Pigeons

She took one lengthy deep drag from her cigarette as the cold biting breeze disheveled her long, dirty-blonde hair, and she held her breath as lifeless beaten newspaper pages rolled past her pastel-pink scuffed up Louboutins. As she removed the hair from her mouth and face, she noticed her bitten, black paint-chipped finger nails reflected the frozen face of the lady known as the Statue of Liberty, and for a sullen second, she allowed one seething tear to slither its way down her mascara. Her hands began to shake from the cold and she rubbed her arms as she finally exhaled and threw the cigarette on the dirty sidewalk and stepped on it with assertion. The pigeons plummeted and cooed, fluttering fiercely their grey and white plumage. Recollections of her grandmother came to mind as she had said, “Pigeons are rats with wings…disgusting creatures that carry a hundred diseases.”

 

Pigeons are cute, she thought. I love their singing and their playing. I don’t care if other people think they’re diseased—they’re alive and they’re survivors.

∞