In the cobwebbed eaves of the house on Fig Street, the third pigeon drops dead. 

I hear her struggle from the front lawn, where I am deadheading the roses. My hand goes up to shield my eyes from the sun. At this point, I am expecting the fall. Her feathers iridesce green, blue, purple, with each twitch of her little head. She twists almost gracefully to the very edge of the roof. To linger on the precipice, body limp but briefly suspended, brings to mind something beautiful: a ballet dancer about to fall into her partner’s arms, Anna Karenina on the train platform. A papery brown blossom flutters from my gloved hand to the ground. Then the pigeon topples into the rain gutter. 

I am the only person in this neighborhood who knows how to garden. I walk four blocks to the bus stop every day, and every day I notice another thing left to fester. Ivy gnawing at an exposed brick facade. Mistletoe snared in the boughs of a slowly graying tree, drinking the living from it. Squashed plums on the sidewalk, crabapples rolling into the gutter. The whole scene stained syrupy and sickly-sweet. 

I know I cannot reach the rain gutter with the only ladder at my disposal, a squat A-frame left in the garage by a handyman Aunt Nell briefly courted. Still, I cannot become another keeper of rotting things. 

Aunt Nell was a collector. She collected forever stamps and uranium glass dishware and ceramic Precious Moments figurines. She collected stray cats, left them bowls of dried up kibble on the white oak porch. She collected me from the train station when I first arrived in town. Most importantly to my current predicament, she collected long lists of phone numbers. Magneted to the fridge, overlapped by a 10% off coupon for the pizzeria downtown and a postcard from the Vatican, is her list of pest control companies, scrawled out in her looping hand on the back of a Salvation Army receipt. 

The third number on the list picks up. 

“Greenbriar Wildlife Services, how may I help you?” A voice—smoky, feminine—tins from the receiver. 

I explain the situation. Dead bird in the rain gutter. Can’t reach it on my own. 

“I’m sorry to hear that,” she says. “But it sounds like an easy fix. I could come out tomorrow afternoon?”

I almost laugh. Stupidly, I realize, I hadn’t imagined that this woman would be the one to come and take my bird away. I figured they would send a wiry twentysomething, a former high school track star. A burly quarterback with dark hair on his forearms and coffee on his breath. I adjust my mental image of the woman on the other line, from a cream-bloused secretary to a coverall-wearing, slick-haired androgyne. 

“Yes,” I say. “Tomorrow afternoon works.”

I cup the handset to my cheek—warm from the mist of my breath. I give her the address. 

The first dead pigeon I blamed on Rocky, Aunt Nell’s only surviving stray. It was lying in front of the door like a gift, something dark oozing onto the daffodil-colored welcome mat. I wrapped the body in the doormat and put it in the compost bin. When Rocky next trotted up the driveway, I shook my head at him and clicked my tongue. He only rubbed his head into my hand, purring like a locomotive. Cats can’t tell when you’re mad at them. Cats have no sense of shame. Cats are not born guilty.  

The truck pulls into the crook of the cul-de-sac. Greenbriar Wildlife Services, it says on one side, green and yellow like a parakeet. Humane Solutions for Pest Problems. A grinning cartoon raccoon stenciled next to the lettering, cheekily fanning out its burglar hands. No man with an oversized mallet. No panicked line of rats or termites. Just a raccoon, who looks like he knows something I don’t. This cools my nerves some, quiets the thudding of my pulse. I don’t like brutality. I like cleanliness. I like English mystery novels. I like strict teachers. I like solitaire. 

The woman who gets out of the truck does not look how I pictured her. Her hair is pulled into a short ponytail at the top of her head, jagged ends spiking out like a crown of thorns. She wears a faded gray Laguinitas t-shirt, tucked into a pair of straight-leg work pants. Her face is studded with sterling silver, piercings above her lip, notched into her eyebrow. A tool belt weighs down her hips, swaying with each step. 

I startle out of my position at the window, suddenly aware that I am watching her, aware of the way my hair feels on the back of my neck, the chappedness of my lips. I open the door before she has the chance to knock. 

“Hey,” she says, “You the one with the dead bird?” 

“Yes, yes I am.” 

“My name is Syd.”

“Florence.” I accept her proffered hand. Her palm is dry, her grip strong. 

I found the second dead pigeon tangled in the neighbor’s fence. Caught on the ragged hole in the chain-link gnawed by the neighbor’s portly rottweiler, the bird’s feathers embroidered with metal. She must have fallen and gotten stuck. Wings spread, head limply bowed, a suburban martyr. I cleaned that one up too, hurrying across the cul-de-sac with a newspaper-wrapped bundle tucked under my arm. 

Syd sets up her ladder where I direct her. While she pulls thick gloves onto her hands, her eyes wander around the yard, taking in the greenery. She compliments my roses, although half the blossoms are severed at the stalk and the other half are brown and withered, the ground at their feet still heavy with fallen petals. I haven’t found the time to rake them up. 

“Thank you. Lots of people don’t know how to tend to them properly.”

Syd smiles. Her canines are slightly sharp, giving her the look of a wily fox. “But you do.”

“Yeah,” a laugh buzzes my lips. “I suppose I do.” 

“Any plans for the holiday?” She’s halfway up the ladder when she asks this. I find myself wishing she would remain at ground level, where I can watch her eyes flit from the bed of clover by the windowsill to the poplar fanning its branches over the lawn, the dandelions polka-dotting the grass. 

“Housewarming party,” I lie. A sweet-sounding frivolity for the long weekend. In actuality, I will be working all three days. Nametag clipped to the collar of my shirt, corralling escaped shopping carts back into their pens. I don’t mind. The holiday pay is nice. 

“You just move in?” 

“Yes.” It is easy to imagine that I’m new to the neighborhood. Aunt Nell wrote me into her will but it still doesn’t feel like the house is mine. I brush dust off the furniture, but my fingerprints don’t leave a mark. I’m a groundskeeper. A haunting. 

Syd rests her elbows on the edge of the rain gutter, and looks in. There’s a rustling as she digs around for the fallen bird, and a few dislodged dead leaves twist languidly down to my feet. The ladder creaks. I can see her bicep muscles moving under her thin t-shirt, dark halo of sweat blooming under her arm. My stomach tightens. Worry, for her balance. 

“Yep,” she calls. “Found it. Good thing you called me when you did, things could have gotten real smelly up here.” 

She whips a rag from her back pocket, a matador with his cape, and scoops the creature out. She descends the ladder gingerly, with her cotton-wrapped bundle kept close to her chest. 

As her boot hits the ground, the pigeon’s head lolls back, the makeshift burial shroud flapping open around it. 

“Sorry,” Syd moves to cover the bird’s fragile head with her big gloved hand. “If you’re squeamish.” 

“No.” I drift closer.

Syd makes a humming noise in the back of her throat, cups the pigeon’s neck gently, like she’s holding a baby. “Sad, I know. But whatever it had, it probably wasn’t avian flu. See, no swelling, no discoloration.”

In fact, the pigeon looks like it might start flapping at any moment. Gray feathers collaring her neck, eyes glassy but open. 

“She’s beautiful.” I lean forward. Bergamot and cedar tangle with the earthy smell of early decay. 

“You can look, but, uh,” Syd swipes her tongue over her lip, the ball of her piercing bobbing as she swallows. “Don’t touch. It’s good to be careful. We don’t know what killed this thing.” 

“Of course.” Heat pools in my cheeks. I take a step back. 

Silence cools the air. I try to think of something to say. 

“Did you know that, genetically, pigeons are no different from doves?” Syd offers. “But one we call pests, the other we… release at weddings.” 

I smile, imagining a magician flourishing a pigeon from his sleeve. People used to keep pigeons as pets, train them to carry our mail, take messages for us. It’s no wonder they stay at our sides, nest in the awnings of our skyscrapers, even when we decided there’s no use for them anymore. 

“I’m worried about them,” I blurt out. “The pigeons, I mean. I keep finding them dead.” 

She makes a humming sound in the back of her throat, considering. “I don’t know what to tell you,” she says eventually. “If it’s a disease, it doesn’t look like anything I’ve ever dealt with. Sometimes things just die.” 

The nervous, feathered creature inside me lurches, a half-hearted attempt at flight. Syd turns to go. I am sorry for standing mutely as she walks away. I am sorry I could not save them. 

After the drivers-side door thunks shut and the engine of Syd’s truck sputters to life again, I walk up the stairs of the house. I keep expecting Aunt Nell to emerge from around a corner, chiding me for moving her leather recliner, throwing out her empty shampoo bottles. As the sounds of the vehicle disappear down the street, I kneel at the side of my downy, quilted bed and pray the rosary. It’s the first time since I was a child. Aunt Nell kept an expensive, pearly one hanging off the side of her old mahogany bureau, and I never had the nerve to move it from that spot. Now I slide my fingers along the beads. My hand still buzzing from where Syd pressed it, the warmth of her palm on my palm, I duck my head and pray. Hail Mary Full of Grace. Hail Mary Full of Grace. Hail Mary Full of Grace. 

It is December now. The plum and crabapple trees that once infuriated me with their useless plenty now fruit nothing. The stickiness and rot-stench of summer has given way to fog and frosted windshields in the morning, bitter sun in the afternoon. I still walk to the bus stop every day, a flannel coat and knit gloves over my maroon polo shirt. 

The pigeons have stopped dying. At least, they have stopped dying where I can see them. This is fine by me. I trim the birch tree in the backyard. Pruning shears for the thin branches, pole saw for the thick ones. I wrench stinging nettles out of the flowerbed by the roots. I keep myself busy. 

At the grocery store I stack boxes of cereal, rearrange displays of organic almonds and pistachios, mop the linoleum tile when someone drops a carton of oat milk. 

Four hours of my shift have crawled by when I see her across the produce section. Syd. Wearing a heather gray sweater with a moth-hole just below the collar. Testing the skin of an orange with one finger. I set down the box of Medjool dates I’ve been arranging on the endcap. Although her gaze is leveled at the display, yuzu and grapefruit and tangerines, I am certain she can feel my eyes on her head. Look up. 

The disease that laid waste to the pigeons has not gone away. It hides in the intestines of the dead ones’ broods, settled and waiting. Disease is a patient thing. Intent on survival, on procreation. It will lay dormant until it is time to fell another one of its hosts. Until it is time for another pigeon—on Fig Street or any of the identical streets branching outward through the endless suburban grid, on another eave of another roof—to drop dead. 

I imagine Syd splitting an orange down the center, burying her thumbs in the flesh, citrus juice stinging rivulets into her knotty wrists. I imagine her laughing, mouth open, head tilted back. 

I swallow, my heart battering the inside of my throat. The air fizzes between us, carbonated by dust and light. She looks up. I look away. 

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Header photography and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson