Strange Birds
After months of confusing applications and automated interviews an offer finally came in. They were a small, nonprofit team working off grant funding to study how wildlife adapted to climate change in urban environments. They needed someone to transcribe a year and half worth of field notes the rest of the team was too busy to deal with. The contract was only for six months and not very well paid, but no questions were asked about the twelve year gap on Claudia’s resume or her lack of science background. They only told her not to worry about dressing up when she started on Monday.
Claudia still arrived wearing the only dress slacks she owned that still fit right and old dress shoes that clicked loudly as she walked. She rode the train, something she hadn’t done alone in a number of years. People rushed around her, going this way and that. Elbows of blazers and wafts of strong cologne blended together and she got off with the flow, letting herself be carried up and out of the station into a new stream of strangers. She walked through an old, cement neighborhood filled with old, cement buildings. Inside of one, she clicked her way across an art deco floor made of polished tiles and was greeted enthusiastically by two people who looked somewhat out of place among the lobby chandeliers.
Jewel and Lenard were the lead researchers. The two of them nearly matched in their faded jeans and sneakers, graying ponytails frizzing at the tops. They all traveled upstairs where the elevator wobbled at the top and opened to a dark attic space covered in wooden paneling and steely exposed tubes. The echoing of air being pushed through along with the creaking and clicking of wood and Claudia’s shoes overshadowed the brief tour where Lenard pointed where each shadowed, labyrinthine hallway led to, but she nodded along anyway. They ended at an alcove filled with makeshift computer desks and small windows, flooding the dusty space with a soft light. Her space was set up along a wall with a boxy donor laptop and metal, folding chair piled high with notebooks and accordion folders. They left her to get settled without much fanfare and Claudia shifted the pile to the floor next to her. She grabbed the top notebook and flipped it open.
The drawing that greeted her was done in pen, stains that looked like raindrops blurred the angles of a bird’s wing. A beak bled through the page underneath. Talons, eyes, feathers were all drawn in close detail. The figures were accompanied by smudges of lost observations. She flipped through the book and tried another one. Similar scribbles of messy pen greeted her. Book after book offered only the same, undeniable circumstance. It was all pigeons.
How they nested, traveled, mated, ate, lived among city residents was laid out across notebook after musty notebook and folders of scribbled writings and hand drawn diagrams. Claudia looked around her desk. No one was watching her. If she got up and left right now no one would likely notice, she hadn’t even signed any paperwork yet. Because while Claudia could deal with a dark, attic of an office and waking up at the crack of dawn to pack lunches for her and Ben before an hour and half commute into this dirty, industrial maze, she could not deal with pigeons.
She’d always hated them. Their loud flapping and inability to respect personal space had always elicited the same panicked sprinting as far back as she remembered. The way they sounded, their germs, their pointy little bird faces, all of it horrible. Claudia spared another glance around. She still had no idea what she was supposed to do with all these notes and their smudged, indecipherable handwriting and no one else around seemed to care about that.
The whole team appeared to work out of the same small area. Claudia only caught flaps of arms and backs with names rattled off too fast to catch, she thought maybe there were five of them. She desperately tried to memorize any defining features, but the haze of rumpled, untucked shirts on long-haired men and hiking pants might as well have been copied and pasted across each one of the bodies that flew by. None of them had even spared her a nod.
“Don’t mind them,” Jewel said. Claudia realized she was at a desk station across the small space from her. “Feathers are just a little ruffled around here with our deadlines looming.”
Claudia nodded. She half debated excusing herself to the bathroom and running but she didn’t remember where the bathroom was. Claudia turned back to the notebook she’d opened with Jewel still looking on encouragingly, reading the top most notes describing how pigeons appeared to be built well for evading buildings and fast moving vehicles. They were fast themselves and sturdy, apparently keeping them out of more trouble than other urban species, or so the notes highlighted with a hefty underline and a few question marks. Claudia read on with the image of a large pigeon swooping down, wings spread, beak open, and talons poised for attack stuck in her head on a loop. She read assuming she would stop when someone came to tell her what to do and ended up reading until everyone else packed up for home. She followed them, adrift, and marked where the bathroom was on her way out.
And Claudia returned the next day, only getting a little lost on the way up. She was greeted by Lenard slapping an onboarding form on her desk and giving a quick rundown on the master document she’d be adding research notes to under pre established tabs of different categories. All the software was unfamiliar but Claudia nodded along. He recommended they schedule weekly meetings to check in on her progress and told Claudia to book some time on their digital calendars. After struggling to figure out how to locate his own schedule she saw he was fully booked for weeks out and turned back to the notebook pile instead.
Hesitantly, she opened one and began to type what she saw. Pigeons were small. Pigeon feathers were water resistant. Those could go under physical attributes. Gross and dirty would also suffice. Pigeons were territorial, that could go under behavior. Pigeons were freaky with little beady bird eyes. Claudia typed and drifted. She would need to finish laundry when she got home, Ben’s shorts were stinking up the garage. They were almost out of eggs and sandwich bread too. Pigeons could extract food from narrow spaces by using their feet and beaks; that one came with a little drawing done in smudged pen of a pigeon’s clawed foot gripping a bag of potato chips.
Lenard appeared back beside her desk. “I can’t help but notice some creative interpretation on your end of things.”
“I thought I was meant to summarize?”
“Only in instances of repetition. Try to keep to the words as they are written. If something is unclear just tag me in the document.”
“Yes, of course,” she nodded. She wanted to ask him more questions. She’d wrote some down last night at home, alone in bed and unable to sleep. They were things like, Who do you all work for? What is this project for? What exactly is the point of all this? But Claudia couldn’t think of the right way to ask.
“Do you always type like that?” Lenard pointed down to where her index and middle fingers were still hovering on the keyboard. He shook his head. “Anyways, just think of these field notebooks as a style guide and keep to that.”
Claudia tried to ask what that meant, but he’d already walked away. She was alone again in her little corner, the window above her offering only a strip of bare gray sky. She began to type again. Pigeons weighed between 220g and 340g from birds lured onto a scale near State and Madison, average 227g. Birds weighed near the Riverwalk trailhead averaged closer to 330g. Did the river yield a more consistent food supply —whoever wrote these didn’t think so. Pigeons were not well suited for fishing but did seem to enjoy a swim. Claudia used to visit the Riverwalk with Ben, they frequented a wine bar one of his college friends owned. She always got nervous sitting outside in the evenings with all the pigeons that would circle the outdoor tables begging for scraps. They were everywhere. Claudia’s trip back to the train last night she had passed a flock of pigeons picking at someone’s abandoned takeout food. She had edged around them and ignored the stomach churning chorus of cooing and scuffling. Claudia had reminded herself they were fast and nimble enough to chase after her if she stepped on one accidentally.
The team invited Claudia out for drinks at the end of her first week. She agreed, bashful and excited as she trailed behind the group of hunched shoulders and crossbody bags. They all walked so quickly, perfectly in step with each other. Claudia was lost in the tailwinds and sped up to reach Jewel who was back a ways talking with Lenard. She reached them in time to see him scratch a hand across Jewel’s lower back, saying something that made her slap his shoulder and laugh. Claudia debated changing course but it was too late. Jewel saw her and swooped, linking their arms together and marching her away from Lenard towards the bar, half prize and half prisoner.
Jewel did not let Claudia stray far for most of the night, ordering them a flight of fruity beers in little round glasses to share. Claudia had not drank beer in a long time. It had improved since the days of her sharing a six pack of whatever Ben picked up at the store on his way home from work, back when the two of them lived in a small apartment in the city and were still in school. Jewel placed her hand on Claudia’s arm when she spoke and squeezed it when Claudia replied.
Someone else cracked a joke, Nish she thought, and Claudia laughed along without hearing it. She was slowly observing how to tell her flighty officemates apart. She catalogued who had a handsome nose and who wore the reddish glasses versus the gold, who bit their nails and whose wedding rings gleamed on hairy hands. Jewel wore her nails long, the slightly wrinkled skin on top of her hands dotted with freckles and bare, ringless fingers just like Claudia’s.
*
When Jewel asked Claudia to step into her office one morning a couple weeks later she thought it was a joke, but then Jewel was leading them both through hallway after twisting hallway back past the out of order bathroom and to a closet that she opened, waving Claudia inside and shutting the door behind them. It was a spacious closet but still a closet, dusty wooden shelves empty aside from a couple boxes. A small window at the back was propped open with a door wedge stuck in it.
“Lenard is always leaving this open,” Jewel said. She reached into her bag and pulled out a pack of cigarettes, extending one towards Claudia who just stared at it, her head tilted and shoulders stiff. “Not a smoker then,” Jewel laughed and put it away.
Claudia stayed and watched Jewel light her cigarette, breathing in and exhaling smoke back out towards the window where it escaped in rivulets back into the sunny, stagnant air of downtown. Soft sounds of traffic poured inside and filled the silent, stale air between them. Claudia breathed carefully, afraid to cough or look too disgruntled. She could have left but it seemed like that time had come and passed so she stayed, rocking on her heels in the sneakers she’d swapped her dress shoes for that looked more like the ones Jewel wore. Ben had been a smoker when she first met him and always hated the way the bitter smell clung to his shirts. She wished she had something to do with her hands too.
Making up her mind at last, Claudia moved closer to the window to lean against it and heard soft cooing. Barely visible on the roof, pigeons were lined up under the window. They were basking in the sun, wings fluttering gently. Claudia jumped back.
“What’s wrong?” Jewel asked.
“Nothing, just some pigeons out there.”
“Oh, yeah. They love this spot too. They’re creatures of habit, have you seen that in the notes? The same pigeons will return to their favorite resting spots over and over again regardless of weather or construction or anything.”
“Hmm.” How many days had Claudia made the same path from bedroom to kitchen and back again or to back yard, to grocery store and back again? Enough to wear the carpet in her hallway down probably if she didn’t steam it regularly. Enough for there to be greasy spots on the handle of her fridge she always forgot to wipe away, and holes in the patio where she’d stand in the afternoon and watch her flower pots struggle to bloom. There was a bit less to do now, with Ben gone there were no longer coffee rings left on the counter. She still wiped it down out of habit.
When Jewel was done smoking she offered Claudia a spritz of perfume to cover up the smell of smoke. Claudia nodded her thanks and Jewel crept close to spray her own wrist and pressed it to Claudia’s neck, one side and then the other.
Now that Claudia knew to look she saw Jewel go back to the smoking closet frequently. Sometimes alone, sometimes with Lenard. She never disappeared for long and always came back smelling freshly of perfume.
Claudia started going back there by herself too. It was something to break up the endless scrawl of scratched out notes and marginal asides as she went through notebook after notebook, although she was disappointed when she arrived to find it empty. Two months had passed in a blink without much notice from Lenard or anyone else. Claudia’s days passed evenly. She packed lunch for her and Ben. She rode the train in and back home. She cooked dinner and tidied. She went to bed. Even this new commute soon became another easy, carpeted path.
She passed by more pigeons in a day than she’d ever really realized. The ones drawn over and over again in the field notes were fragmented, a wing here, a nostril cere there. That’s how she tried to see them in real life too. There was nothing scary about a foot. Pigeon’s leg muscles had evolved to be sturdier to keep up with human demand. Their powerful breasts perhaps emerged by preening under human guidance generation after generation for thousands of years. Pigeons today still strutted chest first, two different muscle fibers making up the largest and most important flight muscle. Their chests depressed the wings at the shoulder, where attached to the deltopectoral crest of the proximal humerus. Claudia tried to sit up straight in her desk chair and felt her own chest stretch, odd joints popping and cracking in a way they never did before.
It was pouring rain and Claudia headed straight to the smoking closet when she saw Lenard leaning against her desk waiting on her. He had an annoying habit of checking on her progress first thing in the morning when he had to know she hadn’t started on anything yet. She clambered inside the closet, dripping from her jacket onto the floor. She pried open the closed window as far as it would go and peered out, balanced up on her toes making her rain boots squeak loudly.
The window led onto the roof, sun bleached concrete dark gray with the downpour. Another gray shape moved into her view. A soaking wet pigeon looked at her with a tilted head and sad bird eyes; a shiver coursed through its little bird body. Pigeons regulate their body temperature by tucking in their heads and feet. They have downy feathers that helped to insulate them, pulviplumes she believed they were called. Claudia thought of the birds she passed outside the train station, the ones huddling next to buildings to avoid the scuffle of feet and how she’d stopped shuddering away when they ruffled their feathers to settle. She thought of Ben in his little puffer coat all weighed down by water, drips pouring off his curly hair. How his cheeks used to get so red and how Claudia used to wrap a scarf around his neck before sending him off with a kiss.
Claudia pointed at the window, “You want in?”
The bird shivered again.
Claudia reached her arm through the narrow space to try and beckon the bird inside. It backed up and puffed up its chest. Claudia pushed at the window harder and its old wooden latch snapped. She hauled the heavy glass pane up. “Here you go.”
The pigeon hopped its way inside and Claudia dropped the window closed with a loud slam which must have alerted the bird to its new surroundings because it began flailing, squawking, and pooping all at once. It flew back at the window and banged its body against the glass.
Claudia sprinted out of the closet, shutting the bird in behind her. She heard it yelling frantic bird calls in her absence. She shakily maneuvered back towards the office area where Jewel was now seated, tiny drops of rain clinging to the ends of her hair.
“There’s, umm, a bird in the smoking closet,” Claudia said.
“Really? How’d it get in?”
Claudia shrugged.
“Probably Lenard,” Jewel rolled her eyes. “Let’s go.”
Claudia followed her back to the closet again. At first the bird was nowhere to be found, then Jewel spotted it wedged between a shelf and the wall. She tried to grab it, but the thing flapped its wings rapidly and growled an indignant, pigeony roar the closer she got. Jewel instructed Claudia to close the closet door and she did so, reluctantly.
Jewel backed up and squatted down while Claudia pressed herself back against the door, hand poised to open it and run if she needed to. Jewel opened her hands, arms half raised off to her sides. She cooed at the bird, softening her voice into a low drone that washed over the closet, barely audible over the rainstorm.
The pigeon stopped fighting, cranking its head and bowing instead.
Jewel returned the gesture, bowing low and popping her shoulders up like wings. Her chest came next as she rolled her body back up, cooing louder. She twisted her head side to side stepping forward.
The pigeon shook itself loose and hopped down onto the floor. The two of them closed in, circling each other as Jewel whispered, “Go open the window,” just before she lunged and grabbed the bird, closing one hand around its head and another around its middle.
Claudia ran over and shoved the window open. As she did, Jewel reached out and thrust the bird out of her grip, pulling Claudia’s hands out of the way as the glass dropped closed again. Back outside, the pigeon squawked indignantly then shook itself off and flew away.
“There, that wasn’t so hard,” Jewel wiped her hands on her pants.
“What was that?”
“Mating signals,” she explained. “Typically a male initiates but more aggressive females can as well. There’s actually a lot of homosexual coupling in feral pigeon populations, I mean, you’ve seen the notes. The dance is all in the neck and chest. They puff up like this,” she rolled her shoulders back again, stretching her neck out to the other side. “And the bowing and shaking comes with a song they sing to each other.”
Jewel dropped down again, shaking her head slowly, her still damp hair flopping about her shoulders. Claudia dropped as well, trying to mimic her movements. She felt stiff and awkward, pulsing out her shoulders in disjointed movements. She braced her hands on her thighs to rise back up and stop, but then Jewel strutted forward, bowing her head down, waiting for Claudia to reply.
She did, stepping forward again and ducking her head down still in her pigeon squat. Claudia’s head was almost in the other woman’s neck, their feet slotted together like a dance. She could smell Jewel’s perfume, felt some of her hair curled from the rain gently brushing her cheek.
Jewel’s lips pursed as she made a soft cooing sound. Claudia leaned closer to copy her, tilting her head and cooing right back against her ear. Jewel placed her arms on Claudia’s shoulders and squeezed gently, her thumbs rubbing over the fabric of her shirt. Claudia bowed her head low one last time in a nod and Jewel turned. She pressed their lips together, soft pigeon sounds getting lost between them.
*
Jewel and Claudia made cooing noises at each other from their desks when no one else was paying attention. Claudia worked quicker now, her eyes had grown used to the styles of handwriting and the transition from reading to typing. She was only interrupted by frazzled clucking of the others searching in her pile for something they needed or by Lenard swinging by her desk periodically to question why she’d put all the notes about pigeon’s communally grooming each other into the behaviors area when it should clearly have gone with relationships. Claudia always heard him coming before she saw him. The shuffle of his feet and quiet muttering as he squabbled on his bluetooth gave him away.
Claudia knew there was something between Jewel and Lenard. It was the way they dragged each other off sometimes beyond the normal smoke break. They took lunch meetings out together and arrived at the same time almost each morning. Jewel hadn’t asked Claudia back with her to the smoking closet again and they had not been alone since the window incident some weeks ago. Only Lenard, who looked over Claudia’s shoulder, emailed her pages of edits to make and reminded her frequently to refer back to her ‘style guide’, was led off personally by Jewel.
After another morning watching Jewel and Lenard disappeared together, Claudia decided to take her lunch break outside. She circled the block and found a small park. More a smudge of green space and some benches but it was still nice. Pigeons were splashing away in a fountain, more running after each other in the grass clicking and chirping in a way that sounded like laughter. Ben and his friends used to run around in her yard like that. He used to lay on a blanket in the grass and read with her, and share peanut butter sandwiches. Claudia really needed to mow the lawn. She’d been reminding Ben to do it next time he came by but was close to giving up hope on that. A couple of pigeons approached where Claudia sat and stared at her with their beady bird eyes. She cringed back.
Feral pigeons demonstrated the highest intelligence for social cues both within their own familiar units and when interacting with birds of other colonies. Claudia had never realized pigeons had colonies, or families as some of the notebooks called them. Pigeons were tightly knit creatures, returning not just to the same places but the same flocks season after season. They mated for life. They raised their young communally.
Claudia wondered where the birds went when they couldn’t be at home. Did they miss each other when they were away? Did pigeons dream about old friends? Make plans for pigeon family vacations? Did they feel sorry when they’d disappointed one another? Claudia stood and the bird closest staggered back, chest puffing up and wings beating. She almost apologized for startling it.
When she was left alone, her work wasn’t all that bad. Four and a half months had flown by. Every day was a repetitive read, type, click click click, brainless work that allowed Claudia to forget about the pigeons as best she could. It was easier than she anticipated to focus instead on words as standalone clumps of letters and waterlogged handwriting. Pigeons have been noted with higher success in adapting their diets. The proventriculus glandular part of their stomach rested around a 4.8 ph level. They were able to eat larger amounts of refined grain and processed food items without getting sick. Pigeons enjoyed a grain and legume based diet which matches up to the urban scraps of human food waste many of them sufficed on. They stored excess food in their crop sac for conserving nutrients or to give to their young, crop milk. Claudia really needed to buy milk. She needed to do laundry again too. Ben had shrunken her nice sweater when she’d asked him to handle it last time. She’d even shown him how all the buttons worked.
Claudia started taking all her lunch breaks in the park. She tossed most of her corn chips away to the fountain pigeons, unsalted of course. She delighted in how they all returned to her for more, longing for her to notice them, nurture them. They cooed at her and bowed their heads. She ducked her own back and hoped they’d reached an understanding.
Claudia couldn’t help but notice it one day as she ascended to the attic with one month left on her contract. She’d come to view the space as her own little roost, up high and plenty of nooks and crannies to cuddle up away from the elements or any predators. And once she put it all together she couldn’t help but laugh, loudly, right at her desk drawing an unimpressed glare from Lenard across their cluttered alcove.
Her coworkers’ gray, mottled heads bobbed in agreement with whatever Lenard was saying. Her coworkers, gray molting pigeons with their receding hairlines, who nested with their stacks of books and overheating computers. Each one of them was an arm-flapping, shoulder-stretching squabbling bird running back and forth all day ignoring any questions she had or emailing her passive aggressive comments about keeping her spreadsheets tidy.
When Lenard prattled on to her later about editing one thing or another, all Claudia saw was a large pigeon, gray remiges all puffed up and little glasses perched on pale ceres. Claudia pressed fingers into her temples and flexed her fingers sore from typing. She listened to the flutter of academics pecking at each other and daydreamed about throwing french fries and watching them scatter.
*
Pigeons came in more colors than Claudia ever realized as she spent a day scanning and archiving a pile of photos, a favor Jewel had asked with a kiss to the top of Claudia’s head when she agreed. Pigeons were not only grime-matted gray but blue, green, and purple. She noted the rainbow of them on her walk back to the train. Jewel too, favored these colors and the scent of her perfume had lingered on Claudia’s sleeve all the way home.
Jewel hadn’t been around as much, their conversations limited to her runs between meetings outside the little alcove. Jewel always left with a lingering hand squeeze, a comforting scratch across the shoulders. Claudia wondered if maybe she was just a very affectionate person, Ben had a cousin like that. She looked over at Jewel’s empty desk.
Claudia noticed how the sun caught on a pigeon’s tailfeathers, the bright green hue of it. Pigeons’ beaks have been getting longer over time and so have their legs. To better rifle through trash or maybe to fight or flee as different accounts had hypothesized. The pigeons Claudia passed outside walked down the streets, heads held high, defiant in their rhythm as they circled ankles and dodged purses.
Pigeons related to each other verbally and physically, each vocalization a signifier to a world of meaning that Claudia could swear she was able to tell apart now that she was listening. A growling rumble when a bird got too close to someone else’s lunch. A soft purr to a friend to check in. Pigeons must have ways of greeting each other, there was nothing to differentiate a friend from a lover in the notes. What was the right caw for, Hello, how was your day? How are you? Claudia cannot remember the last time she had any such conversation with someone. Only Jewel, who hummed at her when she saw Claudia stretching out her shoulders at her desk. She came behind her with warm, perfumed hands and offered to rub them for her, pressed in with strong fingers and clicked her tongue at her. Claudia couldn’t find it in herself to ask if she’d had lunch already, only cooed back in thanks, bowed her head to let her work.
Jewel was the only calm one among the cast of unruly birds. Unflappable, she languished at her desk, occasionally putting in headphones for video meetings where she said nearly nothing but nodded intently. She filed her nails habitually. She ordered the others around in her pigeon-toed orthopedic sneakers, tapping her feet all day under her desk like she’d rather be somewhere else.
Claudia finally invited her out on a walk around the park. She’d packed an extra sandwich so they could eat together by the fountain. She’d practiced at home, tilting her head and popping her shoulders, humming under her breath and twitching her chin. Feral city pigeons copulated on a less strict schedule than wild birds, spring and fall mating seasons mere suggestions of how to pass the time. Pigeon birth rates have only increased through urbanization. There were two pigeons together in the fountain when Claudia and Jewel took their seats, the rest of the birds scattered about, some watching and tittering and others pecking at the ground.
Jewel declined the sandwich, citing a gluten allergy Claudia hadn’t known about. Claudia ate hers quietly, cycling through thoughts of interesting conversation. She’d like to know what Jewel went to school for, what Jewel liked on her pizza. What kind of shoes she wore. If Jewel kissed all her friends, if Jewel had time to see each other outside of work, when this was all over. If Jewel knew how a woman was supposed to make friends now when all of hers were still married or out of state or both.
She tried to think of a way to explain how funny it was that the birds and their coworkers were essentially the same. And that she had been thinking about pigeons nonstop since working here like, that Claudia felt for them and how this job had taught her so much. Humans had abandoned pigeons back to the wild and expected them to figure it all out on their own. Of course they walked with us, acted like us, ate our food. They wanted to be with us.
Claudia wasn’t sure if all that domesticated human DNA baked into pigeons still mattered like the field notebooks debated. She wondered if Jewel thought it was only a pantomime now, a shadow of someone else’s dreams teaching them to chase binned scraps after a taste of something old and comforting. She wondered if Jewel thought of them like children, if she worried after them and wanted them to do well on their own. Or maybe, they looked at us like big, strange birds, bumbling our ways through the scrap-filled nests of the world, fighting our way against the cold.
Instead, Jewel turned to her first. “So, do you have any idea what you’ll do next?”
Claudia’s gaze tracked a pigeon flying overhead. “What do you mean?”
“You only have about a month left with us. Have you been looking at other positions?”
“Oh, yes. Of course.”
She had not been. Claudia’s time at home had been whittled away to making meals and taking out the trash. Sometimes she and Ben watched a show together in the evenings but most of the time they didn’t. She’d ask him about his day and he’d reply in vague gestures and clipped replies, opting to spend most evenings with his friends. Claudia slept alone and woke up alone and rode the train alone and walked to the office alone, only flanked by pigeons and the hundred other people who waddle and chirp and shimmy into their assigned dovecot holes. She tried to find the right words to tell Jewel that she was not meant to fly solo, that she needed this place and the company it gave her, that she was starting to feel like a pigeon too.
“I’m looking for something back in education, maybe,” Claudia said. “I used to work in an elementary school’s office. One time, I had to chaperone a field trip to the zoo and a bird pooped on the third grade teacher.”
Jewel smiled, nodding along to Claudia’s story the same way she responded to floating heads on her screen. “I’ve heard that’s supposed to be good luck.”
*
At home, Claudia ate dinner with Ben. She drove him to the park and stayed to watch his soccer practice. She sent a picture to Ben. Other Ben, she wanted to call him. Worse Ben. Irritating Ben. Ben Who Probably Didn’t Even Know His Son’s Jersey Number. Claudia’s traitorous mind had considered renaming her son, but that was hard to do when they’d reached a certain age and she thought Ben might have some grievances about it.
Out in the grass the boys ran back and forth, sometimes knocking into each other just for fun. There were pigeons running around too, just yards away chasing a hamburger wrapper across the parking lot flanked by some smaller sparrows. They lived outside of the city too, she’d been noticing more and more the birds stalking grocery store parking lots and sleeping on the post office roof and taking refuge under front yard shrubs. They looked the same out here as they did downtown, sleepy and a little aimless until they were startled by something into high alert.
Baby pigeons are born pink and featherless. They are fed by the crop milk of their parents, tucked safely away from any potential threats. But feral pigeon babies grow up fast, they need to be tough to exist in a world where danger comes for them constantly.
Did pigeons ever feel jealousy? Did they ever throw other pigeons out of the nest when they got annoying? They hissed, they argued in fits of feathers and clashing beaks, but there was nothing in the field notes about how pigeons made up. When they soothed the other’s ruffled feathers, rubbed out the tension in their hackles, what about that? Did pigeons ever call each other in the middle of the night informing the other pigeon they’d rented an apartment across town? Did they name their pigeon children after themselves and then fly the coop? Claudia wondered what happened to the birds who got left behind. They probably had their pigeon friends, the other members of their colony to help with chores and cooking and helping their pigeon sons apply to high schools and traveling sports teams. Pigeons probably didn’t even notice someone left.
Everyone went out for drinks again at the end of the week to celebrate a successful deadline, a portfolio project or something else crucial to the ‘big picture’ that Claudia still only vaguely understood. They sat at the bar and Jewel leaned against Claudia’s shoulder, whispering jokes in her ear about how Lenard’s drunken pacing reminded her of an owl she saw once that had eaten part of an edible.
A dark haired, handsome man came in and walked over to their table to greet Jewel with a kiss. He introduced himself to Claudia like he already knew her, patted Lenard on the back and waved to the others. She didn’t catch his name, only watched his muscled arm where it draped over Jewel’s shoulder, the one that had just been resting against her shoulder. Jewel left shortly after with him, kissing both Claudia’s and Lenard’s cheeks goodbye.
Claudia stumbled up to the train platform an hour or so later, tipsy and off kilter. She was alone on the platform except for the clusters of pigeons. Some were cuddled under benches while others courted each other, strutting across worn wooden boards. Around and around they went, Claudia’s eyes traced over them as her vision spun at the edges.
The birds were all perfectly at ease here. For the feral pigeon, a city was a playground of hiding spots. An endless food buffet. A beautiful, stinky, concrete paradise that wild pigeons could never appreciate. Jewel had said that once. She thought the feral pigeons, the ones descended from abandoned, domesticated ancestors, had gained an advantage when it came to urban living. The ones with memories of lost comforts baked into their DNA now the best survivors.
A pigeon’s optic nerve was about five centimeters long emerging out from the eye’s posterior hole. They had a nearly full 360 degree view of the world. They could see around themselves entirely. Pigeons bobbed their heads not just to communicate but to gain perspective, shaking their soft nerves to zoom in and out on the world like a camera. But the wulst of their brains that allowed for stereoscopic vision gave them little overlap compared to other birds. They had bad depth perception. Their rock dove ancestors didn’t need it. They only ever had to find a hole along a rocky cliff or mountain edge to call home. These pigeons moved premeditatively, choreography plotted out through generations of knowing this world was not built for them. The cone photoreceptors of their eyes held oil droplets that let pigeons see more color. Pigeons were drawn to bright colors. They liked to fill their nests with shiny plastic wrappers and scraps of fabric. Pigeons recycled. They took what others discarded in evolving claws and carried them into their homes, trusting old instincts to tell them how to shape it into something warm and safe. Their inner ears had electromagnetic cells that allowed them to trace direction, hone in on magnetic fields from the earth. The way home was built into pigeons’ bodies, even now, as they scavenged it from the slate gray holes of a new and strange wilderness. Claudia followed one pigeon as it flew up into the covered platform ceiling. It hopped daintily across a row of bird spikes zip tied to a beam, squawking when they pressed into its legs. It disappeared. Claudia climbed up on the bench, her dress shoe heels wobbling in the cracks, and looked up at the bird spikes, reaching out to prod their surface. They felt springy, softer than she’d imagined. Behind the spikes, more pigeons were crammed into the empty ceiling space nesting in pink insulation and dead leaves. Claudia gripped the beam to get a better look.
One of the birds puffed out their feathers at her, letting out a displeased rumble. Claudia tried to chirp back, twist her head side to side and bow. She cooed to it just like Jewel had cooed at her.
The bird flapped forward and Claudia fell back, crashing to the ground as her weight shifted, pulling the whole row of spikes she’d been holding down with her. She laid on the dirty ground with the wind knocked out of her. Startled pigeons flocked down from the ceiling. Their formless, spinning bodies hitting the ground sounded like applause. She closed her eyes and let the hard press of wood seep into her shoulders, soothed by the sounds of beating wings. The birds settled and when all was quiet again she looked to find them peering at her as if to help her back up.
On Claudia’s last day Jewel brought her a cupcake and Lenard gave her a gift card for a bookstore she’d never heard of all the way across the city. They both hugged her and wished her luck with whatever came next. There was expectant twinge to the wish, a question buried in the lead. What was she going to do now? She imagined telling them the work here inspired her to go back to school and study ornithology. Or that she was returning to administrative work at another office, one with bigger windows and less confusing style guides. She nodded to her coworkers and accepted a final shoulder squeeze from Jewel. There was no exchanging of numbers, no offers to stay in touch.
Claudia left the office early, completed notebooks left stacked in her seat and the donor computer returned to Lenard’s desk. The sun was out and she headed for the park instead of the train. Pigeons still filled the fountain even though the spouting water had been turned off for the season, leaving only empty basins. Claudia perched herself on the fountain’s concrete edge and toed off her shoes, letting her socket feet touch the cold ground. Around her, pigeons flapped and pecked at old algae, their shining silver and purple crests gleaming in the sun.
Tomorrow, she would drive Ben to school instead of sending him on the bus. Ben would pick him up for their weekend together. She’d finally vacuum under the couch. Change her bedsheets. Do the laundry. Pull weeds in the garden. When Ben came to drop her son off back home, she’d invite him in for a cup of coffee and he’d decline as he always did, and her Ben would run out to the backyard with barely a word. Later they’d eat dinner together and she’d take him back to another soccer practice and Claudia would watch him, send a message to a friend who lived six hours away, and wait a week to hear a reply. Pigeons flocking beside her were unbothered by the cold breeze. The train’s all encompassing rumbling didn’t phase them one bit. Claudia’s own shoulders crept towards her ears with a shiver. When the wind washed over her again Claudia leaned into it, feeling it curl the ends of her hair and creep into her fingertips. She kicked her feet out in the air and flexed her toes like talons to crack them. Her arms opened wide as she could stretch and her mouth followed in a yawn, the air rushing through her as though she was nothing at all. Something inside unfurled. Pigeons huddled in the sun, heads glittering.