I'm sitting here crying.
Once upon a time, before i boarded up the fire place in my bedroom, a strange creepy shape began to silently billow and distort the sheet i had hanging over the then open grate.
It was a pidgeon who had fallen down my chimney… sitting there behind the sheet quietly facing away from the room as if it was completely normal… what big birds they are when they're wood pidgeons, really heavy when you try to pick them up, really fat and healthy…
I put the strangley placid bird in a box and covered it up overnight and it woke me up as dawn broke, flapping around and scratching, so i fought with it to get out the box and it got away, flying into the corners of my room and crapping over everything in fear, freaking me out with it's massive frantic flapping, crashing into nothing like some angry flying bull.
I dont know how i caught it but when i put it onto the window ledge and tried to shoo it off back into nature it just sat there like a dead weight. I could prod it or stroke it like a sleeping dog on your bed.
I shut the window and when i next looked it had gone.
Now I've decorated my room and put up some plasterboard, lovingly Stanley knife carved into a tight fit with my chimney breast, seemlessly papered over it, painted it and put up a shelf where my mirror sits and i stand and do my 'stuff' when I've had a shave (because my bathroom is too cold).
For two days now, a shuffling and scratching has been eminating from behind this perfect bit of time consuming DIY and a another pidgeon has doubtlessly fallen down the chimney again and in my mind I can see it there in the dark surrounded by soot unable to really move and just….being.
I tell myself that pidgeons don't think, or wonder why it's so dark, or say to themselves "christ i miss my mum" and "oh no I'm trapped in the dark, what will I do for food?" but I just sit here and listen to its failing attempts to climb back up the chimney, weighing up the time it would take to rectify the mess I would make rescuing a dumb animal. How long the new hole I rip through into the fireplace would sit there, another thing to do that I just couldn't be bothered to fix.
I like to think the pidgeon, sitting in the dark, will just shut down like all animals do. Thirst probably will be its end. Kidney failure. But I'm worried that I will never forget that I had the power to save it and that I chose to kill it indirectly because I lack the inertia to anymore than make it to and from work.
Here I am stuck in my little chimney every night, no one but me and I cant help thinking that someone or thing sent me the pidgeon and that I'm supposed to save it. But i cant. And every day I leave it, the more futile it becomes. It would never survive now anyway and probably die from shock. So I just have to wait and listen, waiting for the scratching to stop, believing that all a pidgeon will do is close its eyes believing it to be just one long night and quietly stop breathing.
Until then, it's just me and the pidgeon and everytime I hear another stumble or scratch or tap tap, I find myself saying sorry to god.
