No one ever looked at an animal in the wild and thought, "What poor posture!"

From Alfred’s journal

A woman on the bench by the oak spent an hour telling her daughter to sit up straight, and the girl sat up straight, and then she didn't. Ten feet off, a heron stood in the shallows with its neck folded into itself like a bad coat hanger, and the same woman said, look how beautiful. I used to think there was a correct way to hold a body, that the hunch I take when the wind comes off the field was a failure of nerve. No one ever looked at an animal in the wild and thought, what poor posture. Switch sleeps with his spine in a shape I cannot describe and wakes up fine. The girl was slumped again by the time they left and her mother had stopped noticing, which may be the closest thing to the shallows she gets.