This particular pigeon was stuffed into a niche to the right of Cory’s front door, and she could have easily missed seeing it, like so many other daily oversights committed because she did not have eyes in the back of her head or in her hands. She slid in only one direction, along one plane. She had once been in the habit of flaying herself regularly for these sins of sensory omission, when she was younger and had more energy. She believed that a certain amount of guilt, like red wine, was healthy. She had been raised without religion, and guilt kept her in check. Too much, to extend the metaphor, was poisonous.

At any rate, Cory noticed the pigeon, perhaps because she’d caught it fluffing itself out of the corner of her eye. She’d been on her way to the bar to visit friends (fond acquaintances, really), but she paused for her visitor. It didn’t move much when she approached – in fact, it didn’t seem to notice her at all. This lack of reciprocity was good for her side of the relationship. The pigeon shuffled its claws and rounded itself off. It had come, an elementary equation, to Cory’s doorstep – to die.

This was the stuff, Cory thought, of which small myths were made – a baby in a basket of bulrushes, a falling-to-earth. She was naturally suspicious of stories in which too much meaning was made, in which precious conclusions universally drew themselves over some framework and stretched taut, ready to be hit, ready to make a sound. Those frames never held. Still, this sick bird had chosen her doorway, third on the block and gentrifidentical to all of the other doorways, and it had thus become her responsibility.

She called Ruth, her first-string fond acquaintance of the group she was supposed to meet up with. The pigeon’s presence had rooted her to the doormat; she sunk down onto the step. The bird continued to not notice/not care.

“I’m sorry,” Cory said to Ruth (or to her electronic proxy), as soon as the familiar pop and click and background-noise-hello? had taken place. “I know this is going to sound weird, but a pigeon chose my doorway to die in, and I sort of feel like I have to take care of it.”

Ruth’s disembodied voice registered the appropriate amount of mild surprise and dismay. “You’re not usually the motherly type?” Ruth herself was the motherly type. She had been given an antiquated name and had felt the need to grow into it via a series of behavioral glitches that, together, made a neat little meme. She carried Band-Aids and Kleenex in her purse, played mah-johngg, preferred tea, and was not averse to answering the door late at night with rollers in her hair. Somewhere along the line she had truly adopted the qualities she’d aspired to – she’d gone from affected to charming - and this was what made Cory like her the most of that particular group.

Ruth and Cory discussed options – whether to take the bird inside or leave it (“it might bite,” Ruth said, ever practical. “Rats of the city, you know”), whether it might want anything to eat, whether it might want a blanket. Then the rest of the acquaintances arrived on Ruth’s end of the line and she excused herself, always politely. Cory, feeling socially graceless, went inside. The bird hadn’t moved in fifteen or twenty minutes – not at all – and Cory wondered if it had just up and died on her. She didn’t know whether the bird would care (or if it was even able to care, being a bird) about the fact that she was trying to make its last minutes more comfortable.

She toyed briefly with the idea of becoming a sort of pigeon euthanasia specialist, traveling the city putting birds in doorways out of their misery. She wondered whether it could be nursed back to health at this point. She had a miniature moral crisis, in which small parties of imaginary lawyers and newscasters and senators blathered back and forth about life and death and nothing got solved. Cory Roget, playing avian God. She dismissed her existential angst as teenage and, following her gut instinct, got a cardboard box and a blanket and a small cup of trail mix and set to waiting.

She never took off her hat and coat. She got herself a pile of magazines and made herself comfortable on the doorstep, next to the pigeon, which (judging by its slatted eyes) was still sort of alive (at least in biological terms). She read about how celebrities are Just Like We Are while the bird shed feathers and attempted to shrink its head into its neck. The bird didn’t touch the trail mix, and it didn’t seem to mind when she picked it up very carefully with both hands, looking away from it as if it was toxic (which it very well might be) and afraid it might bite her (she could hear Ruth’s warning); it was past that. Like a pitiful molting grey Buddha, it was implacable.

Feathers continued to fall, littering the box. The pigeon’s eyes squinched shut. Cory figured she was mapping her sadness and discomfort onto it, and that she should probably go inside to bed because the bird was suffering enough as it was without her bullshit.

When she returned in the morning, it was, predictably, stiff. Flies had arrived at some point and were, by the time she checked, swarming over her little blanket and its contents, doing what flies do.

She swatted a few flies away and rolled the corpse up in a sheet of newsprint (from the classifieds – it resembled her grandmother’s Christmas gift-wrap. A series of disconnected, half-complete thoughts about the Depression and saving things trampled through her head and were gone).

She double-bagged it (“Thanks for your Business! Have a Great Day!”) and put it in the trash can out back. Having not been raised with religion, she wasn’t quite sure what other last rites to give it (she was fuzzy on what sects believed animals to have souls, or whether she believed that, or whether she believed in a soul in the first place – again, she thought, stupid! Cory! You are not sixteen!), so she muttered something about finding your final resting place among the refuse of so many other dead things and closed the lid with an appropriate clang.

She considered calling Ruth, but dismissed that idea. There was an emptiness that she didn’t feel like filling with activity, not this time. There was an economy of movement in her step. When she drew in her breath it felt like she was about ready to explode.