Tag: birds

Air Aria

A tree on 10th Street. There is a glass building behind it.

It almost sounded more like squeaking bedsprings than tweets and chirps. Except that there would have been an old time hospital ward full of beds, and those beds would need to be fully exerted in a most athletic fashion to create this level of racket.

Maybe the tree was a bird version of a packed convention center exhibit hall, the echoing din of vendor and vendee voices combining to fill the cavern. Except that the pitch was much higher and frequently punctuated. The noise didn’t grow to a generalized loud buzz. It didn’t fade into the background. It was scraped, like a metal rake on concrete, onto the air.

You couldn’t actually see the birds in the tree, but there were likely hundreds. It wasn’t as much that the tree was large–although it was–but that there were a lot of birds. Peering into the dark foliage you might think you could make out the movement of a bird, but it was as likely to be the movement of a leaf. Undoubtably disturbed by a camouflaged bird. Their shiny black eyes didn’t reflect any light and their beaks and wings melted into the evening shadow of the bounteous greenery.

Walking under the tree, people only thought about birds dropping. Not the birds themselves, you know. The gray sidewalk was splashed with white splatter shapes of guano. It wasn’t slick, but it looked it. Pedestrian heads ping-ponged between carefully looking up to avoid walking into dropping poop–carefully in that they didn’t want anything falling into their eyes–and looking  down at the ground to avoid a slip and a fall onto the fresh “paint.”

But it was the shrill turbulence of peeps and warbles, and the furious rustling of leaves and branches, that drew attention. And questions. Why that tree? Why so many birds? Why this evening?

As the walkers reached the second half of the block, they forgot that they had even wondered.

 

Posted on by docthink 1

Courtyard by Hotel

She stood up and rearranged herself–her slacks, her jacket, her bags and her bones, including all her vertebrae from where she was just perched and up through the base of her neck. She shook out her legs to straighten her knees. She snapped up the front of her vest then yanked the bottoms of her pants. She wanted them to meet the top of her sandals. She was together now.

She was done with her squagle. That’s what they called the bagel-like fare from the corner shop. It was square and had a hole in the middle. She was full after eating a quarter of it. The pigeons nearby eyed the rest. These were very fat pigeons. They were not hungry as much as they were greedy. They made some pigeon sounds and slowly strutted in front of her. The better to catch her attention.

She began to tear her roll into chunks. She tossed the chunks on the bricked patio. Then she wished she could take them back. They were so jagged and ripped. And big. Too big. She wished she had taken the time to more cleanly tear them, and to tear them into smaller, more accessible pieces for the birds.

She reached into one of her bags for another squagle. She carefully tore it in half. She was very deliberate this time. She eyed the middle and split it from the top. She placed one half in the bag to her left. She kept it at the top because she expected to return to it soon.

She looked at the bread in her hand. She pinched off the corner, then picked at it and picked at it until her lap was full of small pieces of bread. She picked a piece up and tried to make it smaller. It was still too big. She frenetically pinched at the edges, trying to make the bread into the specs of flour that it came from. She needed them to be smaller. The birds strutted closer and then flapped their wings, slightly alarmed, as her motions became wilder.

Her head shot up and down like a piston to some internal metronome as her hands plucked at the bread in a frenzy. Sweat beaded at her temples. She reached to unsnap her vest when a gust of wind scattered the tiny crumbs from her dark lap in a swirl. But the pieces were too small for the birds, there was really nothing left.

 

Posted on by docthink 1