Animals: “Pigeon House” by Shilo Niziolek

Pigeon House

I wake in my queen size bed. I lace my fingers behind my head before opening my eyes. I know what awaits me on the other side of my lids, a room filled with pigeons and an empty spot beside me. It’s not the morning light that blinds me streaming through the window above the bed, but a hundred sets of tiny orange eyes blinking back into the daylight from the floor, the bottom of the bed frame, the dresser, the chair that sits in the corner. Their heads bobble and small crooning noises erupt as, one after another, the pigeons notice I am awake. 

I had been dreaming that William stood across from me in an empty parking lot. We were disagreeing about something, and I said “I’ve loved you since I was fifteen. I’m thirty-one now. I’ve loved you over half my life and I’m not going to stop now.” He moved toward me, his hand outstretched, and that’s when I woke. Now I press my eyes tightly, sealing them like a jar trying to push away the light. It was the shuffling of wings that pulled me out of it, just as William and I were about to kiss.  

Whooo, whooo. The whispers of a hundred pigeons take flight inside my body and I feel myself levitate into the air and open up my wings. But just as easily, I sink back down into the yawning mouth of the bed. Flight was never my dream. It was William’s. That’s why the birds are here. They’re trying to tell me that William is dead. That William is a bird. That he’ll never come back to me. But I don’t listen. I won’t listen. I will not let him fly from me. 

I stretch out my arms and toes and accidentally tap the protruding purple chest of a wide-set bird atop my metal bed frame. He shuffles away and emits what is akin to a huff.

“Well, you shouldn’t make a home on people’s heads.”

I rise from the nest of my down comforter and tiptoe across the hard-wood floor, weaving between birds, wings all aflutter. And with one swoop of her hand Lily parted the grey sea. After checking my slippers for birds and poop I slip my toes into them and head across the room to light a fire. It’s only early November, but already the chill on the coast is so volatile in the morning that I’m suspicious a snow could fall within the week. A small purple pigeon is nestled into the wood stack, and I pick her up the way you would a small rabbit and set her gently down next to me, her eyes enamored at the growth of flames. I hear the gentle tap of a hundred claws making their way down the hallway. They are usually polite enough not to fly inside. When I turn from the wood burning stove delicate wobbling heads have pressed in around. A hush falls over the room as they warm themselves by the fire. It feels like applause. 

I shuffle through their bodies and peek out the front window. The old ladies are out in matching track suits. They look like crinkly versions of Power Rangers, except instead of saving the world they are dedicated to saving the neighborhood and to do so they have aimed all their powers of will at getting the crazy pigeon lady out and leveling her pigeon house. They whisper among themselves and cast vicious looks my way, their eyes become teeth. Only a few short months ago, I was just their sweet young librarian who lived with her handsome blue-eyed husband on the corner of Pleasant Avenue. But I guess that’s how fast the world can turn on you. Close your eyes and fall asleep and when you wake up the man you love is no longer there beside you. He becomes a figment, a ghost, and next thing you know; your house is swarmed with pigeons. It starts small. At first just a few birds in the trees. Their haunting little whoo’s whispering down at you. But then more and more come. Soon they’re on your porch, nesting in your shed, destroying your garden. And then, finally, one day, you look up and they are in your house. But I don’t need to tell you this. You already know the way that love can turn fowl. 

William and I were still newlyweds the first time it happened, barely two months in. It was night and he had been out late. I don’t know where he had been. After our wedding he became distant. He wasn’t always the charismatic and bright young man I married or that I’d been in love with for two years. I had noticed small things before the wedding, little changes I didn’t read too much into: dark circles under his eyes, the way he’d tilt his cell phone away from my body at an angle so I couldn’t see the screen. His body seemed taut like a livewire at times, and other times he was languid and heavy. A river burgeoning from the rains.

On this night, I noticed the pallor of his skin. He came into the room and began undressing me without a word. No Hello, baby. His eyes seemed black even though they were actually ice blue, and I felt the stare acutely, the way a woman walking alone on a darkened street feels when she knows there is someone behind her. I tried to kiss him, but he pushed my face away. He wasn’t after love making. There was something else inside him. A beast. A monster. When it was over, he lay beside me gulping for air. He said my name, at first like it was a curse, then a whisper, then a cry.  

Over the following years the cavern in my stomach grew larger with each turn of his head. He no longer looked to me like the man I had fallen in love with. Where his eyes had been kind and clear they were now cloudy and narrow, as if he were looking for something that wasn’t there, things that only existed in his mind. They were steely and cool and unmoving. His nose grew pointier as his face grew skinnier. I felt small and wild against the abstraction of him.

“I want to be a bird in the afterlife,” he once said to me on a good day. We had been at the beach and I had packed a picnic and brought along my parents’ old wool blanket to sit on. It was August and the sun shone through his curly hair and lit up his smile.

“Why a bird?” I asked.

He looked out toward the waves, eyes settling on a far-away point, like the green light on the dock in Fitzgerald’s Gatsby. 

“All that freedom,” he said: “They’ve got the whole wide world around and below them.”

He shook the seriousness from his eyes. 

“Let’s build a sandcastle.” He jumped up and raced away toward the dark wet sand. 

I looked around at the pigeons wondering if one was him, but maybe what he wanted most he could never become. 

+

Lily woke in her queen size bed. She was late for work at the coffeeshop, and even though she was the owner, late was late. She threw on an oversized grey sweater and a pair of yesterday’s stiff jeans, she flew down the stairs, out the door, and down the front porch. Birds ricocheted into the sky as her body propelled into the world. A storm of pigeons, startled by the quick movement where previously the world had been silent as if covered in a thick blanket, swirled and turned over their purple-grey bodies in the sky. 

She watched as their bodies catapulted up into the air, out, only to calmly land again, one after the other, on her sinking lichen covered roof, the maple tree, the porch railing, in the garden, on the shed, on a sunflower, a trowel that had fallen to the side and lay covered in a layer of grime and moss, on the brick pavers, her mailbox, the fence, and on her car. She had forgotten. Forgotten what she had become. She was the lady who lived in the Pigeon House. The one with the missing husband whose daughter lay up in her room across the hall on the second floor. The one about whom people whispered as she passed. No one came into the Latte Library anymore. There was no use going to work or opening up the shop or doing anything other than sitting in the bay window and watching as more and more pigeons came in to roost, to fill up her yard, to fall into the cavern at the center of her heart. The hole left when he left or disappeared or died. A man was there and then he was not and the only thing left was pigeons and a daughter who was relieved that the bad man was gone even though the bad man used to be a good man, used to be a man that you couldn’t stop loving. 

Making her way back up the porch stairs and into the house, her body moved like it was walking through mud. Her steps were heavy, her mind empty as a summer’s day, except it wasn’t summer and her hope didn’t spring eternal. It was dead and he was dead, she was sure of it. Why else would the birds be here? She found herself standing at the kitchen window, looking out at the frothing Pacific Ocean that thrashed on the other side. 

How did I get here? she thought, How did I become this woman? 

The warbling reached her ears and she turned to look behind her. In horror she realized she’d forgotten to close the door. The grey and purple bobbing bodies of a hundred birds thrummed around her like an orchestra of drums. They landed on chairs, made themselves comfortable on the ratty sofa, found their way into baskets and bookcases and stood alight on the top of the tea kettle, peering at her with unblinking eyes. 

“Get out,” she whispered, and then: “Get out!” But the pigeons didn’t move. She was the pigeon keeper, after all. Lily had no say in the matter. She’d been cursed. Perhaps she was the curse. 

The birds. They were everywhere. 

Lily looked around at the birds alight on every surface, covering the floors with the tiny scritches of tiny feet.

“Amy,” Lily called up the stairs, “You’ve got to come see this.”

But no sound came from upstairs. For there was no one there. No daughter. No husband. There was nothing but silence in her big old house by the sea. Silence and the empty sound of bird’s eyes, staring back at her, unblinking. 

+

You wake up in your queen size bed. You know what awaits you on the other side of your lids sewn closed by the lorazepam sleep. Those damn fucking birds. They aren’t even real, you know that, or at least you think you know that. But here they are all the same. He always told you he wanted to be reincarnated as a bird. It’s kind of ironic that he came back as a pigeon because they mate for life and he couldn’t keep it in his fucking pants, not with you and not with anyone who saw the cool blue eyes set in a face with strict and unforgiving lines. You were just the only one willing to ignore his lies.

You open your eyes and, sure as shit, there they are. Their empty orange eyes blink back at you. Pigeons roosting on every open space. A fucking sea of pigeons and you feel like you’re in the nut house, but you’re not. You’re in your own home that’s covered in pigeons both inside and out. That it could come to this. Not the birds—no one could anticipate the birds—but what happened before the birds. 

You’d see those women on the street, the bird ladies: you’d never be one of them. Their hands like delicate fluttering paper, body tight and thin and reed small. They look like they could blow away, like the slightest touch would send the pieces of them scattering, up into the sky. Like antique mirrors. Fragile and used and left uncared for by the thoughtless hands of men who stared through them. That’s what you had thought. Never, ever. That won’t happen to me. But here it has passed. Suddenly your house is like something out of a Kafka novel. And you, from a Marquez story, the very old woman with enormous wings. But your wings are not enormous. It’s just that there are so many of them. 

You pass through the sea of birds. You scream and they lift from their perches and hover in the air. Then they settle back down. In the window there it is: your reflection. A bird lady. There are feathers in your hair. William’s boots sit by the front door and you stick your feet in them. Your plaid pajamas bunch up around your calves and spill over the top of the boots. You’re like one of the fishermen out at the piers, sweatpants bagged up around their extra tuff’s, hair raggedy and frazzled. Fresh off the boat, you think, back from the relentless tumult of the sea. 

Outside a young girl runs past the house. Her hair is in long black braids, and you remember when you used to wear your long pale hair plaited. William thought it was magnificent, and then he made you cut it because he didn’t like the way that other men looked at you. 

The girl’s thighs move with such grace. She could be a dancer. You walk down the steps and out into the yard. 

“Hello,” you call out and your throat catches, as if you’re choking on feathers. She doesn’t hear you and you don’t try again.

But she stops anyway and looks up at you. It’s your appearance, or maybe it’s all these birds. Then she turns from your house and begins to run again, her long hair flapping behind her and the sound of her shoes slapping the pavement reverberates through your spine.

You whisper, “He won’t leave me alone.”

+

I imagine that I am a pigeon. I examine the delicate wings of the one nesting on my lap like a cat or a small dog, its feet tucked under its protruding grey stomach. The afternoon light casts an iridescent glimmer over the wings. They look like an oil spill, metallics running through them. I look down at the frayed tips of my long and tangled hair and find that what once was blond is now long and grey with metallic shimmering ends in the sunlight. I think I might have had it done at the salon like that, after William first went missing. Didn’t I? I examine my hair to look for evidence of a dye job, search for a memory of going out and to the salon, but the memory, if it exists, is not there.  

My breath feels constricted as I search through memory and though I find nothing there, it has brought his presence back into the house. The room is filled with him. I look down at the pigeon on my lap and begin to lightly stroke its downy neck. It rises toward the affection, presses into my fingers. Pigeons stare up at me from the floor or down at me from the counters and furniture and shelves. I open my mouth to call to them.

“Whoooo. Whoooo.” I say. I clear my throat, and again with less tremor, “Whooooo. Whooooo.”

+

Lily doesn’t think about pigeons or husbands. She doesn’t have the time. She rushes from the house, shoves her way hard through the birds’ bodies, crushing a foot, crashing against an open wing as she rushes from the house, calling down the street for Amy.

“Amy,” she shouts, looking down the road one way, then turning to do the same in the next. 

When had she last seen her daughter? What did she look like? But her thoughts are blurry. 

A hundred birds swoop above her, from side to side, following the line her body makes out on the soulless black tar. She has an image in her mind of a blond haired, blue-eyed girl. A girl that was quick to laugh, loud and riotous, like Lily used to be before. A spunky girl who loved to climb the maple trees in the park, swing from the top branch and make monkey noises and scare the daylights out of her mother while her father sat nearby and chortled. “Like father, like daughter,” he would say. Or, at least, she thinks he said, would say, had said. 

Lily takes off running down the street in search of the daughter she’s sure should be upstairs in bed but isn’t. Her heart beats at a dangerous pace and though the air is frigid her body feels like its running through the desert tundra. She runs in the direction of her friend’s house. Beth had been her best friend since high school, but after she married William, they drifted apart. That’s a nice way to put it. It’s more like they were wedged apart, incrementally. William was a toddler. He didn’t like sharing. At first Lily thought it was sweet, flattering really. He wanted her all the time. It was passionate. It was romantic. Until it wasn’t. 

The grey bodies of pigeon’s swoop through the wind above her, looking like a swarm, as she runs from one street to the next, across town. People stare but she has eyes only for the image in her mind of her missing daughter. The sun is blotted out by the storm of birds above her. They’re like her own personal thunderhead. She reaches the light pink Victorian on the corner of 5th and Main, runs up the porch, and bangs on the door. 

“Beth,” she calls over and over. Pigeons flutter and perch around her, like an army, her own personal guard. 

The door opens and Beth stands there, wiping her hands down with a hand towel. How old her friend’s hands look, they’re not baby soft smooth like she remembers. There are creases between fingers, knuckles bunched. Her green eyes are wide, and she pushes the screen door open. The clatter of it reverberates in Lily’s ears. Her face a startled mask of a person Lily used to know. 

“Lily,” she says, reaching out and grabbing her old friend’s hands. “What is it? What’s going on? Has William been found? Did he come back?”

Lily shakes her head, “No, no.” 

She feels confused, lost in the face and questions of her dear old friend. How does she know about William being gone? She turns her head to the side, away from the bright glare of her friend’s wizened face. The pigeons sit around her, unblinking, and in their stares, she remembers why she’s here, why she fled like a woman being pursued all the way across town. 

“It’s Amy.” Lily starts, but her voice catches in her throat, like a hesitation. “I can’t find Amy.”

Lily looks up, expecting to see the earnest face of her friend, but instead she finds that Beth’s body looks collapsed on itself, her face tilted down. 

“Oh. Lil,” she almost whispers. “Amy is gone. She’s been gone. Don’t you remember?”

Lily cocks her head to the right and the birds around her follow suit. A hundred birdlike heads on tilt. 

“But I don’t understand,” Lily says. “Where did she go?” 

Beth guides Lily over to her porch swing and Lily looks on as pigeon’s scoot over or fly up in the air to make room for them to sit. She blinks rapidly, waiting for Beth’s response. 

“Honey,” she finally says, taking a deep breath in. “Lillian,” again, she pauses. 

“What? What is it?”

“Amy was a still-born,” at last she says. 

She shakes her head rapidly in a no. 

“No, I remember her blond hair. Her laughter, it was William’s laugh, his stubbornness.” 

Tears streak Lily’s face. 

“I think,” Beth weighs her words carefully, “that you are remembering the dream of your daughter.” She rubs the tops of her friend’s hands with her thumbs. “We buried Amy, in the Green Haven Cemetery, next to your parents.”

Lily searches for the sound of her daughter’s laugh but instead hears the crunch of a gravel road and the sound of her black boots crushing it under foot. 

“No, but…” she tries to conjure the face of Amy, but now it’s a granite slab. 

She stares into the older face of her friend, and she sees her younger friend, an image super-imposed over this one. Beth, her soft face, and tender eyes. The feel of her delicate hand being crushed by the pressure of Lily’s. She feels the weight of her stomach like she did that day, as if Amy were still inside there, waiting to take her first breath. The breath that she would never have. 

She can see the gravestone with Amy’s name on it and just the one date, standing so miniature next to the statuesque head stones of Lily’s mother and father, towering over Amy’s, shadowing it. She would never think miniature things were cute again. She placed the knitted booties on the overturned earth. William wasn’t there. He couldn’t bear it.

Lily stands and moves away from Beth’s body. Beth stands too, trying to gap the distance, but Lily pulls from her again. She turns from her and races down the steps. 

“I’m sorry,” she calls over her shoulder, over the birds fluttering in the space between them, ready to fly. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have come.”

“No, Lil. It’s okay,” Beth says, shouting now, but Lily already can’t hear her. Her mind is elsewhere. It is up in the air. It has taken flight. 

+

You read somewhere that a pigeon appearing to you is a spiritual sign of divine truth. A pigeon appearance is said to mean you should pay attention. A bunch of bullshit, you think. Pay attention to what? The massive ocean frothing out the window. The empty space in your bed and how you’re both devastated it’s empty and relieved that he is gone? Pay attention to the way your mind feels fluttery and frantic. 

You watch the young girl who ran by your house turn and run away. Run far away, you think. Be free. You were the young girl running. 

There’s a large pigeon sitting on your mailbox. Though now you know, or think you know, that it really isn’t there. The sound of wings beats loudly behind you, and you turn around to see the birds take the shape of a man. They don’t become the man; they just flutter in formation. They become the space of where William would be. The shape is undeniable. It is unfathomable that he is still here. Still with you. He was a ghost those last years he was alive, pacing the hallways of your house in the dark.  

“I know it is you. Go away. Go away, Willy.”

The pigeons shoot up into the sky as if frightened away by the sound of a bullet. 

You watch them lift into the world, leaving the ground, leaving you. 

“No. Come back! Take me with you!” 

Love is like that sometimes. When loves goes wrong it can be both something you can’t stand to release and yet something you’re dying to let go. 

You squat down, William’s boots pressing up in your knees. The pressure feels nice. It feels right. It feels sharp. Your body feels tight. It feels round. You feel expansive. You’re expanding. You tilt your head, and your neck stretches, it feels elongated. 

You think about all the other ways this story could go, could have gone, has been, never was. You feel a sort of buoyancy, a loosening in your bones. You push up through your joints to rise. You’re no longer tethered to the ground. 

About Shilo Niziolek

Shilo Niziolek's memoir, Fever, is out with Querencia Press and her chapbook of grief essays, A Thousand Winters In Me, is out with Gasher Press. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Juked, West Trade Review, Entropy, Pork Belly Press, and Phoebe Journal among others. Shilo is a writing instructor at Clackamas Community College and is the editor and co-founder of the literary magazine, Scavengers. Find Shilo on Twitter & Instagram @shiloniziolek