Forty Minutes of Pigeon Diplomacy

November eleventh. There was a pigeon on the fire escape this morning and I did not move for forty minutes.

I noticed it when I got up to refill my coffee, just there, on the ledge outside the kitchen window, puffed up against the cold in that particular way birds have that makes them look twice their actual size. I don't know why I decided not to spook it. I just did. I set the mug down and got up on the counter and sat very still, watching it through the glass, and it watched the middle distance in the way pigeons do, which is to say with complete authority over the situation.

At some point I started looking at the windowsill from the inside. The objects I can never quite stop rearranging in my head, the letterpress card, the two photographs, the small thing from Carol, all of them shifted slightly apart since the collapsed bowl moved to the shelf above the stove. The gap is still there. The pigeon, framed in the window beyond all of it, looked completely unbothered by the question of what should or shouldn't fill a space.

the pigeon, unbothered

It left when it was ready. I made a fresh cup of coffee, stood at the counter for a moment, and felt like I had gotten away with something, forty minutes of doing nothing except being very deliberately quiet, on a Saturday morning in November, with no real reason and no consequence.

after

The windowsill kept its gap. Gerald's trailing vine caught the light. I decided that was enough.