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The camera caught the sharp talons gripping the perch inside the cage.

Slowly, the view tilted upward. The owl arched its body, feathers rich and brown, and spread its wings—nearly two meters across. 

When it began to beat them, the air filled with soft thunder, and the crowd watching burst into applause.

It was a program about Oats, the owl kept in Central Park, Manhattan.

My younger brother had recorded it before he was hospitalized and watched it again and again. He loved that owl. Yet every time he saw Oats locked behind iron bars—creatures meant to soar free under the open sky—his heart ached.

On the morning of April 1st, I was planning to visit him in the hospital.

Evan, three years younger than me, was fifteen. He’d been battling Ewing’s sarcoma for three years, in and out of hospitals. A year ago, the tumor in his thigh had grown too large, and his doctor told him he had two choices: amputate the leg or try chemotherapy to shrink the tumor.

If he chose surgery, the possibility of recurrence was twenty-six percent. With chemotherapy, twenty-seven.

My parents urged him to take the safer way, but Evan, who dreamed of becoming an ornithologist, chose to keep his leg—for his future.

After six months of treatment, the tumor had shrunk more than anyone expected.

When the doctor said it might be possible to remove it without amputation, we hugged each other in relief. The operation succeeded; the tumor was gone.

But our joy didn’t last.

A year later, the cancer returned, spreading to his left leg.

Evan was devastated. He cried, asking why he had to be sick—why he couldn’t live like other kids. Watching him like that was almost unbearable.

With the metastasis, his five-year survival rate dropped to thirty percent. 

That number hung over us like a dark cloud.

Like the owl trapped in its cage, Evan was confined to his hospital room, dreaming of the day he might fly again. 

And I lived each day with that same fragile hope.

On the way to the hospital, we drove through Times Square, where towers crowded the sky and streams of cars and people moved beneath the gray clouds.  

A warm wind brushed my cheek through the open window.

When a man suddenly dashed across the road, my father slammed on the brakes and shouted, “Idiot!” out the window.

The word hung in the heavy air, swallowed by the noise of the city.