I opened the doors to the small wood-burning stove and jumped back, startled by the frantic flapping of wings. A friend and I were in the middle of a weekend paint job for my parents at the building where they used to run a bookstore. No one had used the building in months, and it looked that way. Our job was to clean the place up and put a solid off-white coat of paint over the squeamish blue and lavender colors that the last tenants had done. I only opened the stove doors by chance, and after my initial reaction, I realized that a small, soot-soaked sparrow cringed in the back of the stove as two other dead ones lay petrified face down in the ashes.

I had not planned on this. I had planned on scraping and painting the outside trim a bright yellow color called Golden Corn. I planned on sweeping up the dead roaches as a result of bug bombing the building. I planned on rolling coats of paint on the walls until the memory of the last lousy tenants were covered up. And now there was this little bird.

What would Jesus do? Never mind that. What was I going to do? A demented Edgar Allan Poe thought passed through my head briefly telling me to shut door and not worry about it. After discarding the malevolent musing, I wondered if I could leave the doors open and hope the sparrow would hop its way to freedom, but it was apparent the bird was in too great of a shock to move on its own. The helpless creature had to be moved.

Fortunately, my friends had a better idea of getting the bird out than sweeping it out with the broom I held in my hands. He grabbed some newspaper we had for covering the floors and snatched the sparrow from ashy darkness. He carried it to the low brick ledge out front and gently set the bird down.

Although confused, the sparrow began ruffling its feathers and adjusting to sunlight and wind again. Since my friend was the brave soul who actually handled the bird, I grudgingly volunteered for graveyard duty, and with the dust pan, I scooped up the two dead birds still in the stove and shut the doors. As I walked back to the dumpster, I noticed the bird had moved from the ledge to the facade of the building. It can still move around, I thought. It will be on its way in no time.

We had painted for another hour when I heard a screech from the front room. Again, I opened the stove doors to some familiar frantic wing flapping. Our sparrow had returned. Maybe it came from a nest at the top of the chimney, maybe it wanted to check on its stiff buddies, or maybe it didn't know where to go. Regardless of its true intentions, it had come back.

Nothing kills a good deed more than realizing it accomplished nothing. The sorrow we felt for the sparrow was now replaced by disappointment and scorn. What kind of crazy bird would plummet back to its demise so soon after being freed from it? The answer was in the question. The bird was crazy.

My friend repeated his rescue technique with newspaper, and he set the bird in nearby hedges where it sunk into the interior branches. We even scolded the bird a little bit, warning it that we were almost done for the day and wouldn't be around to save it anymore.

We went on painting for a few hours into night, and the bird didn't return. When we returned the next day, I immediately opened the stove doors to check. Empty. It was a bizarre relief to stare at the ashes.

The building got painted and again lies dormant, albeit a much more attractive type of dormant. The new tenants will know nothing of the sparrow or its stiff friends. But it's just one of those little things that I can't help but remember and extract some basic purpose for having empathy for others. Even if the others include a crazy little bird.

Chris Jungle has not painted since that weekend.