There’s a dead pigeon in the gutter. It makes me sadder than it should. It’s not the death that’s most upsetting, or even the gutter of it all. It’s the mere fact of the pigeon, if you want to know the truth.
“Watch your step,” I say to Marky, tugging his little forearm like I could swing his whole body up and over the curb. His sneaker grazes a smear of viscera, but he misses the bulk of the bird.
“Oh,” Marky says. Squints. Shudders.
They’re seemingly infinite, pigeons. One goes down, a swarm flocks in to fill the gap. Gray, blue-gray, purple-grayish-gray, evoking soot and ash, the remnants of things you clean out of a flue. My father used to forget to do that, every time he made a fire. “Goddamn flue!” he’d shout, pigeon-colored smoke choking the room.
“It makes my elbows tingle,” says Marky.
“What?”
“Dead things.”
We trot south, skirting slow walkers to make the light. My eyes keep dragging to Marky’s left shoe. The laces aren’t untied, not fully, it’s just that they’re tied with radical inefficacy. Loose and dangling, both loops and strings kissing the pavement like fingers trailing through water off the side of a boat. Only, in this case, pigeon guts.
“Why was he flat?”
“Who?”
“The pigeon. The dead pigeon.”
How to answer? Because he’s disposable, I could say. Because no one else’s elbows tingle. “Who says it’s a he?” I go with instead.
When we get home, we won’t make a fire. Our fireplace is purely decorative, though it puts up a good front—even sports artificial logs in an iron grate. It embarrasses me, when others see it. Always having to disabuse. “Oh, no, it’s non-working,” I explain, with a stuttering laugh, like I’ve been caught doing something indecent. We ought to drywall over it, sell the mantle marble for scrap. When I mentioned that once, Marky cried.
Overhead, pigeons dive bomb pedestrians. Underfoot, pigeons peck at scraps. Pigeons remind me of bloated, feathered lesions, for in addition to cinders, they share the color of a bruise.
He was flat. The gutter-pigeon. Eventually he’ll be ground down entirely, those bird bones trodden and scuffed to dust. How many formerly alive things do we walk upon daily? How much blood is under our soles?
“Mom?” Marky’s face is open, questioning. He tugs my index finger. “Are you OK?” I’ve stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, it seems. A human eddy for the stream of commuters to flow around and past.
There is something I have to tell him. Something that will make his elbows tingle. Something that will make him cry. Across the intersection, two pigeons ignore each other atop a window air conditioning unit, stupid to their oncoming fate.
“I’m fine!” I assure him. Because largely, I am. Sad truths will still be true tomorrow. One solid step, and the gutter will be behind us. And a fake fireplace means never having to clean out the flue. I take his hand and we press on, sky full of flying, street built on backs and bodies and somehow bearing our weight.
Erica Ottenberg is an Emmy Award-winning writer and creative director. For over twenty years, she wrote and produced content for kids & families at Nickelodeon. She is also the author of three books in Madonna’s The English Roses series for middle-grade readers. Erica is the winner of Book Pipeline’s Unpublished Manuscript (Young Adult) for her novel, Confessions of a Ghostwriter. She is a winner of Writers’ Hour Magazine’s flash fiction contest.