Pink Pigeon
By Alexandria Carolan
The wedding has it all—kiss under the arch, bouquet and the beads of rice, pillowy doves all flying. The groom fills the archway, his head bent over hers as she looks at him with the eyes of someone who has only known love once. Wives search the eyes of husbands, hoping to rekindle that something. The mother of the bride, recently widowed, beams.
The doves are not doves. King pigeons have two fates: raised for food or raised for release. Domesticated completely, these bulbous birds lack the instinct to scavenge. They fly like bumblebees, uncertain of the freedom they have been awarded. One stumbles onto a child’s lacquered head and she shrieks. The pigeon flies until the people are sure this troubled dove, this potentially deranged dove, is gone for good. It is only after the couple skirts away in the rented Rolls Royce that the crowd is appeased. They mumble about the lovely couple, about how he is so large, and she is so small.
Now the rock pigeons peck abandoned in the orchard where the couple married, their tender beaks unsure of how to get to worms. At night they nestle in the brush just as they once had in their metal pens. Every now and then, one cooes at the moon, mistaking it for the overhead light their farmer would turn on in the early hours.
One bird lives. Per the contract, the wedding planner insisted that someone take it home after the event. The mother of the bride lets the lone dove loose in her home. She is supposed to feed him pellets, but she finds them distasteful. Every day this rock pigeon eats one medium-sized pack of french fries. When she pets his sturdy back, he purrs. The bird nests above her head while she sleeps. When the daughter calls about the pregnancy, the mother smiles widely for the first time since the wedding. When she finds out it’s a girl, she turns to her bird, eyeing his stick legs and dull white coat, and says “I know what to do with you.”
The party is a great success. Attendees play gender reveal juice-pong and the boy team wins. In the end, the wife slices a purple ribbon, and a dove glistening pink fumbles out of the box, feathers affray. “A girl!” the wife says. “A girl!” the party-goers repeat. The final dove flies above, his little body wavering along the tree line. “That’s my girl,” the mother says and points. “I call her Flamingo now,” she says, and they all laugh.
A few months later the couple brings their beautiful girl home. They do not remember the pink pigeon who scurried into the woods behind their house, consumed in a cloud of hair dye fumes. They do not remember his lonely coo, or how moments before death—just beneath a hefty oak—his last thought was that the shuffling in the bushes might be the woman who once fed him fried potatoes.
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About Alexandria Carolan
She is a student in the MFA program at the University of New Hampshire. You can find her on Twitter and Instagram @alxcrln.