay there until I was about ten feet away, at which point it decided it absolutely needed to fly right in front of my car.

I've had that happen before. Squirrels and seagulls both seem to make a game of it - leap out in front of the car and see how close you can get without actually being hit.

This one lost. Perhaps it was the fog hanging in the air, or the weight of its breakfast in its gullet, but it gained neither velocity nor altitude as quickly as it should have. I barely had time to take my foot off the gas, much less hit the brake, when I heard (and felt) a heavy thump. And then I was past. I looked in the rearview mirror to see the gull tumble gracelessly into the other lane. Thankfully, there were no cars coming in that lane. But the fog was thick, and I didn't see whether it got back up.

So I don't know the end of the story. Did I just give it the fright of its life and a few nasty bruises? Did my car smack it in the head and kill it outright? Or did I break a wing, dooming it to starvation?

I was travelling at least thirty-five miles an hour when I hit it, and birds have hollow bones. I kind of doubt it was merely shaken. I'm probably a murderess. No, wait, I didn't intend for it to die... Manslaughteress? Birdslaughteress? Something like that.

That'll teach me to whine, even mentally, about not having anything interesting to write about in my journal.

--Liz