The Pigeon Was Not Sorry

August twenty-second.

The bird did not announce itself. There was no warning, no shadow, no rustle, just a sudden, extremely solid impact against the back of my skull, and then a flap of wings going past my ear, and then nothing except me, standing on a completely ordinary stretch of sidewalk on a Friday afternoon, hand pressed flat to the back of my head, trying to reconstruct what had just happened.

The pigeon landed on a mailbox about six feet away and looked at me. I looked at it. A man walking past me with a coffee cup in his hand did not slow down, which I took as confirmation that I had not, in fact, imagined the whole thing, because you only don't react to something if you saw it happen and decided it wasn't your problem. The pigeon looked extremely unbothered. I was not extremely unbothered. I was standing on the sidewalk with the workshop camera strap cutting into my shoulder from the sudden stop, doing the math on whether birds can sense that a person is having a perfectly fine Friday and act accordingly.

Still looking at the exact spot. As if the concrete would explain it.

I took a selfie on the sidewalk. I want that on the record. I took a selfie in the exact spot where I had been struck by a city pigeon, with the exact expression of someone who has just been struck by a city pigeon, and I stood there for a moment looking at it and decided: yes, that is the correct document of this event. The camera was right there on my shoulder and I still used my phone. That tells you something. I'm not sure what, but something.

The face of a person who has made peace with what just happened.

It is August and it is hot and I got hit in the head by a bird and I went home and ate dinner and here we are. The collapsed bowl is on the windowsill. Gerald is fine. The photograph of my mother is between them. The pigeon is somewhere, not thinking about me at all.