New prose by Don Cole.

Thanks, Don!

less a flight than a free fall

A friend of mine works up north. I crunch over in the wee hours to feed the pigeons when he is out of town. The ice has almost given up now. I walk along looking at it amazed by all the things locked up in it, coming free now. Oil, transmission fluid, puke, plastic, piss, rings, coin, dog shit, it all feeds into the ice and bleeds out. Some folk from the lower 48 may imagine a pristine snow scape up here but I feel as though I am walking on the a frozen lining of phlegm in a giant smokers lung. The pigeons are not my friend's birds but rather they are refugees of the greater Fairbanks area. The flock that feeds on the street behind his house number about forty five. Last winter they were around fifteen but we fed them you see. The cold robs them of calories, calories we replace with shitty corn. Some people get angry about this and I don't blame them. Each pigeon produces somewhere in the squat of twenty six pounds of waist a year. One man followed me as I stretched out a path of cracked corn and told me the pigeon is the most diseased bird there is. I don't doubt it. I also don't give a full diaper rat's ass. I imagine I will see a hundred and fifty birds next fall staring stupidly down at me from the wires. I will stare stupidly back wishing I could see the mini-universes of germs and bacteria riving from their round heads. Its true that those of us, Dan and I and the people who have joined our feeding ground, have created a J-curve population increase rate that will crash sooner rather than later. But this is a rate that we bald monkeys are on also. After the cat's ass there will be no order here. Sure, we cling to our facts, theology, technology and such so as to throw it like scat at the critters we are burning off this spinning cheese rock. But now I froth. So far I have heard two theories on the origins of the Fairbanks pigeon. One is that a doctor brought them up and released as death closed in. Perhaps he gazed, the morphine coursing, as they flew seemingly backwards into the clouds. The other is that army officers brought them up here to shoot. Could be the was tobacco spit, the hands shook, and they were flown up from their Georgia roots to fly a death gauntlet. What ever the case I feed them in spite of order and crunch back home.