They shit leylines across the city. Your new shirt was directly in the path between the old library haunted by that linguistics professor who defenestrated himself and the world’s last KenTacoHut combination restaurant. You’re sweating through the new shirt anyway. Summer already and she won’t return your calls.
It’s said to be good luck, a bird shitting on you. That their migratory defecation patterns are premonitions, thrift store tarot cards dealt at blackjack tables, russian roulette where every chamber is loaded with a slot machine. But each bird bears its own brand of luck. The options should be ranked accordingly.
- A common pigeon. Maybe you’ll win a gas station coupon for a sixer of Colt 45 and a packet of Royal Honey. Maybe a drunk “u up?” text will be answered with “What’s wrong with you?”
- A carrier pigeon. You’ll get home, caramelized in overpriced cocktail sweats and there’ll be a letter from your ex in the mail box. No return address. It’s just a print out of a Venmo request you never fulfilled. A bird wearing goggles stares up from the novelty stamp, the lenses clear enough to hold a reflection. You’re getting too old.
- A manslaughter of crows. You’ll get to call them your friends and they’ll offer unenthusiastic opinions about your life. That the new shirt didn’t fit anyway. That your ex is probably dating someone 6’2. That you should stop jerryrigging together fried chicken taco pizza from the KenTacoHut because you’re getting hard to look at. That sometimes it’s better to give up than grow up.
- An ostrich, hung bat-like from a streetlamp. If you ask nicely, it’ll let you become briefly egg-shaped, be incubated, be vomit fed, beak-to-mouth. So much feeding you can’t speak. You can’t think about the shape of her body pantomimed against yours in a smoke-salted bar, the jukebox coughing up the same song on repeat. Your egg-shape is temporary. You will be dropped from the streetlamp and crack open on the sidewalk.
- NSA surveillance devices pretending to be birds. You have been compromised and the government will assign you a new identity soon. That wasn’t shit, and you are quite going to enjoy life as a roadside porn seller off I-70 in Kansas.
- A cardinal that was recently assigned to a new parish due to “the allegations.” Say three Hail Marys and you will permanently be good with God. You can burn a church down, take up a shoplifting hobby, watch your ex from across the restaurant and try to read the scripture in the laugh lines along her mouth. Maybe you should go home. Maybe you should burn your house down.
- A house sparrow, inside when the fire starts. It sings your first dance song.
Wingbeats lance through the gathering dark. You’ll step into the traffic, get clipped by a passing Dodge Charger, and say how lucky it was the driver missed. How lucky would it be if he hadn’t. The air is cooling and it’ll be autumn soon.
