pigeon

there are plenty of ways to get on a northbound f train in brooklyn. you can walk out of the ocean at coney island and right there is the f train, waiting for you. you can roll your wheelchair onto an elevator at church avenue, one of the few accessible stops on the entire line. you can leave the wilds of prospect park and enter the tunnels at the 15th street entrance. but if you're walking from bensonhurst, you can climb the dusty wooden stairs at bay parkway. two flights of slats you can see between, allowing you to view small strips of the world below you. mostly cars and cemetery.

as you walk up to the first landing you try to figure out what made folks build this thing two stories high. think about the fact that further in toward manhattan on this very line is the highest point on the entire system. be glad you aren't climbing to that platform. you make it to the second landing and you see an egg there, looking like last halloween, flat, splattered. it isn't right, though, because it's too small. half the soft white shell is lying between two of the floorboards and you realize it's a pigeon egg fallen from somewhere. you look up and there on the rafter directly above you, directly above the egg, sit two pigeons staring at the mess and at you. sticks and torn bits of plastic decorate the beam under their claws.

you want to take a picture of the shattered egg. the yolk is stiff and dry, little peaks standing up where people have stepped in it and walked away. you think about the camera in your bag and look up again at the two pigeons, solemn, like ugly guardians of the egg. what you know of birds tells you this is no real loss to them because they are birds and have brains the size of peas, made for building nests and finding food and for figuring out the mechanics and logistics of flying. birds do not feel sad. then there's the fact that you do not like pigeons. they are dirty and the city ones especially are always broken- dragging along gnarled claws or bent wings. half the city's birds seem to be without two feet. you recall that your hatred of pigeons did not stop you from thawing out a pigeon stupid enough to get itself frozen to a ledge once. and that part of you, not the part that knows facts but the part that feels sad for stupid things when- or maybe because- they are stupid, looks down at the crushed egg, which might have been a dirty pigeon someday but for the horrible wind. then that same part of you looks back up at the stupid pigeons, blank circles for eyes, staring right back at you. and you don't take the photo. you just get on the train.