How Many More Times

pigeon on ledge photo by LSU DAV.

Inside the bell tower of a downtown Lutheran church, pigeons roost. They huddle in window sills or balance on the craggy edge of stones. Their brethren flutter round and round the tower in circles. It’s cold on the shady side of the north face, which is where Humfelt lays on a window ledge, keeled over to one side like a grounded boat. His eyes are crusted, and his heart flutters erratically in his breast. This will be his last day, he’s almost certain, of being trapped in the body of a pigeon. Last day of pecking at french-fries spilled on the sidewalks, of darting out from under roaring buses. Last day of flight. Last day of ascending to a perch fifteen stories above the city streets. Last day of soaring through canyons of high rises.

How long had he been trapped in the body of a pigeon? Previously he had been a floor trader on Wallstreet, then a cuttlefish, then a mercenary, then a goat, and way way back he faintly recalled life as a magician, a wizard of sorts traveling around villages with a band of other illusionists. He convinced himself from time to time that his tricks were more than just sleight of hand, but that he harnessed actual powers of nature that ordinary mortals did not share. He could make a pretty woman in a crowd take notice of him just through concentration. He could will the gold coins out of a shopkeeper’s pocket and into his own coffers. At night, when he roamed through village streets or out on the edge of town to a milkmaid’s hovel, he could will himself into her bedroom.

Now he gasps a last few lung-fulls of air on the ledge of a chapel tower. It is early spring, a time of rebirth. He wonders through whose eyes he will next look upon the world. His reincarnation had not always been incremental in time, so he’s not even sure into which world he will resurface. Will it be the late 2000’s, or will it be a wheat field in 19th century France. Will he be driving at tank in WW2, or brushing lint off his master’s waistcoat in Edinburgh mansion? A worm boring through coffin wood to get at the rotting flesh within, corporeal fruit wrapped in soil? Or will it be one of those times when he is caught between lives, trapped as a ghost gliding through the lunar mansion?

The one constant in this long thread of lives is that he remains in the orbit of his eternal lover, Rebecca. If he is a pigeon sitting on the shoulder of a statue in a city park, she is a sparrow flitting through the bare branches of crab apple trees lining the park benches. If he is a executioner operating a guillotine in a French square, she is the courtesan expelled from royal halls only to stretch her slim neck across the blade’s edge. The magician lurking outside her window. The worm boring into her grave. Will he ever have her? Yes, he has a thousand times, and a thousand times he has lost her. Which is more painful, in the end? Is there and end?

Keys to Life

funciona! photo by corbata1982.

The Backspace key is my nemesis. All of these words spill out of me, and just as quickly slip into oblivion as I hold down the Backspace key. Really, these keys hold such warm or bleek possibilities if they could be applied to life. Home. Pause/Break. Delete. End. When I was in Budapeste huddled on a bench in a train station platform, I could have pressed the Home key. During my marriage troubles, I wanted to Pause all of the arguing, but then came the realization that we need to make a clean Break of things. But there are no clean breaks in a divorce. For years afterward, I still thought about her. I imagined I could return to the home we had lived in, and she would be in the kitchen cooking up something, and the dogs would come running and lick me to death as I came through the door. But all of that was gone. A different family lived there now, and it would be so much easier if I could just forget it all. Delete, and it would be like we had never met.

Is life worth all of this struggle? Finding happiness, going to work, paying the bills? Sometimes it seems like it would be easier to press the End key. But I’ve never figured out what happens when you press the End key. An end will come soon enough, so I might as well enjoy myself while I’m here. Insert myself back into the dating world. Now it’s all about making some kind of Shift. Taking Ctrl. Stop watching life pass me by and get the courage to Enter.

Enter.

Enter.

There, now I have some space to work with. It’s time to make use of these twenty-six keys that aren’t so easy. Got to find the right combination of them to find my way, but they also hold infinite possibility. Find the right sequence and you’ve got the complete works of Shakespeare, the Declaration of Independence, and the diary of Anne Frank . Lose your way, and you’ve got the Life of Brettanicus.

Tax Deductible Expenses

Touchy dragon photo by Jukkie.

I was trying to write a story last night, typing away on my laptop. I sat by the living room window looking out over the city from twenty-five stories up, a view that had provided inspiration on many nights, except now I had seen it so many times that I suppose it was no more inspirational than what a ground-dweller feels when looking out to a dried-up birdbath. Since the words weren’t coming, I had a decision to make: either continue my labors at the noble art of expressing the truth through lies, or file my taxes. I was just logging into TurboTax when a dragon crashed through my window and perched itself on the windowsill. It shook a few shards of broken glass from its head and wings, then leapt into my apartment and, with two hops across the room, alighted on the back of my sofa. It opened up a bag of trail mix that I had left on the coffee table after watching Forrest Gump the previous night and started to nibble. It picks out the pretzels and tosses aside the peanuts.

It looked at me with this satisfied expression and appeared to be about to speak when instead it grabbed an open bottle of Newcastle, tipped it back and downs it in two gulps. It belched, emitting two small puffs of smoke, and then jumped down from off the back of the sofa. It hopped across the room, much like a sparrow hops, back up on the window sill and then plummeted at least a dozen flights before those papery wings caught enough air to propel its considerable mass away from the concrete. It took off towards the Warehouse district, where hip-hop clubs were already forming lines at the doors. I was left standing in my empty apartment with a cold wind blowing in, feeling almost certain the whole thing was imagined, until I heard screams from the girls propped up on their high heals alongside the velvet ropes outside the clubs, heard the screech of tires, the crunch of metal on metal, and a fiery belch. The circling spotlights outside Spin caught the dragon banking across the night sky for a moment, then it was gone.

So my question for you is can I file a tax deduction for the broken window? I mean, it is an expense incurred while in my line of work.

Grandmother and the dragon photo by Anandamide.