Pigeons

Either they ate too much junk - spilled popcorn and Cheetos spilled over the abandoned alleyways - or instead consumed some sort of poison accidentally... the two pigeons I saw sitting in dirty corners of the city's streets seemed to be extremely sick. Not just sick, but tired of having to move and walk, avoiding and not avoiding, looking at nothing and everything all at once. The one I took a picture of sat bloated and still, eyes wide open, swollen from some illness we will never know. She sat, waiting, hoping to be taken or else cured, and if the night rose and fell over her filth, which she never asked for in the first place, she might've wished to perish, knowing all wealth of meaning disappeared on the plane which she currently inhabited. The second pigeon, in an emptied out parking lot, sat the same way, crouched over, hunched like some rotten beast made small, shrunken even, in all his bulging pain, given up too on the life of movement and the fetching of scraps. The filling of these two pigeons became something no longer about pride and warding off unnecessary threats, and instead became a reaction of the body, not of some evolutionary consciousness. A reaction to the sickness of the place in which it had found itself, the pigeon body expanded with disease, feathers no longer glorious, incapable of rectifying any semblance of its past, of its symbolic or metaphorical presence in this world. If the pigeons lived through nights like this, forced to go on, to walk heavy footed amidst the conditions which eventually would murder it, then they did so without mind, however small, and instead walked on in a horrendous display of pain and sadness which they felt not only inside but deep within their failing crevices. And then, again, remembering the state in which they wandered, would stop, for days and nights on end, praying for the death that would inevitably come. 

- F