(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.