The end of my street bleeds into another one, a quiet perpendicular passage that runs down from the cathedral to the tramlines below. Today I was climbing home along this street. I reached the toy shop on the corner and went to take a left towards my apartment, but something in front of my caught my eye and held it. Though my body turned it left my head behind, transfixed.
A narrow yellow shop that I had previously taken little notice of, though it was technically in my line of sight almost daily. A sign saying Fermé and no lights on but the door was ajar, and on the doorstep, and on the pavement outside it, pigeons. At least two dozen pigeons, flocking around this tiny shop, bustling into the threshold and then flapping out again. Feet universally that raw, chapped pink, marching their unsynchronised goosestep, heads bobbing to some secret music, silent to all but their secret ears. Real city pigeons , these; posh, plump, pure-bred wood pigeons they were not. These were mottled, grubby, an assortment of colours. Were they human, I imagined, the wood pigeon would be an aristocrat with a paunch and gout; these would be a mixed race street gang - unloved underdogs, scourge of the streets, raw beauty in their faces. But someone loved them, these rats of the skies; inside the tiny shop, obscured in the half light, sat an old couple. I saw only their side profile, her head covered in a scarf, his nearly invisible in the shadow but for the dark frames of his spectacles. Seeds fell periodically from an unseen hand and scattered onto the flagstones where they were pecked up in a flurry of feathers. Dark slate grey, warm sepia; some speckled with white like mountain peaks at winter’s start; others white, flecked with grey like snow at winter’s end. Flushed faintly, at the throats, with sea green and amethyst, a subtle iridescence which quietly outshone the rainbow plumage of parrots and other such gaudy birds of paradise purely in its unexpectedness.
The old woman noticed my presence; I pictured myself as she saw me, a dark blonde girl in a man’s navy duffel coat, a trace of a smile on her pale face, glazed eyes following pigeons gliding gracelessly from the rooftops. I nodded at her and turned away, with a little reluctance. As I walked away the sound of wings beating against soft bodies, of feathers striking the nothingness of air, brief, quiet rustlings, lingered in my ears. A celestial sound. Like angels in flight, I thought, and smiled at the irony. Dirty angels who eat cold chips from yellow Styrofoam and shit on monuments, but angels, nonetheless.
No comments:
Post a Comment