Afterwords: Pigeons
Skateboarding, a cure for capital punishment, and the cardinal on my windowsill (with whom I fell in love.)
These are miscellaneous notes for October’s story. Full story below if you missed it. Free subscribers, you still have two weeks.
STORY ORIGINS
PIGEONS started off with a mission statement: “this month, write the shortest story you can tell that won’t look like a 100 Stories cop-out.”
I failed.
On the shortest part.
*
As it happens, my desk is next to a window of a third floor Brooklyn apartment. I keep a flood-stopper sized bag of birdseed on the floor, and from time to time, I sprinkle it about the sill like a Pope. This generates traffic, air disputes and great fluttering. Early on, the territorial thrashing got so out-of-control, I had to go on mute during conference calls.
In more peaceful moments, when a gang of bullying mourning doves were off elsewhere, a lone female cardinal would parachute in, bob about, and occasionally back into the suet tray. Without fail, my little lady would look straight at me with that cocked-to-the-side consideration birds size you up.
Then she’d fly off the ledge.
You probably imagine my lady cardinal flying upwards off a sill, but she doesn’t. She “drops in” like a skateboarder, dive-bombing into freefall before takeoff which charms me enormously.
*
What was I saying?
“The shortest story I could get away with.”
The shortest story I could get away with (that would still interest me) was the germ of an idea about sticking my hand out the window and seeing how long it would take for a single bird to trust me enough to settle in it.
My imagined story wouldn’t be about anything but a hand and a bird.
Hand.
Bird.
No people.
No faces.
Hand reaching.
Bird deciding.
Some outcome.
The end.
I’d still have “a goal” and “conflict” and an underlying reader’s desire for the hand (all hands) to build trust and make contact with the bird (all birds). And I’d have a lovely little denouement that unfolds the love story of my lady cardinal and me.
Two to three hundred words.
Done.
October.
Story XIX.
This particular story never settles in my hand.
*
So how did I get from a cardinal to a pigeon?
I traveled a great storytelling distance.
Here it is, approximately.
Hand and bird and lady cardinal, as discussed.
First sign of additional paragraphs: I have a follow-up idea that the bird being reached for is hidden from sight. Poof goes the apartment windowsill.
Then I get to this idea the hand reaching out is hoping there is a bird but never knowing if there is a bird. Years of not knowing, in fact. An act of great faith in the absence of all evidence.
Hope has gotten involved. There goes the shortest story.
The idea of a prisoner reaching out arrives at more or less the same time. If you can’t go outside the room and look to see if there are birds, you’re probably in a jail.
Yes! It shall be a jail!
More than jail! I am on Death Row! I feel the story appear. This is the moment I feel my baby’s first kick. Generally, there are a few weeks of flat nothing with a story where I’m sure I’m headed for a “stillborn” when suddenly there’s a hook. This is my ‘feel something.’ This is a check arriving.
I go tell Melanie that I found my story. She nods appreciatively.
Back to my office.
My prisoner is so hungry for something positive in his world that he keeps his hand out there all the time, to the point that even the crazy prisoners think he’s crazy. He has a reputation as the bird guy.
The prisoner lies to the other prisoners for some reason that he is touching birds.
“Why would that be?”
I rub my chin.
How about he lies and tells the others that he feels a bird the morning of an execution? No, even better, ONLY on the mornings of executions. All executions.
“Oh, fuck yeah.” I go back to Melanie and let her know I really, really have my story now.
Nods.
Office.
My story is briefly set in the Nebraska State Penitentiary. The “NSP” my weary guard will call it.
After further research, I discover we’re too far North for the number of executions I require.
Hmmm.
Problem solved! Oklahoma is a hotbed of executions! Yay! I found my state!
Then, oh my God, the most brilliant idea of all. I will have the birds flying into the prison dayroom through the drainpipe at the end. Oh, how beautiful! I love it!
No, I don’t love it. I hate it. That is an awful choice. Delete, delete, delete.
The next moment is inevitable. I don’t think you can write a story within four hundred pages of a prison and not end up with Shawshank fingerprints in the paint.
I steal a little something from Shawshank Redemption, a story that whispers through every drainpipe here.
The execution line on the floor in the day room is rather Stephen King, don’t you think?
Admit it.
If you remember in Shawshank, there is a character—let’s call him Morgan Freeman—who goes up in front of the parole board and says, “I don’t give a shit anymore what you decide.” Obviously, I can’t use that, but I can invert it. Inversion, if clever, is fair game.
Out of nowhere, I decide a guard will see the hand reaching from outside the prison.
My creative pregnancy baby does a freakin’ somersault.
Close succession: The guard decides to plant the birds on the prisoner’s behalf when he’s up for execution.
Oh, Jesus Fuck. Yes, yes, yes.
Back to Melanie. “Sorry to interrupt. One more. I’ve really, really got the story now. A man known both inside and out. The whole thing right there in like one image.”
I’ve lost her.
Days pass.
For a few hours, I title PIGEONS A CONSPIRACY OF GRACE.
Taken.
Then PIGEONS. That’s my answer, even if taken.
I mean, pigeons are total, crap birds. They aren’t lady cardinals. They’re birds that bully the nice birds away.
I cross my fingers that this title that at first appears to be a humdrum, so-what title spreads its grey wings and take flight for you in the final sentence.
CAPITAL PUNISHMENT
You might think I’m against capital punishment after reading PIGEONS, but you’re wrong.
I’m for it.
Really, really for it.
I think all the states should have it.
And here’s how it should work:
Every member of the jury knows they have a chance in twelve of having to execute the person themselves. Right before filing back into the courtroom, the jurors draw straws about who will have to do the killing.
“Now what’s your vote going to be, Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury?”
*
And yet, this was never a story about capital punishment.
Looking back at its journey, PIGEONS became a story about the complexity of grace and the unexpected and unlikely forms it can take.
Grace delivered through a drainpipe, not a barrel.
Till next Sunday, 9:00am.
The story of the story makes a great story.
Your telling me, whose husband is a chiropractor, that you basically hunch and slump over your desk for hours at a time, well , your just asking for it. A really, really long chastising, but thankfully for you, I am holding myself back. No, you never mentioned the quote, I like it ! I would have done the same as Melanie, not mentioning the car. But I am no saint, I would have casually brought it up afterwards. Maybe more than once.
Re: Shawshank, same here, I have seen it more times than I can remember, about due for another. We bought a friend a huge poster from the movie for his 50th bday. You would have thought we gave him a Rembrandt, by the way he carried on.
The Green Mile; put it on your Lor recommended list. Let me entice you by saying, after you’ve watched the movie, you’ll want Tom Hanks to play Frank A.