It’s a cold hard dark north wind and a sadness blankets the city like invisible snow. Things seem at once too literal and unreal. A high resolution graphics engine used to create low resolution frames. No expense has been spared to expend the least. The illusion master’s growing fat and lazy. Why try hard, when those deceived are all too eager? Fish in a barrel. Birds in a cage.

Into this bleak milieu arrives tonight’s contingent pigeon. Scruffy, gray, anonymous. A pebble held loosely in the beak. Sheltering under a highway overpass. Wind is relentless; the night settles in.

pigeon

the greatest songs go unrecorded

Stochastic piles of trash adorn the city’s grid. This pigeon’s hours are numbered. Somberly the others gather, here where highway crosses avenue. They come to say farewell.

Last mile. Last night. Last rites. Those attendant line the girders, gray on gray. They get their bearings, duck under the deck, extend the bobbing line. Gradually, all grunting, clapping, hissing ceases. Silence then, save for a susurating, gentle coo.

At the foot of the abutment, this one haphazard pigeon inarticulates its final song.

Five hundred miles away a scrawny boy scrawls fervently: The greatest songs go unrecorded. Caps the pen, stows the notebook, tries to sleep.

The pebble drops.

Sunrise erases the traces of this foul night’s agitation, as clapping and flapping crescendo again, tumbleweeds of trash resume their predetermined paths, the crippled rhythm of the morning’s traffic picks up pace. The pigeons depart — all save the one, departed, now tucked inside a weep hole, there to decompose, a wisp of feather and bone, unsung, unseen by millions, gone.

Construct two cities, identical in shape and form and energy, down to the most minute detail of window, dust, light bulb, and individual brick, in every pixel parallel except for this: from one, one specific pigeon missing — would anybody know?

Ten thousand interlocked cacophonies bereft of but one coo — who cares?

The boy grows up. Wanders, gets lost, finds the city, finds a friend. Goes out at night. The restlessness returns. Something’s not quite right. Reality’s an error, off by one.

A sigh escapes the city. The rest of us — for better or for worse — meander on apace — still here.