The Pigeon Emma A

Emma Ambler

WLH

Ms. Bennett, period 5

25 April 2014

The Pigeon

The small boy lifted a pudgy hand to the blooming bruise on his temple, strategically concealed by floppy dark hair. His father never hit him in places visible to the public. Even in his drunkest state he had enough sense for that.

The sun hugged the trees with its warm light, weaving in and out of the dense leaves to form speckles of golden lace on the damp earth. As the boy walked as fast as he could farther out of range of his home, he began to hear birds sing. For whatever reason, the living things in the forest never came near the decrepit old house. It was a commonly debated topic in the town, where the people grew up living in accordance to nature’s rules and any disruption of the normal cycles was seen as an event to be noted.

“It’s probably the stench of alcohol keeps ‘em away,” Mr. Ignaro had said at the counter of the Denny’s, the only functioning business in town. Then he had laughed, short and harsh.

When there were enough trees between the boy and the house to completely shroud it from him, he sat down on the ground, breathless. His tiny heart was still hammering with fear inside his chest. The shade caressed him, cooling his sweaty skin. The boy tried for a deep, soothing inhale, but his body shuddered halfway through and left him gasping again. He shoved his fingers in his mouth, that childish habit that angered his father so.

When he had stopped shaking, the boy noticed a strange gray lump on the ground ahead of him. He leaned forward and squinted to see it better. Finally his child’s curiosity got the better of him and he began to crawl slowly across the dirt, furtively glancing around like he was a spy on a covert mission. He reached the side of the mysterious object and peered cautiously down at it.

It was a pigeon. Limp, on its back, eyes gazing mournfully upward. It had one wing tucked abnormally beneath its round and feathery body.

The boy stared in wonderment at it, a creature of flight suddenly so immediately in his reach. His little hands squirmed against each other as he yearned to touch it. The boy knelt down until he was practically nose to beak with the bird. His mouth opened in amazement as he noticed the incredible gleam of its eyes, reminding him of the glassy stare of the big stuffed bear head over his father’s fireplace.

Once when he was smaller he had asked his father to get rid of the head because its big yellow teeth scared him. His father had seized him by the back of the shirt and thrown him from the room. The boy was still too small to realize that that bear head was the most valuable thing in the house. All he learned from the experience was never to bother his father when he was frightened.

Above the fireplace those shiny eyes were huge and menacing. Here, on the ground, so small and beady, they were the most non-threatening things in the world.

The pigeon suddenly gave a pitiful attempt at movement and jerked slightly, twittering. The boy leaped back in fright, but the bird was now still. When he regained himself, he took a seat next to the injured animal and stared down at it, absentmindedly taking a rock from the ground and massaging it with his thumbs as he watched. Sun shone on the back of his ratty cotton t-shirt, casting a shadow over the pigeon as it lay still, having given up on trying to save itself.

The boy frowned. He tentatively reached out a hand, and began to delicately stroke the smooth side of the bird. It responded by barely turning its head towards him. Somewhere inside his small head, the boy registered that if there was no intervention, this bird would most certainly die. It would either starve, unable to fly away and collect food for itself, or be eaten by some other creature of the woods with no way to escape. As he mulled this thought over, the boy found himself removing his hand from the bird’s feathers. He paused for a second, looking at this pigeon, this cripple. It was disgusting, how helpless, how useless it had become. His insides began to bubble with hatred.

So the boy raised the rock in his fist. And he held it in the air, small fingers barely able to wrap around it, for the shortest of moments. And then he brought it down, hard as he could, onto the side of the tiny gray skull.

It made the most satisfying of crunches. In the moment of silence that followed, the boy studied the aftermath of what he had done. The delicate bone had smashed all the way through, leaving blood on the rock, and on his fingers, hot, sticky, and scarlet. The pigeon was now just a twisted body, the head too deformed to be recognized as such anymore. The boy watched solemnly as blood from the wound seeped down into the silvery plumage of the neck.

Suddenly the boy began furiously rubbing his hands in the dirt. He had cast the rock away somewhere, and focused now on getting himself cleaned up. Once the blood was as wiped away as it could be, the little boy stood. He turned quickly away and wandered home, weaving in and out of the mossy trees, still golden with sunshine. When he had disappeared, the birds began to sing again. The boy hadn’t noticed, but somewhere during his visit, they had stopped.