Sophie traced her steps through Chelsea, back toward home. In the dark of night Chelsea almost felt safe. It was people that made the city dangerous, and the people were mostly asleep. Sophie passed their houses, dingy colored; their concrete steps, cracked; junk in their front yard, sneakers dangling from the phone wires above. Towels and sheets hung where curtains should be. One home even had a beach towel for a front door; the nubby image of a dog on the shore hung limply from the frame in the breezeless night.
Sophie walked and the pigeons came with her. Some had flown ahead to make sure everything was quiet at home, and a couple stayed with Sophie, riding on her shoulders. The rest flew to and fro, high in the sky above her. They were too heavy to fly slow or low— “What, do you think we’re hummingbirds?” Arthur asked—too short and cumbersome to waddle alongside her on the pavement. Sophie loved the movement of them high above. They swooped like bats, the fluted ones making their eerie, beautiful sound. She also loved the weight of the birds on her shoulders, the faint coo of their cooing so close to her ears.
About a block from home, Arthur touched down on the pavement before her, his proud chest broad and tufted. Sophie marveled at his wing’s perfect peaks, the striations of feathers—even in the dim light Sophie could see the stripes and shading. His wings were were muscular and elegant at once. Why did people hate pigeons, Sophie wondered? They were more attractive than seagulls, and while many found the gulls a nuisance, no one tried to kill them. They were more nuanced and interesting than crows, and their noises far less abrasive than that caw-caw-cawing.
Sophie had heard just about everyone call pigeons “rats with wings.” At the close of this most fantastical of nights Sophie wondered, what was so bad about rats? If a group of rats had come to her at the creek, standing upward on their hind legs to speak with her, a sweet, plump lady rat like Livia and a proud, showboating rat like Arthur—well, if that had happened Sophie figured she’d be walking home with rats on her shoulders, and happily. People didn’t look at the animals they claimed to hate, Sophie thought. They paid them no real attention, just agitation, and missed the ways they were as sweet as any other creature, were any other creature. They were dirty, and they scavenged for food, but in this way the pests—the pigeons, rats and cockroaches of Chelsea—were not so different from the people they shared the city with.
“Fast asleep,” Arthur said. “That mother of yours. I recognize her. She’s one of those who put dry rice out on the street ’cause they think our stomachs will explode.”
“I know,” Sophie said. “I told her to stop.”
“Tell her when I want to eat rice, I hit the dumpsters behind Comida Criolla and get the good stuff. We don’t like chomping on dry rice anymore than she does.”
“Arthur,” Sophie said. “I’m probably not going to tell her about you guys.”
“Why?” the bird challenged. “Ashamed to be seen with a flock of pigeons?”
“Arthur,” Livia stepped in. “Leave Sophia alone. She can’t tell her mother about us, she’d never be believed and it would put her in danger. We don’t know that her mother isn’t an enemy.”
“I’ll say she’s an enemy,” Arthur grumbled. “Listen, it’s not a coincidence that humans who put dry rice on their sidewalks tend to find a lot of bird doo on their cars.”
“Arthur!” Livia trilled, and Sophie giggled. “You are coming very close to compromising your dignity.”
“There is a lot of bird doo on my mom’s car,” Sophie said. She knew her mother deserved it for what she’d tried to do to the pigeons.
“Now you know,” Arthur said with what would have been a wink, if pigeons could wink, which they can’t. But he dropped the subject, because Livia had said the magic word. Dignity was deeply important to the pigeons. In a world where they were persecuted, it was important that they retain their nobility and not stoop to retaliate in a manner that only degraded them and enforced the humans’ views.
On the long block of Heard Street where Sophie lived, the houses were dark as the sky. But not Sophie’s. Through her window she could see the flash and glow of the television against the walls, like the Northern Lights, she thought, only not. Not like the Northern Lights at all. More like a television left on long into the night, a television playing its shapes across the face of a sleeping single mother. There was nothing natural or mystical about it.
Sophie surprised herself by kissing the face of the bird on her left shoulder before lifting her off. The bird cooed shyly, dipping her face into her feathers. “I washed my face today,” she assured Sophie. “But I don’t know how clean the water was. It’s hard to find clean water, you know. Angel leaves us rainwater baths on the tumbler shack roof, but aside from that, it’s puddles and the creek, and you know Chelsea is a very dirty city.”
“Dirty cities have dirty pigeons,” Arthur quipped. “The problem is systemic.”
“My name is Giddy,” the bashful pigeon introduced herself.
“I’m Roy,” said the pigeon on Sophie’s other shoulder. “Giddy’s mate. Mind lifting me down? My wings will make a racket.”
Sophie placed the birds side by side on the sidewalk. They yawned in unison.
“It’s really past our bedtime,” Giddy apologized.
“Mine, too,” Sophie said, and climbed the stairs to her home.
Inside, she gently switched the television off. The sudden silence awoke her mother like a noise. “What?” she jumped from her prone position, struggling to sit up in her sleepy disorientation. Her eyes widened as she peered deeply into the room. Her curly hair rose and fell about her head like a disturbed sea. “Am I late? What time is it?”
Sophie was pulled to feel her mother’s feelings right then, but she feared it would make her heart too sad. Andrea worked and worked and worked and even when she wasn’t working, even when she slept, her body was a clock ticking its way to her next shift, anxiety winding the gears.
“No, Ma,” Sophie said softly. “You’ve been sleeping with the television on and it was keeping me awake. Why don’t you sleep in your bed?” She herded her mom into the bedroom as if she were a sleepy child. Andrea collapsed on the wide mattress with her shoes still on. Sophie plucked the laces from their bows and slid them to the floor. She climbed into bed with her mother. The fan from the living room spun back and forth, back and forth, filling the bedroom with moments of cool air. Sophie’s clothes were gummy from the dried creek water, but she was too tired to change into something better. Plus, the briny smell meant something different now, something new. She knew she’d be grateful in the morning, when she awoke and wondered if it all had been a dream, to feel the stiff salt of the mermaid’s cave on her t-shirt. She snuggled backward into her mother, who threw a sleeping arm across her shoulder. It was too hot to cuddle, but Sophie feared that forces more powerful than the humidity would soon make it difficult to seek comfort from her mom. As the sun began to rise Sophie slipped into sleep, the cooing of pigeons outside her window lulling her.
