The smoke had gotten so bad that seagulls started falling from the sky. They fell into the water at the Rockaways and onto the highest fire escapes in Alphabet City.
A video began to circulate of firefighters intubating a pigeon. Rachel was in a small coffee shop with glass windows, uptown, by the park. She was sitting at the counter looking out onto the street. No, she was facing the street, and she was looking at her phone. The video was playing on repeat, the sound off.
There were two men in the video. One was Italian-looking with very veiny hands. He reached down and grabbed the pigeon. He held it by its wings, which against the smoky grey sky were a beautiful sort of turquoise and purple, feathers interwoven.
Highlights, $250 plus tip. Bob, lob, French bob, Italian bob. Wolf cut, pixie cut, bear cut, pigeon cut. Perms were back now, too, Rachel had heard.
The second man was pale. His hands were smaller, but not gentle as they forced the pigeon’s head backwards and pried his beak open. Down went a tube almost certainly too thick for a pigeon’s throat, so Rachel thought. This was meant for a human, perhaps a baby human. Would they use it on a baby again? Surely the hospitals couldn’t afford to waste.
Waste not, want not, a whole lot, all over the lot, parking lot.
The pigeon writhed and flapped and then seemed to ease, as if at last, again, it could breathe.
These were creatures which Rachel saw as filthy. Aerial rats. But no one would dare bother to intubate a rat. They would stand by and watch it writhe on the sidewalk, the hot cement, twitching the way mammals do when they are about to go. And then they would gag at its lifeless, decomposing corpse, and think that what killed it could not possibly have been something that could kill them, too.
Rachel never would read the study that came out later that summer. It was driven by a group of interns at the Department of Evolution & Ecology at NYU. Shocked by their findings, they had double and triple checked, and then passed their numbers up the totem pole for publication. They were not to be the first named authors on the study, but they were glad to be included, and to be paid, and to have the chance to dress in tight jean shorts on Friday nights and go to the intern bars and kiss twenty-three-year-olds who had overdone it on the aftershave.
Here is what the study said:
Three thousand rats had died that week, and nine hundred pigeons had fallen from the sky. Finding no brave firefighters, the pigeons inhaled too much smoke and suffocated. The population of owls migrating into the city rose exponentially. Male owls flocked into the city and picked at the corpses of the rats and the pigeons. They then returned to their nests in Rockaway, where the seagulls had fallen. The mothers divided the food into small pieces and fed it to their chicks.
The squabs—those who survived—went hungry. First they would have had crop milk, suckling it from their mothers. Then they’d have grown to stomach regurgitated seeds and grains. Then their feathers would have come in. They would have shed their fluff for adult wings and finally been able to feed themselves. But this season, without fuel, their feathers could not slough off for newer, coarser, stronger ones. They could not survive.
The owlets grew big and strong and had more babies the next year and the year after, and so the owls returned to Belle Harbor in numbers higher than the many decades past.
The video of the pigeon kept playing on her phone. Rachel looked from one glass square to another. She stared at herself in the window. She pursed her lips and drew them to the left. She knew she was beautiful, in a sort of terse, untraditional way. She became more beautiful to herself the more the circles under her eyes grew, the messier her ponytail, the more chipped her nails. Rachel sipped the watery dregs of her iced coffee and stood up to leave. Her legs had let out droplets of sweat which seeped onto the warm wood of the stool so that when she stood it felt like painful peeling. Perhaps inches had peeled off and stuck such that, when she left, the ligaments and red musculature under her skin would show. People on the street would stare at the skinless body just below her ass. She would have left behind huge chunks of what had been her thighs on the chair. Rachel hurried out the door.
Rachel crossed at Lincoln Center and headed toward the park. She walked past toddler row, where the city’s expensive, exorbitant daycares and preschools stood welcoming and well-painted behind brown picket fences. They were soon to make the public schools free, and still families would pay hundreds of thousands for their children to have what others couldn’t. On the fence to one tot-factory was a large and bright cardinal. Rachel nodded, as if to say there he goes, and here I go.
Rachel had a sort of uninformed affinity for birds. She didn’t know their scientific names; she could not tell one species of crow from another. She certainly didn’t have one of those silly apps on which you could log the birds you witnessed like you logged the movies you watched, books you read, calories you ate, people you loved.
Rachel’s mom, to whom she no longer spoke, had taught her to eavesdrop. They would sit on a bench outside the market, cluster together, eat meatball hoagies, and watch. The closer you watched, the easier it would be to listen, Rachel’s mom had told her. There is always someone listening, she’d whisper into Rachel’s ear, one of her many lessons in paranoia. Later she stopped taking Rachel to the doctor, and stopped going herself, and began believing that cancer hid in everything—the sunlight, the water, the shampoo used by the teachers at school.
Rachel’s dad, to whom had spoken nearly every day until a month ago when his heart gave out, had taught her to translate. He had taught her to understand her mother’s crazy and to listen to the calls of the birds. Together they wrote them out phonetically, like they had the Mourner’s Kaddish when they moved into Rachel’s grandmother’s house. It was just the two of them. Together, they knew how to pray, and how to seek prayer in response.
Witchety, witchety, witchety, said the Common Yellowthroat. Free beer! chirped the Alder Flycatcher. Rachel loved these ones. Free beer! her dad would call, and she’d giggle and wheeze.
The coo-roo-coo of the city dwelling Rock Pigeon drew potential mates to common nesting sites. But the common Wood Pigeon dropped its final two notes: coo-coo-coo…coo-roo. And the Eurasian Dove, commonly mistaken as a pigeon, sang evenly paced tri-pa-lets: coo-coo-coo.
Rachel had the particular, unusual view of conversation that not every statement needed a response. She was happy just to speak, or just to listen. Rachel and her dad would read to each other from her grandmother’s collection of books. Sometimes, still, she called him not to say a word herself, just to hope she might hear his voice. Instead she heard the beeping of the phone line. Still, she listened to his logistical voicemails, parsing them for poetry. Rachel’s mother hated her father’s voice. Perhaps Rachel loved it spitefully, using her mother’s acute ears in a manner her very own. His voice was smooth and gravelly like the Wood Pigeon, it was self-assured, rhythmic, and knew how to play on irony.
Such a privilege is put on back and forth, reciprocity, boundaries, respect. We are walls to each other; we might fly into each other and die. Rachel and her dad would mourn her grandmother’s life, and her mother’s sanity. Their mourning call was birdsong, and Rachel knew it phonetically long before she knew its actual text. Yit-ga-dal va-yit-ka-dash sha-may-rah-baa. It’s rhythm went up and down, like the Alder Flycatcher’s. Free beer.
Rachel watched the cardinal fly away. His red wings were refreshing amidst the grey. Churr-churr-chew-chew-chew-chew-chew-chew he sang, like a laser gun firing.
Rachel knew where she was going: across the park halfway, and then straight down, on 2nd Avenue. She would buy a bran muffin from her favorite place, where they sold them cheap and baked them large and didn’t skimp on the raisins or the crumbled oat topping.
She would walk until the carousel, and then lap around it one time. She loved it, moving or not, the children on their horses, the horses falsely lifelike. Children do not care. They like anything they can use, ride, taste, spit out, chew, swallow, grab onto the plastic mane of and go for a spin.
The carousel was running, but the horses were void of passengers. Looking around, Rachel saw only two other people in the clearing: a little girl and her mother. The girl was crying. She was a little girl dressed up as a little girl, her hair in pigtails, and with her wails she was playing the part. Mah-mah-mammmy. Her mother was in tight leggings and a linen tank. They had been told to stay inside. The AQI. The smoke. What were they doing here? In the mother’s hand was a cigarette.
Rachel turned and headed south on Center Drive. Where usually the park would be filled, on a sunny day, with girls in patterned bikinis, the fields were empty. The trees around Rachel grew taller, the bushes greener, cloaked as they were in grey. Ahead of her the path curved. Feeling for the first time the smoke in her lungs, Rachel began to walk more slowly. They were in that period of summer during which nothing much blooms, but everything is a lush and beautiful green. A lush and beautiful green-grey.
Rachel began to cough when she saw it.
There was a deer lying, collapsed, at the next corner. The smoke, Rachel thought. She turned around abruptly. She did not want to pass him. But the smoke was heavier behind her, and this was the most direct way. Rachel moved her body sharply to the other side of the path. In trying hard not to look at the deer Rachel found herself staring. The smoke must have taken him out.
She had never seen a deer in the city before. She thought about the girls at work who were amazed about her childhood stories of checking for ticks—out in the grass, like, you roll around in there—they had gasped. They had probably never seen something like this before. The deer’s antlers were long and firm, his chest and legs lean. The velvet around his ears was thick and folded, like on a pitbull, like thick cartilage when it starts to grow, like men in suits draped in large suede coats in the fall which crumpled when they sat on the subway, straightening with subtle creases when they stood. Rachel remembered what she had read in one of the big books of wildlife. In the wild, it is biologically impossible to tell if a specific buck has sired fawns just by looking at him. Still, this was a father. Rachel knew.
Were the antlers now an inch longer than before? The velvet still covered them. Peach fuzz, kiwi fuzz, pervstache, armpit hair. The smoke. Rachel walked as quickly as she could past the deer. Were his lungs weak from how much preparation he had needed to mate? Did he collapse under the weight of fatherhood?
Her mother would have called it an omen. Her father would have called it a misplaced white-tailed buck.
He was not a doe, whose post-partum belly would sag. Still the wounds of his fatherhood showed.
He had a large red spot in his middle, blood oozing out, where, Rachel realized, a bullet had lodged.
Here is what she thought:
The smoke has shot him, and has left the bullet there, and as his antlers grow, he bleeds out. The smoke might shoot me too and I will bleed from the middle. This is not the hunter I imagined for myself. The antlers are still growing, growing anyway. That is the terrible part. His body keeps doing what a father’s body does. Send blood into the branches, thicken the trunks, feed the future.
She imagined the blood spreading, like the limbs of a tree, like river channels, like the lines of prayer written phonetically in her notebook as a child.
But when Rachel looked again the red spot was gone. One more look, and again his skin was taught and tan. And then she curved again, around the edge of the path, and kept walking.
It was ten minutes out of the park, then a block over to 6th Avenue, and a block down. Rachel coughed and felt as if her lungs had cleared. She could walk more quickly again. It took her twelve minutes to get to the bakery, and then three minutes to order the muffin, one minute to pay the two fifty in singles and quarters. She left the bakery and watched the sparrows beneath the benches, pecking at what everyone else had dropped. They had survived the smoke. Or perhaps they had only survived the afternoon. Rachel listened for their calls anyway. It took her four minutes to devour the muffin as she headed east, headed home.
Talia Traskos-Hart writes fiction, essays, and literary criticism. Originally from Colorado, Talia studied History and English at Bowdoin College. There, she founded and edited a campus magazine compiling long-form journalism, creative non-fiction, and visual art. Also at Bowdoin, she wrote a yearlong column of personal-literary criticism entitled “Suppose a Sentence.” Her writing explores memory, family, and the ways people construct identity. She is currently a student at Stanford Law School and an editor on the Stanford Law Review. Talia hopes to go into public defense.