Eunice the pigeon did not live a glamorous life, but she was determined to rise above her dreary roost in the parking garage’s concrete rafters. She didn’t mind the exhaust-filled space or even the laughable “pigeon barriers” around her nest. “What I crave,” she lamented to anyone who’d listen, which in this case was her sister Barbara, “is to create a legacy, a memoir of avian city life and one pigeon’s brave quest to rise above the grit and grime and bring beauty and song to the world.”
Unimpressed, Barbara continued pecking at the cement traffic barrier. “So you want to be a storyteller,” she said. “Big deal. Pigeons have a billion of ‘em. I mean, Mom and Dad never shut up about the huge cicada they caught in ’14. Everyone’s a storyteller.”
“I want to be something different! I want to be … a writer!”
Barbara squinted at her. “What’s a writer?”
“I don’t know, exactly,” admitted Eunice. “But according to the magazine vendors on the corner, writers tell stories and then the stories are distributed all over the world. They tell a story through a particular kind of art called ‘typing.’” She gazed fiercely at her sister. “I will learn this art of typing, and I will be a writer and then all will know the hidden avian story of this city!”
Barbara, engrossed in the tiny pebble she’d dislodged from the cement, ignored her.
Pigeon talons weren’t designed to grip a pen, but fortunately, Eunice was born in the Technological Age and writers need not put pen to paper. That she could neither spell nor read had not yet occurred to her. (Be kind, don’t judge. Pigeon brains are small and Eunice’s was bigger than most). Stealthily observing human writers through the windows of coffee shops and libraries, she learned that “typing” involved smacking the tops of “keys” on a “keyboard.” She watched the humans stare intently at a screen, apparently forming a complex and emotionally gripping thought. Then they’d smack away at the keys, finally printing what appeared to be abstract art composed of “letters.” Each key, she learned, created one of these small symbols designed to evoke some emotional response from the reader.
“It’s fascinating!” she told Barbara over a meal of rainwater and worms. “The writer creates an idea in his or her head, and through the creation of these abstract symbols, the meaning is conveyed to the reader! It’s like alchemy, a mysterious process that perhaps not even God understands! Perhaps this is an energetic transmission? A merging of the minds? A melding of auras?”
Barbara stuffed a decapitated worm into her gullet. “What’s an aura?”
Eunice didn’t know, but she continued rather than admit ignorance. “When has art ever been logical?” she cooed. “Is storytelling not an art?”
On a summer evening, she squeezed through a half-open office window and waddled nervously to that godlike engine of creativity: a computer. Hopping from key to key, she coaxed magical symbols to emerge in whatever way pleased her. An “I” there, a Q followed by a YYF. An H here, three nines, and a P, no, a J! Then, moodily, she stared at the creation, only to erase it. It had not properly conveyed the concept she wished to express, which was:
My pigeon life is full of gray
The concrete, my feathers, the hats of heads I poop on
The clouds and smog of this cold city.
I long for color and warmth
If I flew for 40 days and 40 nights, would I end up in Hawaii?
Would I wake up as a Bird of Paradise?
Finally, she arranged the letters in a way that seemed most appropriate. She wasn’t sure what the rules were, but she felt that only one configuration of the mysterious keyboard symbols would convey the anguish of pigeonhood: UHHeLVJ QPG DKFKKKKKKK1198^
After typing, she gazed critically at her creation. Was there too much white space? Did the repetition of that spiky letter fully express her sentiments of pigeon life? Was concluding with a ^ overkill? She would find a time to revise this stunning masterpiece she called, “Lament of a City Pigeon.”
She showed the poem to Barbara the next afternoon, reciting her creation aloud. “So …” Barbara puzzled. “Humans look at UHHeLVJ QPG DKFKKKKKKK1198^ and just start thinking about pooping on heads and flying to Hawaii and all that stuff you just told me? Just seeing those whatsits … letters…does that?”
“Yes, indeed.”
“So arrangements of letters mean whatever you want them to mean?”
“It’s called art, Barbara! We poets won’t be bound by rules!”
“Well, how does anyone know what you want them to mean?”
“Poets are psychic.” It was the only reasonable explanation for poetry.
Barbara shook her head. “I don’t think that’s how it works,” she said, but admitted that she didn’t have a better explanation.
Eventually, as Eunice attempted to publish her poetry, the harsh truth about the world of writing emerged. Not a single publisher took her writing seriously. When a publishing house bothered to respond to her, the letters were rude.* “We don’t have time for jokes in this office,” and “This is a serious literary magazine –please take your tasteless humor elsewhere,” or even “If you truly are a pigeon as you say, you need to get back to soiling car hoods.” Alone in her concrete rafters, she cried bitterly when the seventeenth rejection letter appeared, as it was now undeniable that her second-class status as a pigeon would keep her from ever getting respect as a writer.
Fed up with the stress of city living and the constant rejection of the literary world, she flew to visit her friend Pablo in Los Angeles. A vacation might distract her from the pain.
“Hey Pab,” she said glumly, settling into his swanky roost above the law firm. “How goes the carrier pigeon business?”
“Oh, hey Eunice,” he said, looking up from his citrus-laced martini, removing a mint sprig from his beak. “It’s going well. How’s the writing stint? Barbara said you were going to learn typing or something.” He paused as he looked at her droopy wings and dragging feet. “You look like you could use a drink.” He motioned toward the rooftop bar.
“I’m a failure,” she sighed. “I keep sending in my deepest heartfelt writing for publication. I know it’s good, but no one will publish my writing because I’m a pigeon.”
Pablo stopped, his martini halfway to his beak.** “Really?” he asked, suddenly very interested. “Is that what they said? Because you’re a pigeon?”
“Well, yes,” she said, and shared the litany of angry anti-pigeon rejections, concluding with the dreadful “soiling car hoods” insult.
“And you saved the letters?”
“Of course,” she said. “Don’t all great writers save their rejection letters to laugh at once they’re famous? I should use them to line my nest. I’ll never be famous or even noteworthy.”
If Pablo had been born with lips, he would have been grinning. “I think you’ll soon be both, dear. You see, publishers aren’t supposed to discriminate against writers due to race, age, sexual orientation, nationality, etc.”
“They’re not?”
“No, they aren’t. Oh, they do. of course. But they are seldom foolish enough to say it so boldly, and in writing, as they did to you. And while discrimination against species isn’t expressly mentioned in most anti-discrimination laws, I think there’s a precedent. We have a very strong case, Eunice. Don’t you worry. ‘Lament of a City Pigeon’ will be published in the finest literary magazines imaginable.”
Pablo was right. It was. After the court case***, Eunice became the first Avian Poet to grace the cover of The New Yorker, along with rave reviews of her touching poem. Irritatingly, the humans couldn’t seem to figure out what the poem was about, but they agreed that it was tragic, absolutely tragic.
And that is how pigeons learned to be litigious and crap wherever they please, how poetry magazines became incomprehensible, and why I have to write extremely carefully or risk the wrath of an interspecies advocacy group. Libel suits are real, and pigeons have eons worth of resentment over those spiky things in parking garages and high-rise windows, not to mention fake owls on roofs. No matter how tempting, never ridicule Avian art.
