ADELINA ROSE GOWANS
Slow Winter
AUGUST
The neighbors are killing pigeons again. Each year, they string up their decoy birds, tie fishing line around their necks and suspend them from the highest power line so it looks like they’re perched on the line below. Really, it just looks like a lynching. I see the birds swaying in late summer, writhing in the last big rain of the season and dropping little chips of paint off their hollow bodies that ground feeders will eat and cough up. Little miracles. I bought a bird feeder to deter them away from the neighbors’ property, but it doesn’t seem to work so well. Mostly the squirrels eat the seed.
On the weekend, the neighbors cock their guns in anticipation, wait breathy in the brush for the real birds to arrive. August marks the beginning of pigeon mating season, and the birds with heartbeats perch on the power lines, hoping for sex with the fake birds. I read once that many species of pigeon are monogamous, so the real pigeons on the power line are young birds looking for their life-mates when they’re shot and posted on Facebook, their necks clutched in the fist of a man wearing camo with mud streaked on his face. I also read that pigeons are one of the most intelligent birds on the planet—they can recognize the letters of the alphabet and have similarly-proportioned brains to humans. I relay this information to my husband, hoping he’ll mention it to the neighbor patriarch who he occasionally watches a football game with, but he isn’t listening. Instead, a light rain drips outside the open garage as he assembles our son’s new desk hutch for college. My husband replies to me: never thought any son of mine wouldn’t know how to use a hand drill. He laughs his laugh: low and a just little mean. Now what were you saying about birds, baby?
SEPTEMBER
Literally no one talks about infinite numbers after high school. Back when we were in eleventh grade, my husband and I swore to each other over our precal homework that they were just one of those heady made-up academic concepts, but I know the truth now. They’re real, but not in the way they teach them in school. In the not-entirely-speakable way. Like how this one time I was watching the History Channel, and the narrator man told me that the Milky Way contains somewhere between 250 and 500 billion stars and how every single star is made up of countless particles of Hydrogen and Helium that churn together in their nuclear cores to exude the light we see laying in our truck bed at midnight. No way there’s a number to count those star particles—ever birthing and rebirthing themselves like tiny vessels of hope.
When my baby was born, his skin was so thin and translucent I sometimes worried that his veins were going to burst open. His entire body felt like the skin under my eye: puffy, pale, not-quite human feeling but also not-not human in the way only babies and people whose bodies have been stolen by aliens are. I also watch a lot of alien abduction shows. My baby isn’t a baby at all anymore though—he’s tall and smart. Labor Day weekend he came home from his northeastern ultraliberal college and informed his father that he was a vegetarian now. Said: Listen Dad, don’t get pissed off at me please. I just don’t really like the idea of eating food that had a mother, okay? At the time, I was breading fried chicken for dinner. I looked down at the meat—soft and raw in my hands, and for a moment I imagined it was my pigeons, wondered if I should become a vegetarian too. What would my husband say? Already, his eyes were fixed all confused and bleary on our son; I don’t think he could be happy in a house that didn’t serve meat at supper every night.
Through the kitchen window, I saw two pigeons circling the live oak out in the backyard. They were gray and a little fat and completely plain, but in the moment I swore they were the most beautiful creatures I’d ever seen. I wondered if they were life-mates who were so connected that they always traveled together. I wondered if my son would start missing pepperoni pizza and go back to eating meat in a few months, or if this was a deeper, ethical thing. Knowing him, he’d probably spent hours doing research for some academic paper on the atrocities of the meat packing industry and subsequently swore off his own consumption.
I wonder if pigeons are vegetarian. I wonder if my son will marry another vegetarian and raise vegetarian children together. Even at twenty, his skin is so philosophy-major pale that you can see the spidery framework of his veins all blue on his chest and arms just like when he was a newborn. Outside, I hear gunshots ringing in the distance, and I imagine what my son would say to the neighbors in the house to the left who kill pigeons. Or the ones on the right who fly the Confederate flag. I know he thinks about them—he’s always thinking. I wonder if he’s thinking about life after college, about how often he will come visit home. I wonder what he thinks about me.
OCTOBER
In this dream I keep having, I move to Las Vegas all by myself. Years ago, my uncle and aunt got married in Las Vegas by a Marilyn Monroe impersonator with a plunging neckline. I used to be obsessed with the photos. Once, though, when I was a teenager, I overheard my aunt telling my mother that she was sure my uncle had an affair with that fake Marilyn Monroe. Said she could tell by the way he looked at her and her curls and her overdrawn red lipstick that he was much more interested in her than in the woman he was marrying. They were standing in the kitchen, my aunt and my mother, cutting tomatoes and drinking Southern Comfort side by side. I know now this exchange was an act of grieving. I grieve too.
When I’m in dream-Vegas, people keep bumping into me on the street and asking me what I do for a living. I lie each time. Tonight, I’m an astrophysicist, a gynecologist, dictionary editor, fire dancer, international diplomat, stay-at-home mom, all in one go. There are so many people around me but none of them have discernable faces. A flock of pigeons perch on a glittering casino sign above me, flapping their wings and cooing quietly. One flies down, lands just in front of me, looks up at my face with its bulbous eyes. At this, I wake up in a cold sweat, reaching for my husband and two aspirin. My husband stirs, says: it’s menopause, Elisa. Go back to sleep. I turn over and look out the window. Outside, the sky is papery and fat with celestial bodies.
I can’t stop thinking about how many stars there are. How from their hundred billion vantage points nothing goes unseen in the Milky Way. My son, too, leaves nothing unseen. Yesterday he sent me a NPR article on the racist history of the Confederate flag. He said in his text: good read. He said without words: do you care about racism, Mama? That night, I printed out the article and slid it under the flag neighbors’ door while they were away at a football game. They don’t really know us, so they’ll probably blame the Millennial couple down the street. Now, in bed, I secretly wish they knew I sent them the article, even though they would probably hate me.
The tv documentary I saw never mentioned if there were any stars that had never been seen before, not by anything at all, but still existed. I imagine them now, alight on the edges of the galaxy where no human/rover/alien eyes will ever see them. I guess God would see them, and that would probably be enough. Still, I imagine their longing to be perceived—is that what loneliness is? I don’t know. I’m not lonely; I have a husband and coworkers and friends, and in two weeks I will help run the Trunk or Treat at the Baptist church down the street and people will smile at me. Still, I’m unseen. Sometimes I have conversations with my husband where I ask him to see me, the real me. He replies: What are you talking about? I see you every day. Pokes my shoulder. You’re right here. I don’t blame him, really, for not understanding. He’s never been one for observation.
I can’t stop thinking about the stars and my son. Tomorrow I will call him and tell him how I slid the article under the flag neighbors’ door—how I found an article about why pigeon hunting is illegal in 14 states, how pigeons have surprisingly human-like pain receptors. I will print it out and slide it under my left neighbors’ door and they’ll be angry too. I will call my son again and tell him the next day.
NOVEMBER
Nothing will ever be what it is at exactly this moment, nor will any moment in the past be identical to any moment in the future. How much time do we have left anyway? Will Jesus come for us with the rapture, or will global warming take us out first like my son says? Or maybe they’ll come at the exact same time, the sun and the son touching down synchronously—the big neon sign that the end is upon us. As I try to pull weeds in my garden, my neighbor waves to me over our unmarked rural property line, tells me he has killed seventeen pigeons this season. He says: you shoulda’ seen it Elisa! A Little slow going at first, but once they started coming, they just didn’t stop. Mating season is done now, and the fake pigeons have been hidden away. Still, I can’t help but notice how the winter cold comes later and later each year. I wonder if next year the mating season will stretch into December.
Before she died, my mother told me my body was full of maternal bones. I didn’t know what it meant at the time, but now I do: I worry about my children every waking moment of the day. I worry for my son, far away as he may be. Worry about if he gets enough sleep and enough to eat. Worry if he’ll get into grad school and find love and happiness and have children and move back closer to us. I worry for the pigeons too, with their monogamy and intelligence and human-like pain. Do pigeons ever choose the wrong life-mate? Or do they just find other birds to have sex with? I don’t know, so I worry for them even more.
It’s Thanksgiving in two days, and the pigeon-killing neighbors will soon leave to visit their relatives in Georgia. I don’t think the flag neighbors will be home either. I consider how easy it would be to cross over onto the hunters’ property and go into their barn and find the pigeon decoys and throw them away. Take them to the dumpster behind the grocery store and swear I have no idea what happened to them when they ask. I could take the Confederate flag right off the side of the other neighbors’ front porch and throw it away too, tell them that we had terrible wind on Thanksgiving the next time I see them out in the yard, although they probably won’t believe me. My husband will be furious. My son will be impressed, perhaps, but will undoubtedly find something new to critique. But for once I won’t be doing it for either of them. I will do it for the pigeons. I will do it for myself.
Recognized in RCAD’s “Storytellers of Tomorrow Contest.”
Adelina Rose Gowans is a Costa Rican/Honduran-American writer born in 2003. Her work has been recognized by the National YoungArts Foundation, Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, and the Poetry Society of England, and she is published or forthcoming in Ambit Magazine, Barely South Review, Scholastic Best Teen Writing 2020, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Zone 3, and elsewhere. She edits EX/POST Magazine and Pollux Journal. More of her personal projects and resume can be found at https://www.adelinarose.me.
Art by Sofia Musa