Two pigeons were dying. One was on its side, breathing heavy, some sort of thick, greenish ooze coming from its mouth, and the other one was still sitting up, flapping its wings, as if it could just fly off, but that one was dying too. A little boy holding the hand of his stupid-looking father pointed at the birds and asked his father what was happening, but daddy said he didn’t know. The boy started crying. He said, “Help them.” The father looked around the plaza, as if some super hero would come and save the day. He looked at me, and I shrugged my shoulders.
Other pigeons were dying too, a whole bunch of them under the tree that shaded most of the plaza and some of the outdoor tables of the café. Some of the soon-to-be dead birds could still walk around, like drunkards, but others, in the more advanced stages of death, could only fall on their sides, breathing slowly, heavily, deliberately, that goo slowly oozing out of their beaks. One young pigeon, thin and with a long smooth neck, still had enough strength to fly off, but only for a few feet, and then he landed again, tried to fly again, until his young body caved in, and he landed with a thud on the stone. He titled and fell to his side, breathed hard, and gave up his spirit.
People in the outdoor cafe were murmuring, “What could it be?” Some man in a red cap suggested it was the heat. This was the summer of that heat wave, when it was so hot that many old people died in the hell of their own non-air-conditioned flats. “It’s the heat,” redcap suggested. Others disagreed.
“Birds are in their nature,” I said to the father, who was standing next to me, looking dumbly at the birds, the boy’s head buried in his chest.
“Nature doesn’t kill them,” I said. “This is something else.”
Some tourist was talking pictures of all the dead and dying birds. A teenage girl with a piercing in her lip, covered her eyes in sadness. People asked each other and themselves in various languages what must have happened, why were all the birds dying.
The girl with the pierced lip looked up into the sky, as if she expected some dead birds would just fall down like a shower of frogs.
“Should we call someone?” some man with a briefcase asked the crowd.
“Who?” some woman replied.
“Let’s call the police,” the father said.
That’s when I said something.
“The police? What for? It’s not like some crime has been committed.”
The crowd was listening to me.
“This is nature, some phenomenon of nature. Maybe it’s God’s way of telling us something, something big that’s about to happen. Maybe this is an omen. If you think about it, this is pretty amazing. Birds don’t just die. Not this many.”
At that statement a few people looked up into the sky. Others nodded their heads, as if they, too, had been thinking about God.
“The police can’t do anything to help them,” I said pushing my hand deeper into my pants’ pocket.
Left Over by Michael Shannon
Think of him dying. Still smoking cigarettes. Emaciated. Loose skin. Jutting bones. Wrinkled like a child left in a pool under a yellow sun all day.
Think of him not being able to think.
Alzheimer’s disease and doddering fingers and furrowed brows and sprouting gray hairs from strange orifices. Long, yellowed fingernails. Sullied, smoke-stained dentures.
A half-pack of Camels on a nightstand. A red lighter. An ashtray with dunes of charcoal ashes and dead cigarettes.
Dead. Like him. Left there.
Feel his indifference. Not knowing he’ll die. How he can’t care about something he doesn’t know.
Smoking and dying.
Wife: Gloria. Dead. Brain aneurysm.
Daughter: Sandy. A slut. In Europe on a grant, studying strange and obscure paintings by artists who’ve been buried underground for over a century—even artists who’ve had their bodies burned and turned to dust and tossed in rivers and thrown off precipices.
He’s coughing mucous into a bucket at his feet. Yellow and green slime filled with bile.
And an RN—maybe an LPN—walks into his room, saying, “Hey, John, how are you today?”
He doesn’t answer the blonde nurse. The words don’t register. Unintelligible. Meaningless.
He smiles though.
John smiles.
And the nurse, Becky, smiles back. Becky’s pretty with piercing blue irises and a smile that covers her face like one of those bright-yellow happy faces you get in elementary school when you spell cat right.
C-A-T.
“You can’t smoke in here,” Becky avows half-heartedly. “How did you even get an ashtray in here?” She doesn’t really care though. It’s just protocol she’s following. She’s twenty-two-years-old and has missed her period this month. So, why would she really care? Her boyfriend, Kevin, is having sex with another girl. Becky’s sure of it. She’s sure she’s pregnant, too. She feels it—the bun baking in her metaphorical oven.
None of this smoking-in-the-old-age-home-talk matters anyway. Not to John. Not to her.
There’s other issues to worry about. Like people always dying and getting diagnosed with things that want to ravenously eat their entrails. Diagnosed with this. Diagnosed with that. Diseases that come uninvited. No invitation. No RSVP. Like this stupid Alzheimer’s disease.
So nobody cares about John smoking. Not John or Becky or dead Gloria or slutty Sandy in Europe.
It’s all pointless. Like being a little kid and pissing into the ocean to make it bigger. Pointless.
John’s just hanging on to the tendrils of life. Waiting. Unaware. Not knowing there’s a voracious bogeyman in the closet that wants to masticate his soul. A bogeyman sent by God.
All this, while his daughter, Sandy, has been having sex with a man named Claude in France.
And Claude, that bastard, makes Sandy call him Daddy.
Imagine it.
Sandy on her back saying, “Harder, Daddy,” to a guy who isn’t her Daddy at all. That’s what Claude is into. Whips. Daddy-calling. Chains. Orgies. Perverted stuff. Abnormal.
And Sandy, that whore-of-a-daughter-who-hasn’t-come-to-visit-her-father, well she doesn’t seem to care. She just closes her eyes tight and calls Claude Daddy.
Claude’s a sculptor. Sandy would do anything to preserve the relationship, to mold it. It sounds cool to her to say she’s with a sculptor—to say she’s fucking a sculptor.
And poor John doesn’t know what’s going on with Sandy. He’s forgotten all about her. He’s forgotten about Gloria, too. Forgotten everything.
Becky places a tray in front of him: a cold grilled cheese, some steamed broccoli, an apple, and a container of milk.
And Becky says, “You know, John, you have a lovely daughter in Europe. Do you know?”
Becky doesn’t know if he knows. But, the way his eyes look through her, searching and lost, tells her that he has no clue.
“She’s pretty, like me,” Becky adds, lifting a framed picture of Sandy and Gloria—circa 1999—off the nightstand, and handing it to John. “Real pretty,” she says, looking at herself in the mirror to the side of John’s bed, straightening her ponytail.
She is. Sandy is pretty like Becky. Same cliché-azure eyes. Same blonde hair. Same pallid face with patches of strawberry skin. Pretty.
John takes the picture from Becky and looks at the girl. His girl. His Sandy. The girl he and Gloria made twenty-two-years-ago in a hotel room in Boston after a beer festival. A mistake. A mistake they didn’t eradicate. A mistake they kept.
But he doesn’t know the girls in the picture.
“Sandy,” Becky says, pointing at Sandy. She says, “your Sandy.”
Becky smiles.
She takes the picture out of John’s tremulous fingers, puts it back on the nightstand, and says, “She’s in Europe. She called yesterday. She spoke to you over the phone.”
Again, words without meaning. Words that don’t register. Unintelligible. Meaningless.
“Europe,” Becky repeats.
Nothing.
John’s time-to-shine is over. His memory is gone. Sandy’s dead to him forever. Dead. Like him. Like the cigarettes in the ashtray. Like Gloria.
John eats the broccoli, chewing on the stems. He spits the head of the broccoli out, onto the tray. His eyes are engrossed by the images on the television screen. Images he can’t register. Just shapes and colors and flitting scenes without pith. People enunciating things his mind can’t process. Just dead words.
Becky leaves, closes the door lightly. She’s going to the bathroom to take a pregnancy test. She drank water and held in her pee all day. She is almost seething with the urge to emit it from her bladder.
And John keeps his eyes transfixed on the television screen.
Just looking.
Looking at things that mean nothing to a dead mind.
Things that simply mean nothing to him.
