The pigeons arrive in the spring. She watches him try to shoo them away—first with the clapping of hands, with the stomping of feet on the wooden deck, then finally with a garden hose. “Stop,” she tells him finally. “Leave them alone.”

She’s grown to like their incessant cooing, their low murmur a lullaby.

The birds roost on the wooden beam just under the roof, side by side, staring into the Spanish fir across the street, like two people sitting side by side at a bar in front of a baseball game.

*

Flying rats, he calls them. Or, rats with wings.

How does a bird get a reputation like that? she wonders. As a pest—when pigeons are really quite beautiful, with the blues and purples feathering their necks, their curious faces, their bobbing heads.

Anything can be a pest; it’s just a matter of perspective. She watches parents at grocery stores, snapping at their children, yanking at their hands and arms, everything an annoyance.

*

A ghost writer for a popular young adult series, she is immersed in the world of the young and their teenage problems. She’s working on new novel in which one of the high school girls has a pregnancy “scare.” Ironic, she thinks, how hard you try to avoid pregnancy at one age and try so hard to achieve it at another. 

She logs forty hours a week, she decorates the page with dialogue, and in the end she gets a nice paycheck. Yet she’s only a surrogate; when she goes to the bookstore, it’s someone else’s name on the covers of all her books.

*

One egg falls, then the next. The birds disappear.

Whitish yellow yolk smears the deck’s wooden boards like blood.

*

Baby clothes keep arriving—“gifts” from her in-laws. Onesies in greens and yellows, little shirts and leggings, even tiny socks. All unopened in the bottom drawer of a small dresser in an unused room.

*

Sometimes she looks at him, trying to imagine him as a father. He’s got hair longer than hers, a scruffy face, a tattoo of a compass around his bicep—leftovers from his twenties, like the passport stamps he’d collected during his years in the Peace Corps. Now he designs software for a gaming company. He’s changed, physically and otherwise: the tan faded from his skin, the light from his hair; his straight-toothed smile now seems plain instead of perfect. Still intense, yet quieter, he’s become more comfortable facing a computer screen than a human being. When he looks at her, she wonders if he sees skin and eyes, or just pixels and a blinking cursor.

She thinks back to their first date, when she’d asked him about his work. About how he developed code to portray severed limbs and squirting blood. At first she found it amusing, his passion for gore, the illustrations she’d find in his apartment: bloody skulls, exposed bone. The way he’d look at the shape of a man’s head and imagine how it would fracture; the way he’d put his hand on his heart and tell her how its chambers might explode.

He spends a lot of his free time drawing and knows an impressive amount of art history. Yet after a visit to the art museum, she realized he sees fractals where she sees brushstrokes; he sees numbers where she sees images. The casual sweep of a woman’s hair in an Impressionist painting is, to him, an algorithm. She can’t help but feel that these differences separate them to an extent that they may never be fully whole.

*

She comes home one day to find a stranger in the kitchen. She stares at the man’s back as he rummages through the fridge.

Only when he turns does she realize it’s him.

He’d cut his hair.

He smiles and turns his head from side to side. He’s clean shaven, ponytail gone, his hair in a short, neat cut that frames his face in a way she’s never seen before. She steps forward and runs a hand over his head.

In bed, she misses the feel of his hair sweeping her face, the way she could lose her hands in it. She touches the back of his neck, his bare shoulders.

“It’ll grow out,” he murmurs.

“I know.”

“Should I have asked you first?”

“No,” she says. She rolls onto her back, maneuvering a pillow under her hips. She remembers reading something, somewhere, that said this would help.

*

Researching a new storyline at the library, she comes across an article on the passenger pigeon, extinct for more than 100 years—a bird whose numbers were once in the billions. It disappeared because of humans: hunting, loss of habitat.

The world’s last passenger pigeon was named Martha. She died on September 1, 1914, at the Cincinnati Zoo. Like herself, the bird was twenty-nine years old. Also like her, Martha had never once produced a fertile egg.

*

In the spring, the pigeons return. She watches as the male pigeon collects twigs and sticks and leaves, bringing them in his beak to his mate.

That night, she positions the pillow under her hips again.

The next day, she checks the nest for eggs. The pigeons eye her warily.

– Midge Raymond

Note: “Nesting” was first published in The Nottingham Review in the autumn of 2015.