The Birds and the Bag Lady

They're walking down the sidewalk and decide to take the shortcut through the park. Halfway through, they come across a riot of birds, pathway-wide, roosting on the bushes beside and the branches above. She hesitates for a moment and he remembers her odd, yet endearing, fear of feathers.

He makes a run at them and some of them disperse but these are city-park birds - they'll make a mess of your umbrella and your hat, but apart from that, they really don't give a shit. He makes a spectacle of himself, kicking his feet and flailing his arms, but outside the circumference of his reach they just go on pecking at the unusually delicious crumbs left by the strange bag lady - the rich one who lost her home in the divorce; the stubborn one who refused to use her millions in settlement cash to buy another house (arguing that no house will ever be home again), choosing instead to stay at a hotel penthouse; the philanthropic one who buys pretzel-croissants, made to order, on Tuesday mornings from the city's best cafe; the lonely one who spreads them in the park all afternoon, whispering her husband's name under her breath, sometimes longing, sometimes mad.

He's still working on the birds when he feels a tap on his shoulder. At first he thinks that he's just been shat upon but when he turns his head to check, he sees her smiling face - a timid, uncomfortable smile burdened by the weight of her phobia. Her eyes pinball between face and fowl. He holds her close and tells her to close her eyes.

"I can hear their wings," she says, calm but nervous.

"No," he says, "those aren't birds, they're old, manual typewriters - Remington, Royal, and Underwood machines -spewing out stories all by themselves."

As he's telling her these things, the birds jump and scatter as Olympias and Smith-Coronas appear beneath them, pages filled top to bottom with text spilling out over their carriages. After the last bird has flown, he tells her to open her eyes and when she does she finds the pathway white with paper. He picks a few of them up and walks her through the park, reading letters from the bag lady to her husband - some of them longing, all of them sad.