He was as good as his word. The bullet from the .22 rifle had gone right through the bird and torn its wing in half. Its little carcass lay there inside out on the orchard lawn, helplessly letting its guts be prodded by the muzzle of the gun my neighbor David held loosely, swaggeringly, in his right hand.

“I told you I could hit it. No problem. My dad says I’m the best shot of all the boys in town.”
“Is it dead?” I asked warily. I was afraid that we were trespassing in the orchard, but I also felt sorry for the little sparrow we had shot. Even though David was almost a year older than me, we were both just kids.
“We should get on out of here before somebody comes,” I added.
“Are you afraid? Baby,” David said, contemptuous of childish doubts now that he’d killed his first animal. He turned the bird’s carcass over and looked at it. “I don’t see the bullet. Stupid little sparrow.”

“Good book says He marks the sparrow’s fall,” said a deep voice.

We turned around and behind us there was a man. He looked like a giant to us, in his work overalls and his brown boots. He was Mexican, or Spanish, but he didn’t have an accent.
“You boys don’t belong here, this isn’t your land to hunt on.”
“We wasn’t hunting, sir, we just was shooting a dang”
“You know what they used to do to poachers? That’s what you boys are. They killed ‘em!”

That’s when we ran all the way back home without stopping for breath.

“Don’t worry,” my dad said later that evening, “he was just trying to scare you. He’s probably forgotten about it already.”
“Yes sir,” I quivered, “but he said ‘He marks the sparrow’s fall’ doesn’t that mean God’s gonna remember? Maybe God will remind him and he’ll come around looking for me?”
“Son, son, slow down! First off, that’s not what the bible means, son, that’s just a thing he said to scare you. You see, people like to take phrases out of the bible and say them out loud, because the bible is written in such a way as to sound old and scary.”
“It’s like what Samuel L. Jackson’s character did in Pulp Fiction,” said my mom, patting me on the head.
“That’s right dear. Why, even famous authors do it like how Hemingway took that line ‘The Sun Also Rises’ and used it as the title for that horror novel he wrote.”
“I don’t think it was a horror novel, dear.”
“Sure it was. Remember when they stabbed that monster with a sword?”
“You mean the bull fight?”
“Exactly. Well, that book wasn’t about suns rising, was it? He just used that name because quotes from the bible make you sound all big and important.”

Looking back, I think the day that sparrow died was the day I stopped being a boy, and started becoming a man.