Summary

One Day after Saturday – Elderly widow Rebecca (the woman whose home was broken into in “Tuesday Siesta”?) discovers that the screens in her windows have been torn. Believing it’s because she’s been burgled, she visits the Mayor to make a complaint, only to discover that he too is repairing his screens – the consequence, he says, of dead birds falling from the sky. Rebecca goes home, and discovers that there are dead birds in her house. Embarrassed by not making the connection, she goes for a walk in “the brightness of an impending August,” smelling the “strong and penetrating stench of dead birds” everywhere.

Rebecca is not alone in not having noticed all the dead birds. Parish priest Father Anthony Isabel, in his early 90s and considered mostly ineffectual by the people of the town, has also been finding...