(Columba Livia)

Consider a bird refusing to fly.

------ awoke from the shiftless trappings of a red and dreamless sleep on the back stoop of an apartment building with no recollection of his ever having been there before. He was greeted by the tinkling sounds of rainfall, collecting in sinkholes of asphalt and playing in staccato rhythms off the tin lid of garbage container nearby. As he lay with his shoulders slumped against the coarse ruddy brick, his lower half unprotected by the eave of the building, ------ found with some dismay that his shoes were sopping and his blue jeans were already dyed black. Drawing his legs in towards his chest, ------ sat up and began rubbing their tight goose-skinned flesh through the rust in his arms and the thickness in his cold fingers.

Above him hung the cast iron skeleton of a fire escape: slatted platforms and ladders glossed with weather that, despite their intangible number of crisscrossing patterns and pathways, progressed an aerial trail of water to the very place where ------’s head now rested. Shuffling his seat, ------ brushed off the water and squinted upwards. The buildings around him rose nearly a dozen stories, affording from his vantage point in the alley only a thin swath of slate-colored sky. Its thick drooping clouds echoed in his mind with the low hung canopy of some great four-poster bed in which he believed himself to have once slept, but that he could no longer place. In regarding the dull light coming through this grey weave, ------ marked the time of day somewhere between dawn and dusk, as when in the presence of a rain hours dissolve and wash away like clumps of sand.

While looking high upon the wall of the building across from where he sat, whose brick had been sporadically stained dark with phantom drapes where a gutter failed to hold back its carriage, ------ became aware of yet another sound mingling with the cascading rhythms of the rain. It was a sound that he knew by the same effortless recognition with which he could identify his own voice; he heard the papered fluttering of a bird’s wing. Leaning his head out towards the sheeting barrier of the open alley, so close as to feel a steady mist, ------ peered around the faded luster of a percussive garbage container to where the trough of his backstreet became conjunct with a lazy avenue. There he saw, no more than twenty feet away, though safely recessed from the scrutinies of the main road, a grounded pigeon with wing raised, and a child with eyes trained upon the pigeon.

The bird, with one wing outstretched, shook dew from its appendage and, trembling its small mass, agitated its many purple-oil feathers until they billowed to a double girth. The pigeon then folded the wing into its downy exterior and was still. The child, a boy of the age cresting upon adolescence, knelt a mere arm’s length from where the bird stood, and was equally as still while he studied the pigeon with curious, unflinching eyes. He was dressed mainly by the waxy blue cape of a rain slicker that crumpled its baggy length into dark folds around his small body. From under this, ------ could see that the boy was wearing white pleated trousers and a pair of scuffed brown penny-loafers, minus the pennies. Considering this, and the appearance of a faded part yet maintaining itself in the child’s soaking blonde hair, ------ wondered if it was not in fact Sunday.

Moved by a sort of awe and puzzled amusement at the boy, the bird, and their close communion, as well as his feeling of broken privacy, ------ thought it better to make his presence known than to conversely have his presence discovered.

"What’ve you got there, boy?" His voice came out with a morning gruffness, though it seemed to him to fly swiftly through the muting rain. The child did not move.

"Hello over there," he tried again. The boy raised his thin, tightly drawn face long enough to acknowledge ------’s location on the stoop, and then just as quickly lowered his attention once more to the pigeon.

"I said, what do you have over there?"

"Just some bird," the boy replied after pause, addressing not ------ but instead talking down his chest towards the ground. As he spoke his hollow-set eyes maintained a cool, almost scientific watch over the pigeon, whose smooth prismatically colored head turned occasionally. "I came along and saw him sitting here."

"Well I can see that," ------ nodded watchfully. "But what do you want to stand in the rain staring at a pigeon for?"

"I don’t know," consideration marking the child’s voice. The pigeon raised now both of its wings and seized their delicate length in the liquid air. "I saw him and wanted to chase him off, but he wouldn’t go. He walked a little ways and just stopped. And every now and then he does that."

When the boy finished, he reached a hand out to touch the dragging tailfeathers of the bird, which wicked moisture from a tiny reservoir formed by a chink in the asphalt. When his fingertips acquired their aim, the pigeon’s tremorous wings batted at the impetus and the bird began to stagger away. The boy withdrew his hand. While the bird moved, its head danced left and right and its red eyes wildly searched the degrees of the alley, vainly seeking out their tormentor or their path of escape. The pigeon skittered in short leftward inching sidesteps, pivoting around its back end, until by attempting to move away the bird had returned through a full revolution to the position where it had begun. The boy looked on intently and frustrated as the pigeon turned around once more.

"See," the boy decried, looking accusatively at ------ "It doesn’t go anywhere."

"Oh," was all that ------ could think to say.

Presently, upon completing the greater part of a third revolution, the pigeon’s failed deliverance came to a pause. Therein the bird proceeded once more through the motions of shaking out and fluffing up its fallen plumage. After this was finished the bird then stooped and curled its sleek domed head into the downy cove under its left wing. ------ watched this, and he watched the child watching this. The bird watched neither of them.

As ------ considered whether to chasten the boy for his mistreatment of the pigeon or to simply lend this behavior to the passive involvement of a child’s curiosity, a man appeared at the opening of the alley. Cloaked in the distance by rain and the black awning of an albatrossian umbrella, the man’s long profile opened up as he paused and turned in ------’s direction, his dark form framed against the bright colorless wash of the open avenue. Through the masked shade of the umbrella, ------ was able to catch a dingy reflection of the man’s face as it seemed to unfold with a blend of resentment and relief. He stood calmly at the opening and waited briefly for the boy to notice his presence. When the child did not, he cleared his throat. Noticing then ------’s occupancy of the stoop, the man passed upon him a look of stern indifference, at which ------ recessed against the brick of the building hugging his arms to his chest.

"Come along Simon," he stiffly commanded. His oilskin duster was undisturbed by the weather and hung fixedly over high-gloss oxfords.

"In a minute," the boy whined, keeping his small eyes on the pigeon.

"Now," the man asserted in a rather flattening tone.

At this the boy let out a faint groan. As he rose to his feet, the child shook loose his matted blonde hair and a pointed spray of water was released and then dissolved amidst the falling rain. The pigeon did not move. Before joining the man on the sidewalk the boy made a short search of the alley, eventually settling his hands upon the damp grey heft of a cinderblock. His forceless body strained under his dull blue coat as he manipulated the block and shuffled towards the place in the alley where the pigeon stood. Attributing to the weight all the height that he could muster, the child candidly held the cinderblock above the silent pigeon, and for a brief moment he stood poised as one presenting a collection plate. Then at once he relinquished the mass to gravity. The shadow of the cinderblock briefly encompassed the small bird before rejoining its architect, as the distance between the block and the asphalt zeroed, and the pigeon was cobbled into the ground with a dull thud.

The child then turned towards ------.

"That bird wasn’t going to fly," he casually stated with eyes of absolution.

Then the dark man and the child were gone.

Unfinished Work #26

-Hey, hey guys. Come look.
Brother turned his wan attention to the calling of his classmate, and in doing so, unmindfullly bounced the basketball which he had been dribbling off the side of his shoe. It rolled along in the opposite direction of the gathering children, gritting the blacktop in measured bounds, until coming to rest several yards away with a splash of sandy playground gravel. Across a short weed choked field, the boy who had been calling squatted down above an open drainage grate. With his finely featured face crumpled under much discernment, the boy squinted into the shadowed depths and began carefully to draw his sleeves up about the elbow. Brother watched, in the passive autumn air, as still more children shepherded themselves towards the grate; their sluggish unmastered footfalls drumming softly upon the mudded field, and flatly slapping the newly wetted concrete. Very soon, a good number had gathered near the crouching boy, and as they huddled about, a small rise of commotion crescendoed briefly from them like a gust of wind, until gradually all of their questions had been answered and the gaggle fell silent.
Curious as to their interest with the drain, Brother took a few waif steps in their direction, shuffling his feet as he considered an approach. But, as the children stood, tightly knitted in a patchwork semicircle, their backs walled towards him, he suddenly found the idea of placing himself amongst them to be quite uninviting; and so he stopped. For a moment he stood solitary on the flat expanse of the basketball court, watching his long emaciated shadow grow weaker and then become more defined in the slanting sunlight of the late afternoon. The wavering light gave his shadow the appearance of movement, but, as he himself did not move, Brother knew it to be a trick upon his eyes. Again he heard the rustling of conversation from the direction of the gathered children, but ignoring it he continued on with this taffied abstraction of himself. Before long, its once tight boundaries blurred, and his fading shadow spread out across the white lines of the court and was gone.
Aware of himself again, Brother heard the rush of straggling dinner hour traffic at his back, and felt a sudden folding in his stomach. He was hungry. Shifting his attention once more, Brother turned around in the direction that his ball had rolled to find the eyes of two young girls upon him, who hovered somewhat disinterestedly over the spot where it had landed. Upon facing them, the taller of the two let her eyesight fall beyond him, while the other girl met Brother with a look of cool unflinching self-possession. For a time, he dared not to blink, and she too kept on with casual poise. Her long stare drew upon something wild within Brother; it made him uncomfortable.
- Give me my ball. he called suddenly and without consideration; surprising himself.
- This? the small girl narrowed her sable eyes as she delicately placed an uncommonly white loafer atop the basketball. With her knee raised, she trundled the sooted ball back and forth in the gravel and continued to study Brother.
- Yes, that. he halfway asserted. It’s mine.
- Well I don’t want your crummy old ball. and upon this she turned a glance towards the taller girl, who was still looking away into the distance. Maybe she might.
At this the larger of the two gave, with a glint of recognition from her faded green eyes, what could be considered either a sign of consent or perplexity; perhaps both. Brother watched while the girl, who was rather an ogress in stature, reached a long hand up to brush a shock of boyishly short blonde hair away from her brow. Considering, it seemed, the question, she pawed the shock of hair with twisting fingers and looked down intently upon her counterpart. Soon the smaller girl nodded, and the tall girl looked away once more.
Unsure what to make of this exchange, Brother waited for the small girl to speak. When she did not reply, choosing instead to quietly smooth out the pleats of her immaculate white dress, his impatience mounted.
- Look. Will you just roll my ball over here?
- No. she flatly said at once, pitching her head side to side in a whirl of black hair.
- Well, why not? Brother soured his tone and felt a hot welling inside. Annoyance put motion to
his feet, and as he began to approach the girl, his small chest set heavily before him, Brother saw a thin smile turn across her round face.
- No. she paused. Because sister Taylor here might want it. You see, she’s just not sure yet.
- I don’t care. Brother huffed, observing the tall girl’s stillness. From where he now stood, he knew her measure to be slighting of his own. It’s mine and I’ll have it now.
The small girl suppressed briefly her grin, and began chewing on her underlip, as she weighed Brother once more with dark eyes.
- I like you. she spun, ceasing her grating motion of the basketball and lifting her foot slightly from its drab face. Her loafer floated above the ball with spurious frailty as she spoke. Sister does too.

(etc)