I'll admit, it's a bit post-moderny for me, but I think this short story about a pigeon turned out well. Click below for the text.
The pigeon wing has not always lived on the sidewalk near the corner of 23rd and Lawrence. It had, in fact, been quite flighty in its youth, traveling wherever it felt was prudent, whenever it had felt the inclination. That’s not to say that it didn’t take a breather occasionally—find a nice building next to a hotdog stand and gorge itself on crumbs and well-meaning handouts for a few weeks—but all that talk of ‘settling-down’ and ‘making a home’ bored it utterly. The wing had always thought of itself as a bit of a rambler, and it could frankly tolerate only a certain amount of completely immobility before it was fit to burst.
In the long term, though, if one must choose a corner on which to settle, that one isn’t too terrible, all things considered. Right across from the light rail tracks and running alongside a pleasantly busy street where it can watch the thousands of cars passing by. The ones with the little cat leaping off the front are its favorites; being somewhat sleek and high class itself, the wing can’t help feeling a certain kinship to them. It could have fluttered itself anywhere, truly anywhere, and though some of those places would have been more enticing, most of them would have been noticeably less. Perhaps the wing would prefer a nice park somewhere, but one can't be terribly choosy in this type of situation, and it could very well have been devoured anyway--posthaste.
A woman passes by, heels clicking smartly on the concrete. The wing can’t help feeling a moment of pity for her as she waits for the little light across the way to tell her it is alright to cross. It had reveled in the feeling (though, perhaps not reveled quite as much as it should have, at the time) of crossing any street it felt like without anyone’s say-so. It had always been quite independent.
‘Excuse me,’ it wants to say. ‘Excuse me, but would you mind lending me a hand? I seem to have found myself in a spot of trouble, you see, and…’ The wing trails off with a huffy internal sigh. A terrible pity, really, this not having a beak. It had been nursing a terrible itch on its underside for days, now, and calling for help is a bit out of the question given the circumstances. Losing one's mobility also tends to limit one's ability in the self-help category. The thought of it! Detestable—an utterly detestable situation all around, even with the pretty cars flitting by.
Across the way, in a gap between the chunky office buildings, the wing can see clouds billowing ever-closer, pressing in from the mountains that spike up in the distance. As a fledgling, the wing had learned how to recognize inclement weather with fairly impressive accuracy, and those clouds speak of snow as clearly as if they were chatting loudly amongst themselves, discussing just that intention. “Now, dear,” the wing’s mother had said, dragging a meticulous beak through her baby’s ruffled and dirtied child-feathers, “what does a smart little squab do if it starts getting cold?”
“Go somewhere warm!”
“Yes, but what if the smart little squab can’t find somewhere warm?”
“…Keep looking?” it had replied.
She considered the fledgling, her gaze flecked with bits of fondness. The wing had always very much suspected that its mother was the smartest and most capable pigeon who had ever ventured into the world, though it had only an admittedly small base for comparison. “Well, yes, but after a certain point the smart little squab must stop chasing a dream and think about its other options. A nice, warm place is best, but if it can’t find one—or, if it does find one but discovers that someone else has found it first—then it must find a sunny ledge somewhere, high up and protected, that will perhaps not keep it warm but will keep it alive.” The wing remembers its mother’s quiet voice and the warm comfort of its birth-nest and wishes more than anything to go back to it. As the clouds slowly, steadily lay siege to the city, it wants that warm, missing reassurance more than it wants breath.
There is a softball field just to the right of the wing, perhaps fifty feet away, which is quite a shame as it had always preferred soccer. It isn’t the season for softball, but even if it were, sports that require something hefty and firm to bullet through the sky aren’t terribly popular among spectators of the avian persuasion, as one might imagine. Soccer is much less hazardous to watch, and the little white cages at either end provide a lovely place to sit in the sun without running the risk of being consumed. In the off-season, the softball field attracts a small band of ragged men, dressed in patched trousers and threadbare hats, who have yet to become hungry enough to eat pigeon. The wing finds itself quite thankful for this.
Not having much else to think of, the hats unfailingly make the wing think of Clara. Clara…beautiful, lovely Clara, a dove among pigeons, with fluffy white feathers beneath the dull grey that most young birds tend to favor these days. The wing can still picture her sunning herself on the little cement lion over in their favorite park, running a careful beak through her feathers to ensure that they all fell just so. The wing had never been sure what Clara had seen in it—the bland, lank bit of grey fluff on the side of the road is a pretty decent representation of what it used to look like in its entirety—but it had loved her desperately in fear of the day she would realized how distasteful it was to sell one’s self short.
She’d found a little hat, one day, sitting by the side of the road. Whether it had been abandoned intentionally or dropped or pulled from some poor, unsuspecting clothesline, Clara had snagged it immediately with uncaring shrewdness. “You never know,” she said. “We might need it.” They’d carried it back to their nest (a somewhat shabby construction nestled amongst the heavy boughs of a silver maple) and promptly forgot about it, until a few months later when the wing had come home to find Clara filling the knitted fabric with twigs.
“Really?” It had asked.
“Really,” she had replied, and flitted off to find some moss. That winter might have been the coldest on record, but tucked together alongside her in their twig-strewn hat, the wing had felt warm right down to its bones.
Slumped on the corner of 23rd and Lawrence, the wing can’t help hoping that Clara has fared at least marginally better than it has since their break-up. It can’t be sure if the memory loss is a unique phenomenon or not, since it hasn’t spoken with anyone else who had experienced quite what it is experiencing, but everything is a bit foggier now than it had been in the past, and the wing can’t quite remember what had happened to take Clara away. Whatever the truth, the wing hopes that the hat has found someone else to love it; it hopes that Clara has found someone else to love her, too. Maybe she’s still sitting in their favorite park, perched on that cement lion like she’s sitting on the true shape of her soul.
҉
“How the hell does something like that even happen?”
“Couldn’t tell you, man.”
“Should we, I don’t know, throw it away or something? It’s nasty.”
“You want to touch it, go right on ahead. Don’t come crying to me when you get Salmonella.”
“You know what, fuck it. Someone else can deal with it.”
The wing looks from one to the other, following their rather heated debate, ignoring the itch that had become, by this point, quite maddening. It isn’t sure what they are talking about, but they stand in a lopsided circle above it and peer at the ground. One of them wears a mildly contemplative expression, as though he were looking at a case of sandwiches and wondering which would best fit his mood, but the other seems to have already purchased his sandwich and moved on with his life. The wing doesn’t expend a lot of energy thinking about them—humans, it has discovered, are generally too difficult to bother with.
‘Could I ask you to stop staring at me, please? It makes me quite uncomfortable.’
“Let’s go, man. We’re going to miss kickoff.”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m coming.”
The light across from the wing turns green again, and the two waiting humans and the lines of waiting cars start sluggishly forward. Most people simply walk past it, either casting it a cursory glance or ignoring it entirely, but the wing is alright with this. Its heart would undoubtedly be lonely to see it treated this way, but it knows how the world would receive it, given the chance. It had never forgotten Francis, who’d lost his leg in an accident involving an irate mastiff and a somewhat ill-advised dare. People hadn’t been kind to Francis—even the other birds hadn’t been kind to Francis—after that. If losing a leg was so bad, losing everything is undoubtedly a million times worse.
The first tentative flake of snow falls from the sky just as the sun hides behind the mountains, and it lands right on the wing’s tip. It had tried, as much as it could, to follow its mother’s advice when it came to the weather, but sometimes circumstances conspire. Snow had always been something distasteful to the wing, with the way it weaseled its way between feathers like tiny fingers, cooling pinpricks of skin underneath. Quite unpleasant, to be honest, but perhaps the fact that the wing can’t feel it anymore is an unexpected benefit of being a severed limb.
Another woman passes by, studiously ignoring the wing just as the other woman had. As a young, playful bird, the wing had often thought how useful invisibility would be for someone who makes a living from thievery, but it isn’t, in practice, as useful or as pleasant as the wing had imagined. ‘Excuse me, but would you mind terribly kicking me out into the middle of that field, there? I know, I’ve always had a bit of a greasy-feather problem, and you probably don’t want to get it on your shoes, but would you mind? Only, I’ve been here for so long…I’d like to fly again.’
In the long term, though, if one must choose a corner on which to settle, that one isn’t too terrible, all things considered. Right across from the light rail tracks and running alongside a pleasantly busy street where it can watch the thousands of cars passing by. The ones with the little cat leaping off the front are its favorites; being somewhat sleek and high class itself, the wing can’t help feeling a certain kinship to them. It could have fluttered itself anywhere, truly anywhere, and though some of those places would have been more enticing, most of them would have been noticeably less. Perhaps the wing would prefer a nice park somewhere, but one can't be terribly choosy in this type of situation, and it could very well have been devoured anyway--posthaste.
A woman passes by, heels clicking smartly on the concrete. The wing can’t help feeling a moment of pity for her as she waits for the little light across the way to tell her it is alright to cross. It had reveled in the feeling (though, perhaps not reveled quite as much as it should have, at the time) of crossing any street it felt like without anyone’s say-so. It had always been quite independent.
‘Excuse me,’ it wants to say. ‘Excuse me, but would you mind lending me a hand? I seem to have found myself in a spot of trouble, you see, and…’ The wing trails off with a huffy internal sigh. A terrible pity, really, this not having a beak. It had been nursing a terrible itch on its underside for days, now, and calling for help is a bit out of the question given the circumstances. Losing one's mobility also tends to limit one's ability in the self-help category. The thought of it! Detestable—an utterly detestable situation all around, even with the pretty cars flitting by.
Across the way, in a gap between the chunky office buildings, the wing can see clouds billowing ever-closer, pressing in from the mountains that spike up in the distance. As a fledgling, the wing had learned how to recognize inclement weather with fairly impressive accuracy, and those clouds speak of snow as clearly as if they were chatting loudly amongst themselves, discussing just that intention. “Now, dear,” the wing’s mother had said, dragging a meticulous beak through her baby’s ruffled and dirtied child-feathers, “what does a smart little squab do if it starts getting cold?”
“Go somewhere warm!”
“Yes, but what if the smart little squab can’t find somewhere warm?”
“…Keep looking?” it had replied.
She considered the fledgling, her gaze flecked with bits of fondness. The wing had always very much suspected that its mother was the smartest and most capable pigeon who had ever ventured into the world, though it had only an admittedly small base for comparison. “Well, yes, but after a certain point the smart little squab must stop chasing a dream and think about its other options. A nice, warm place is best, but if it can’t find one—or, if it does find one but discovers that someone else has found it first—then it must find a sunny ledge somewhere, high up and protected, that will perhaps not keep it warm but will keep it alive.” The wing remembers its mother’s quiet voice and the warm comfort of its birth-nest and wishes more than anything to go back to it. As the clouds slowly, steadily lay siege to the city, it wants that warm, missing reassurance more than it wants breath.
There is a softball field just to the right of the wing, perhaps fifty feet away, which is quite a shame as it had always preferred soccer. It isn’t the season for softball, but even if it were, sports that require something hefty and firm to bullet through the sky aren’t terribly popular among spectators of the avian persuasion, as one might imagine. Soccer is much less hazardous to watch, and the little white cages at either end provide a lovely place to sit in the sun without running the risk of being consumed. In the off-season, the softball field attracts a small band of ragged men, dressed in patched trousers and threadbare hats, who have yet to become hungry enough to eat pigeon. The wing finds itself quite thankful for this.
Not having much else to think of, the hats unfailingly make the wing think of Clara. Clara…beautiful, lovely Clara, a dove among pigeons, with fluffy white feathers beneath the dull grey that most young birds tend to favor these days. The wing can still picture her sunning herself on the little cement lion over in their favorite park, running a careful beak through her feathers to ensure that they all fell just so. The wing had never been sure what Clara had seen in it—the bland, lank bit of grey fluff on the side of the road is a pretty decent representation of what it used to look like in its entirety—but it had loved her desperately in fear of the day she would realized how distasteful it was to sell one’s self short.
She’d found a little hat, one day, sitting by the side of the road. Whether it had been abandoned intentionally or dropped or pulled from some poor, unsuspecting clothesline, Clara had snagged it immediately with uncaring shrewdness. “You never know,” she said. “We might need it.” They’d carried it back to their nest (a somewhat shabby construction nestled amongst the heavy boughs of a silver maple) and promptly forgot about it, until a few months later when the wing had come home to find Clara filling the knitted fabric with twigs.
“Really?” It had asked.
“Really,” she had replied, and flitted off to find some moss. That winter might have been the coldest on record, but tucked together alongside her in their twig-strewn hat, the wing had felt warm right down to its bones.
Slumped on the corner of 23rd and Lawrence, the wing can’t help hoping that Clara has fared at least marginally better than it has since their break-up. It can’t be sure if the memory loss is a unique phenomenon or not, since it hasn’t spoken with anyone else who had experienced quite what it is experiencing, but everything is a bit foggier now than it had been in the past, and the wing can’t quite remember what had happened to take Clara away. Whatever the truth, the wing hopes that the hat has found someone else to love it; it hopes that Clara has found someone else to love her, too. Maybe she’s still sitting in their favorite park, perched on that cement lion like she’s sitting on the true shape of her soul.
҉
“How the hell does something like that even happen?”
“Couldn’t tell you, man.”
“Should we, I don’t know, throw it away or something? It’s nasty.”
“You want to touch it, go right on ahead. Don’t come crying to me when you get Salmonella.”
“You know what, fuck it. Someone else can deal with it.”
The wing looks from one to the other, following their rather heated debate, ignoring the itch that had become, by this point, quite maddening. It isn’t sure what they are talking about, but they stand in a lopsided circle above it and peer at the ground. One of them wears a mildly contemplative expression, as though he were looking at a case of sandwiches and wondering which would best fit his mood, but the other seems to have already purchased his sandwich and moved on with his life. The wing doesn’t expend a lot of energy thinking about them—humans, it has discovered, are generally too difficult to bother with.
‘Could I ask you to stop staring at me, please? It makes me quite uncomfortable.’
“Let’s go, man. We’re going to miss kickoff.”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m coming.”
The light across from the wing turns green again, and the two waiting humans and the lines of waiting cars start sluggishly forward. Most people simply walk past it, either casting it a cursory glance or ignoring it entirely, but the wing is alright with this. Its heart would undoubtedly be lonely to see it treated this way, but it knows how the world would receive it, given the chance. It had never forgotten Francis, who’d lost his leg in an accident involving an irate mastiff and a somewhat ill-advised dare. People hadn’t been kind to Francis—even the other birds hadn’t been kind to Francis—after that. If losing a leg was so bad, losing everything is undoubtedly a million times worse.
The first tentative flake of snow falls from the sky just as the sun hides behind the mountains, and it lands right on the wing’s tip. It had tried, as much as it could, to follow its mother’s advice when it came to the weather, but sometimes circumstances conspire. Snow had always been something distasteful to the wing, with the way it weaseled its way between feathers like tiny fingers, cooling pinpricks of skin underneath. Quite unpleasant, to be honest, but perhaps the fact that the wing can’t feel it anymore is an unexpected benefit of being a severed limb.
Another woman passes by, studiously ignoring the wing just as the other woman had. As a young, playful bird, the wing had often thought how useful invisibility would be for someone who makes a living from thievery, but it isn’t, in practice, as useful or as pleasant as the wing had imagined. ‘Excuse me, but would you mind terribly kicking me out into the middle of that field, there? I know, I’ve always had a bit of a greasy-feather problem, and you probably don’t want to get it on your shoes, but would you mind? Only, I’ve been here for so long…I’d like to fly again.’