She sits across, lounges across really, the length of the wide red sofa chair. Her calves, ankles, feet dangle over the armrest. Her head and neck scrunch, xylophone style, against the other side. She plays cats’ cradle with a loose string of yarn she found in the apartment lobby. She hasn’t paid attention to the last half hour of the movie. A Western, her friend recommended. It is number 47 on Ramona’s must watch movies list.

She doesn’t watch the movies in order. She actually had never noticed they were numbered until tonight. She had watched another Western last weekend, Dances with Wolves, and felt like she should stick to the genre. She hadn’t stuck to the genres before, either, but she had also never seen a Western before. She felt like she had catching up to do, and while she had a list of must watch Westerns she might as well use it.

She doesn’t even remember the title of this one though and it feels like it’s gone on for days. She picks Ramona’s list up off the floor to see what she could have picked instead. Ramona’s list is not in any sort of order she would have chosen, since the movies are listed in chunks by the actors in them. She has skipped almost all of Adam Sandler. She has watched almost all of Brad Pitt.

When she first started the list, she went through the whole thing and crossed off the movies she had already seen. It wasn’t many, but she established for herself that this was a must watch movie list, not a must watch-over-and-over-again list. Ramona had made the list with an old roommate who moved out before they even started. She and Ramona had watched a couple of the first movies together, but now she watched alone at night after work.

She worked at the hospital now and kept weird hours, not that her job really required it.

She wasn’t a triage nurse or emergency room doctor, she was just an admin worker, a desk watcher. But she liked the later shifts, the night time crowd, and her late mornings.

In the mornings, she sat with Beth, her gray tabby, on the back porch and drank two pots of coffee with half a grapefruit and one hard boiled egg. She watched some people fight in the alley, or some people dump trash and broken furniture in the dumpsters. She told herself this would be a good place to write, a good time to settle herself into a routine, but she never did. On good weeks she read, rare weeks she painted, but most weeks she watched people coming and going, and the woman across the alley who fed an entire loaf of Wonder Bread to a flock of pigeons.

The woman across the alley didn’t watch her back. As far as she knew, this was a fully one-sided relationship, because as far as she could tell the woman across the alley only had relationships with the pigeons. She watched every morning as pigeons landed on the roof of the garage in clusters, groups, then piles. She had never seen so many pigeons at once. And she watched as the woman stood and leaned over the fire escape with a new loaf of Wonder Bread. She twirled to untie the plastic bag then stretched her arm in and yanked sliced bread out in fistfuls, throwing half a dozen slices out to the birds at a time. When the loaf was done, the woman watched the pigeons for a moment, but then folded the plastic baggy gently in her hands and went back inside.

She had a sex dream about the woman across the alley once, and it felt awkward to watch her feed the Wonder Bread to the pigeons the morning after. She started to text Ramona about it, but then realized she’d have to explain who the woman across the alley with the Wonder Bread and the pigeons was and it didn’t seem worth getting into. So she drew a sketch of the woman across the alley feeding the pigeons, then she soaked the drawing in her kitchen sink until it disintegrated and she squashed its remains down the garbage disposal.

At work she watched people coming and going in almost exactly the same way she watched them in her alley in the mornings. Parents with children with broken bones, pregnant women crab walking, drunk people vomiting and passing out in the waiting room. There was an exorcism once, but it didn’t last long and she couldn’t understand what most of the people were chanting. Doctors and nurses separated the exorcism patients too quickly in her opinion, since it seemed like no one was getting hurt.

She brought Ramona’s must watch movie list with her to work today, so that she could google some of the titles when she got bored. After work she’ll stop by and visit Ramona like every work night and this time she can show her how far she’s made it in the list and which ones she’s looked up today. She is not in the mood for any more Westerns, so she switches to Nicolas Cage. She has never seen Moonstruck and she loves Cher, so she circles that one as an option. Someone else had told her to watch Raising Arizona for some reason, but now she can’t remember why or if she ever watched it, or who recommended it. She circles it. She googles Adaptation and circles it then writes a question mark to ask Ramona.

Ramona’s room is on the fifth floor of the hospital in a wing of other women who cannot leave. She’s allowed to visit after visiting hours because she works at the front desk downstairs. Tonight she shows Ramona the must watch movie list with titles crossed off and circled, and she lets Ramona flip through each page methodically.

“Oh you watched Best in Show without me?!” Ramona sits up, excited.

“Yeah, I liked it!”

“You hate comedies!”

“Not as much as I hate Westerns now.”

“See! My list has broadened your horizons!”

“Sure.” She takes the list back from Ramona and turns to the page of Nicolas Cage. ”I circled some of these, which one do you think I should watch tonight?”

Ramona looks over Moonstruck, Raising Arizona, and Adaptation.

“That’s a weird list to circle -“

“Well, you put the list together.”

“You should watch Moonstruck. Moonstuck! It’s a good nighttime movie.”

While she is watching Moonstruck, she pauses to take a picture of the moon to text Ramona. It’s one of those creepy moons where it’s not quite full, but it takes up more of the sky than it feels like it should, and there are clouds floating over parts of it. She thinks tonight would have been a better night for a horror movie, but she has watched all of the horror movies on the list, since they’re her favorite and Ramona’s least favorite.

In the morning, she watches the woman across the alley feed Wonder Bread to the pigeons and starts to write a story about her. In the story, the woman across the alley’s name is Nancy and she feeds the pigeons every day because a pigeon once saved her now-dead mother’s life in a city park twenty years before. The story comes to a halt when she can’t think of how a pigeon could save a woman’s life and now the woman across the alley, who’s name is probably not Nancy and whose mother was probably not saved by a pigeon and is possibly still alive anyway, is done feeding the pigeons. She feels like her ambiance is gone.

There is a drug deal going on in the alley and she watches hoping it will go wrong, but it doesn’t. She thinks of her cousin, whose grandmother found him at knifepoint in an alley last summer. And she thinks of how knifepoint would be an excellent name for a place rather than a circumstance. She goes back to the story about Nancy and the pigeons and adds the name Knifepoint to the park where her now-dead mother was saved by the pigeon hero.

At work, she thinks about the story, and doodles pigeons in the margins of her legal pad on her desk. Pigeons sitting, pigeons flying, pigeons eating. Here she pauses to think of the savior pigeon and decides a pigeon eating would be much the same as a pigeon plucking food from a middle-aged woman’s throat. This is how the pigeon saved Nancy’s mother. After work she will show Ramona the doodles of pigeons and tell her about the story and ask if this could be a plausible means of pigeon rescue.

Ramona flips through the pages of pigeon sketches and laughs.

“You’re writing another story?” She sets the legal pad on her lap and looks up in admiration.

“Not a long one, and not a very good one, I don’t think -“

“The pigeon saves the old lady, “ Ramona is back to the pages of pigeon drawings, “but the story is about Nancy?”

“Yeah, Nancy is the woman across the alley from the narrator – “The unnamed woman who watches?”

“Yeah, and Nancy feeds all of the city’s pigeons every day, devotes her life to it, because of the pigeon who saved -“

“Her mother’s life, yeah. But who is the woman watching?” “She’s watching Nancy.”

“No, I mean, who is she? Why is she watching?”

“I don’t know, because what Nancy’s doing is weird?”

“But who is she besides the woman watching?”

“I don’t know. It’s not her story, she’s not important.” She balances on one foot, then the other, breathes in measured counts.

“She’s the narrator.” Ramona lays the legal pad on her lap again, looks up questioning.

“So should I take the narrator out?”

“No, it’s about the narrator. It’s not about Nancy.” Ramona hands the legal pad back.

She shrugs, uncomfortable, and holds back the familiar tears in her eyes. The ones that burn up whenever someone talks about her writing. This is why she hadn’t brought Ramona her writing, this is why she only gave Ramona the pigeon drawings.

At home, she watches The Truman Show. She is engrossed while watching, but forgets about it as soon as it ends. She looks outside to see the pitch black night and the moon that is no longer behind any clouds. She wonders about the woman across the alley tonight, for the first time outside of her mornings. She wonders if her name is Nancy, first, but then thinks about what the woman does after feeding the pigeons. Does she eat breakfast? What does she eat? Does she go to work, and where does she work? She must be retired, the pigeon feeding would cut into normal work hours probably. But maybe she works from home, or maybe she works nights? She falls asleep thinking about the woman across the alley and what she might be doing right now, and wakes up to the sun and screaming.

In the alley, someone found a dead woman in the dumpster behind her apartment. So, she spends her morning drinking her two pots of coffee without the grapefruit and the egg, because she has to watch as the ambulance and cops block up the alley and first question the kid who found the dead woman and then photograph the entire scene. She watches as they finally, carefully, pull the woman out of the dumpster, ass first, then lay her on a gurney and zip her into a body bag. The woman’s hair is wet, and this strikes her more than any other details, because she thinks she can smell the woman’s shampoo and the clean fresh-washed hair over the death and garbage she was dumped in. During this time she realizes that she needs more coffee and drinks a third pot. She does not know what happened to the woman in the dumpster and will never find out. She googles homicides and deaths in her neighborhood, but finds no news.

At work, she watches the door more closely today, as if the dead woman from her dumpster would be wheeled into the emergency room. She doesn’t draw, she doesn’t write, she doesn’t think of the must watch movie list, she only watches the doors, but never sees any signs of the woman in the dumpster. After work she visits Ramona but is absent, unfocused, thinking instead of the woman with the clean hair who died and was dumped in her alley last night. Ramona notices maybe that she isn’t fully there, but, in kindness, says nothing about it. Ramona seems absent, too, tired maybe, but holds her hand during their visit, then tells her to watch Boys Don’t Cry tonight.

When Ramona died that night, she couldn’t cry. She brought sunflowers to the funeral and stared into their seeded faces while she tossed dirt on their stems. She spent two weeks at home, her bereavement leave, but she did nothing throughout the days. She didn’t turn on the tv for fear of acknowledging the movies she hadn’t had time to watch, and she slept through breakfast too often to watch the woman across the alley. She thought sometimes that she could hear the sleuth of the plastic Wonder Bread bag and the pecking of the pigeons, but she dreamed it mostly. She dreamed long and lasting dreams of Ramona at the park, Ramona reading in the library, Ramona sipping coffee, Ramona sitting on the fire escape with the woman across the alley.

When she was awake, which was not often, she sat on the back porch, not in the chair but on the wooden porch floor and sipped wine straight from the bottle until she needed to crawl back inside. She sat, pantsless often, and sipped the wine until she was drunk then scraped her bare legs on the aged wooden boards. She weeps finally on a night she doesn’t quite reach the back door before she vomits. She vomits violent, blood colored mucus and flem, she hasn’t eaten today she thinks, and it burns, burns its way through her body so strongly that she worries it might burn through the wooden porch. And it is here that she weeps in the fetal position on the back porch late at night, letting the imagined flames cover her. Weeps until she feels drowned and shaken and exhausted. She drags the pieces of herself, whatever hasn’t melted back into the earth, to the door and pulls the puddle of her ashes inside.

She lounges across the red sofa chair, television silenced. Feet, ankles, calves dangle over the armrest and her neck cranes near-broken opposite. Then she hears a knock on the door. A short sharp rap, and notices the tears running down her cheeks, neck, to her chest that is soaked in both tears and wine vomit. She rises from the sofa softly, slowly, meticulously, one foot dragged before the other and makes her way to the door, uncaring that she is only half-dressed. In the doorframe is Nancy, the woman across the alley, holding a combination of gifts that do not cement themselves in her vision.

“I was worried about you,” the woman starts, “I haven’t seen you on the porch.” With this the woman graciously ignores her vomit soaked t-shirt and tear-stained eyes to point casually beyond her at the back door over her left shoulder.

“I’m sorry -“

“Sorry, I don’t mean to be,” the woman pauses, unable to finish the sentence, then restarts. “I brought you three grapefruits, and half a dozen eggs.” She holds up the gifts that seemed vague unshaped offerings before, and now are three round orange orbs and a half cardboard carton of eggs in a plastic Jewel-Osco bags.

“I -“

“It’s okay, I can just leave them -“

“Would you come inside?” She opens the door wider and a loose tear makes its way down her cheek. She rubs it away harshly before it can reach her chin.

The woman does come inside, and she sets the Jewel-Osco gift on the kitchen counter.

“I’m Marissa.” The woman starts to hold out a hand to shake, but stops for some reason. “I’m sorry, it’s rude I guess, but I watch you almost every morning while I feed the pigeons outside.“ Marissa gestures to the window, to the alley outside, “and noticed you eat breakfast every morning, but not for weeks, so I thought maybe -“

Marissa stops, not sure of what she thought.

“My friend died.” She offers as an explanation, even though it feels too light and too heavy all at once.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Marissa tries.

“Do you wanna watch a movie with me, maybe?” She shrugs, realizes her arms are wrapped around her torso like a wretched, broken hug. “You don’t have to,” she looks down at her bare feet, dirty, and her legs, unshaven and scraped. She is feral, she thinks.

“Sure.” Marissa pulls her gaze back up to eye contact.

They watch the first Adam Sandler movie on Ramona’s list, Waterboy, and she laughs. Whole-bodied if not whole-hearted, a placebo laugh. And her tears don’t burn quite so hot. And in the morning she wakes up to Marissa asleep on the red sofa couch, and she makes both of them grapefruit and a hard boiled egg.

“I’m sorry.” She sits beside Marissa on the back porch.

“For what?”

“I don’t have any bread.”

And the two of them watch as the pigeons land confusedly on the garage roof across the alley. And wait.

– Taylor Croteau