The weather is awful, has been for days. Constant rain has caused the main road into the valley to subside and prevent Bill from getting here. When the sun appears over the hills in front of me, it will hopefully shine down on a brand new crop. There is no-one in the Tech Barn anyway, Ricky never made it back. Volcanic ash on the other side of the world still plays havoc with air routes. I can’t get inside the white barn. WEErd Wonders have changed the access codes without telling me. Drones come in to land and are whisked inside on the conveyor belt where their samples are analysed and their sprays are modified with the latest nano-technology weapons to fight other nano-technology weapons. Bill let slip that if the trial is a success they are thinking about introducing animal genes into the new crop, giving the ability to move about and source their own food. That’ll give the protesters something else to worry about, I think, watching as a drone slows to land. A beam of light winks in my direction, scanning me, recognising that I’m not a threat, for now.
The rain drums on my hood. I hate the rain, which might be why my hands have turned to fists on either side of me, or it’s because I feel useless, even more removed from the land that has been in my family for generations. The steward of nothing, or things so small you can’t even see them. But you can still see the sun as it starts to peek over the tops of rolling hills, heralding a new day, a new dawn in more ways than one.
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Children’s author, short story writer and poet, Ian Hunter was born in Edinburgh but lives closer to Glasgow these days and is a member of the Glasgow Science Fiction Writers Circle, poetry editor for the British Fantasy Society and book reviewer for Interzone, Concatenation and Shoreline of Infinity.
Pigeon
Guy Stewart
July 12, 1895
Mother said that a long time ago when she was a girl, they ate pigeon every day, sometimes for days and days at a time. But when she was a girl, pigeon didn’t make you vomit until you brought up only blood. When I asked her if they sounded nicer when she was a girl, she said, “No, they’ve always sounded like a rusty mill wheel pump in a dust storm.”
July 14, 1895
Mother is worried. The store in town said that they’re out of shotgun shells.
Pa and Danforth, my oldest brother, spent the afternoon casting lead ball shot and packing Grandpa’s old musket.
This morning, a family came through town in a prairie schooner. Mother covered my eyes as she dragged me away but I saw before she could get her hands over them. The wagon cover was shredded and there were dead people in it. It didn’t look like they had any eyes, neither. She took me and Dennis, Dorothy, and Debra into the tornado shelter. Mother cried about the end of the world until Pa came down and held on to her tight. Danforth didn’t even say anything nasty to me when I held Mother’s hand, too.
After we got back to work, he came up to me and asked if I wanted to know what was really going on.
“Why you wanna tell me?” I asked.
“’Cuz you’re always readin’ them crazy books.”
His idea of crazy books are Jules Verne’s From Earth to the Moon, and HG Wells’ The Time Machine. I shrugged, expecting him to start in on me again. Ever since he stopped schoolin’ and started working with Pa, he’s acting like he’s all better than the rest of us. But I’ve seen the look on his face lately, like when the pigeons in the sky are worse than a tornado. When they all land and eat the ground bare and there’s nothing we can do because their feathers and skin are poison, and the meat makes you vomit blood…
Danforth said, “I been hearin’ things in town.”
“What kind of things?” I scowled, crossed my arms over my chest—which had gotten bigger lately.
He shrugged. “Fine then, if you don’t want to know.” He turned and headed out of the house. Mother was busy with cleaning up after dinner.
I hated myself for it, but I ran after him and blurted, “What have you heard?”
He turned and leaned toward me, “You know that crazy Wells book you were so moony over last summer?”
“The Time Machine? ”
“That’s the one. I heard in town that it’s real. In St. Paul.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
He shrugged, “Someone said that someone said that even though it didn’t look like the illustration in your book, there’s a time traveler there who talked to the governor for days and days, then disappeared.”
“The picture you saw was from a children’s book!”
He grunted, “Anyway, they said they heard that someone heard that the time traveler wanted to know everything about the birds, only he called ‘em ‘passenger pigeons’.”
“What are those? Pigeons are pigeons.”
Danforth shrugged and went back to work. Mother called me to help her wash dishes.
July 19, 1895
I’ve been thinking about what a time traveler could possibly want with pigeons. They’re monsters. Preachers ’round these parts think that they’re a curse placed on mankind. I heard one said it was “for the hubris of thinking he was better than nature.” When I was doing dishes I asked Pa about pigeons eating people. Pa says that the pigeons don’t eat human meat—’cept for the eyes. Mother hushed him up real fast and asked me if I’d heard what he said. I turned around and said, “What?”
Mother managed a pained smile and a glance at Pa that would have peeled paint from the outhouse—if there’d been any paint left on it.
Later that day, a pigeon flock passed over our town and it was dark enough to have to light the lanterns. The sound was horrible and we could hear the birds relieve themselves on our house and the ground outside. Their relief was poison to the ground.
Mother shouted at the roof as if she was trying to scare them away. She scared the littles so much, I finally had to hold the youngest and let the others lean on me.
It took fifteen hours for the flock to pass. Mother said, “Our time is over and this is the end of humanity. We will die surrounded by meat we can’t eat any more; they’ve eaten the food we’ve grown; our waters have been poisoned by pigeons that drop a deadly rain as they pass over us…”
Pa said nothing, but hung his head. Danforth and me looked at each other until finally he couldn’t hold my eyes no more and looked away. He looked so much like Pa, it made my heart clench tight.
Time passed, and the deafening shriek of the passing flock faded into complete silence. Even so, no one moved. Didn’t seem like it was worth it. Whatever we’d had yesterday was gone now. Seemed like given time, pigeons would rule the world and humanity would be extinct.
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Guy Stewart has lived in the state of Minnesota in the US since birth; been to Nigeria, Cameroon, Liberia, Haiti, Canada, Britain, and Belgium; been writing the whole time. He’s also a husband, father, father-in-law, foster father, and grandfather and has been a science teacher for 35 years.
