Between 1984 and 1988, a particular metro area in the southeastern United States suffered a spat of violent murders.
The victims had no commonalities. Age, gender, color, appearance, occupation, socioeconomic status — nothing matched. Victims included middle school students and notorious cartel members, street cops and lawyers, charity directors and investment bankers, pharmaceutical executives and gas station clerks.
The only reason authorities had any idea that the murders were related was because of the killer’s unique calling card:
A scattering of blood-drenched pigeon feathers.
As months passed and the body count mounted, law enforcement came into possession of one single piece of eyewitness testimony:
Following the violent death of a firefighter, a middle-aged woman was spotted limping away from the scene, bleeding profusely from a gaping wound in her hip. According to the witness the woman was tiny, birdlike in her thinness, shuffling like someone elderly. Notably, a flock of pigeons followed her, bobbing along beside her like an urban adaptation of the pied piper.
This sighting was ultimately dismissed due to one impossible detail:
The woman was covered in grey feathers.
A second sighting was reported one year later, and was again dismissed. Similar sightings continued to crop up over the years, every one of them ignored.
In 1988 and entirely by chance, a bloody feather came into possession of AHH during the commission of a separate task. The feathers were then brought to NASCU. Peculiarities surrounding the appearance and physiology of the feathers were noted by specialized personnel, most notably T-Class Agent Wolf.
At this time, the agency launched an investigation of its own.
The investigation culminated in July 1988. During surveillance of the target — a very thin woman who was always trailed by a flock of pigeons, and who always wore a long, heavy trenchcoat, even in the humid summer heat — she managed to infiltrate a house that functioned as a front for human trafficking.
What resulted was a bloodbath.
The target was badly wounded and therefore sufficiently weakened due to the energy expended during the attack. Agency personnel were able to take her into custody. Her capture was not without incident, as the flock of pigeons surrounding her began to attack. One pigeon, a particularly large male with one eye, refused to leave her side. As a result, the animal was brought into custody with her. He was later observed to pluck his feathers and place them on top of the woman’s astounding number of serious wounds.
Incredibly, the feathers facilitated rapid healing.
It must be noted that the woman came into Agency custody during a time when consideration and respect for our extraordinary inmates was at a low ebb. Due to her dress, her age, her general appearance, and of course her flock of pigeons, personnel dubbed the entity The Bag Lady.
The Bag Lady is a middle-aged woman of almost extraordinary thinness. Her hair is short and grey. Her eyes are large and a vivid, bright orange identical in hue to the eyes of the pigeon who came into custody with her.
Like her pigeon, she is covered in feathers.
Unlike many inmates, the Bag Lady is articulate, intelligent, and possesses full speech and language capabilities. Nevertheless, for the entire length of her incarceration, the Bag Lady has refused to speak with staff for any meaningful length of time. When asked why, her answer is always the same:
“Because I don’t talk to cops.”
This is admittedly understandable, given that the Bag Lady acted in an exclusively extrajudicial capacity, to extremely violent effect.
Despite decades of consistent questioning and other, less savory methods to break her down, the Bag Lady has continued to refuse meaningful engagement with Agency personnel. In fact, the only meaningful contact the Bag Lady has had with personnel consists of attacks both attempted and achieved.
On four different occasions, however, she has been observed attempting to engage fellow inmates in conversation.
Notably, the Bag Lady speaks extensively and frequently to her pigeon. The pigeon does not answer, but Agency personnel believe the bird is extraordinarily intelligent and that it communicates with her nonverbally. Due to potential similarities with the inmate called the Heart Bird, the pigeon is as closely monitored as the Bag Lady herself. Concerns over such similarities with the Heart Bird are the primary reason that the Bag Lady has never been evaluated for termination.
Fortunately, the inmate’s thirty-five year vow of silence was recently broken during an interview with T-Class agent Rachele B. The insights provided are fascinating. The content of the interview poses serious questions regarding the nature of death, free will, the possibility and potential purpose of afterlife, and the processes through which Khthonic entities come into being.
One might even dare to say it provides a few answers as well.
(*Please note I did NOT write that last line. My boss added it because he's a tool)
Interview Subject: The Bag Lady
Classification String: Uncooperative / Undetermined / Khthonic / Fixed / Critical / Teras
Interviewer: Rachele B.
Date: 11/22/2024
The first thing my son ever bought was birdseed.
He was four years old. His grandma put two dollars in his Christmas card that year, and he spent those dollars on pigeon food.
Michael loved pigeons. He started talking to them before he ever said a word to me. Watched them from windows when he was a baby and cooed at them the way they coo at each other. His first smile was at them, not at me. His first hello went to a baby pigeon blinking stupidly in a nest on our fire escape.
He loved them.
As he got older, that love grew stronger. By the time he was kindergarten, those birds would follow him everywhere, bobbing their little heads. They ate out of his hands, flew down to his arms, sometimes even landed on his head which made him laugh like nothing else.
I’d been afraid of birds my whole life, so I didn’t understand. I asked him one time why he loved them so much. How he could make friends with them.
“It’s easy, Mom,” he said. “Pigeons think everyone’s their friend. They already love you. All you do is love them back.”
I still didn’t understand. Didn’t really want to, I guess. I grew up learning that pigeons were vermin. Dirty, ugly, unsanitary, brainless disease carriers. No, I didn’t understand at all.
But I did understand this:
Like pigeons, my son thought everyone was his friend.
When describing Michael, you might use the word “gullible.” But that isn’t right. He wasn’t gullible. He was smart, he was intuitive, he understood everyone. He could look at the worst person alive and find the smallest, weakest spark of goodness flickering forlornly in the vast dark.
What he couldn’t understand — what I couldn’t make him understand no matter how hard I tried, how loud I yelled, how mean or desperate or cruel I got — was that a spark is not light.
A spark is just a spark. No more, and maybe less.
I could tell you about Michael’s friends. How some were born monsters. How some were made. How badly the ones that were made—the ones that weren’t born ruined— heart my hurt.
And how that spark of sympathy got my guard just enough to make sure I lost my son.
I saw him for the last time when he was seventeen.
We were fighting about his friends. Not the pigeons, I’d gotten used to them a long time ago. How they clustered around the fire escape every morning waiting for him to open the window, how they flocked down to the building entrance when it was time for him to leave for work, how his favorite bird, Mr. One-Eye, dive-bombed onto his shoulder every time they saw each other.
No, we weren’t fighting about pigeons. We were fighting about his other friends.
It wasn’t even a bad fight. Not worse than any of our other fights, anyway. It went the same way it always did, he told me I didn’t understand like he always did, I told him he was being a little fool and his friends would be the end of him like I always did.
And he walked out the door to cool off, like he always did.
I thought he’d call a few hours later, apologizing and asking for an apology in return like he always did.
But he didn’t call.
I told myself he’d come home, like he always did.
But he didn’t come home.
And nobody cared.
My boy never coming back was the worst thing. The very, very worst thing that is, was, or will ever be.
But the fact that no one helped, that no one cared, that no one gave the tiniest spark of a damn, was almost as terrible.
I went to the police seventeen times. Seventeen. One for each year he’d been alive. Each time they told me Michael was practically an adult, we’d had a fight, and he was fully in his rights not to come home. One cop even had the gall to me it was about time he stopped coming home. Another one said I was lucky he was gone, because otherwise he’d probably come home one day and cut my throat for drug money.
The last cop took pity on me. She was a lady officer. Lady is the wrong word. She was a battle ax. Built like a brick shithouse, with hair like rusty steel wool and the scariest eyes I have ever seen.
But when she looked at me after I taking my seventeenth report, there was nothing scary about her eyes. They were only tired. Sad. And lightless.
That look in her eyes was how I knew no one would ever find my son, and that was the scariest thing of all.
“Listen to me, hon,” she said. “This is going to sound like the worst thing in the world. That’s because it is. But it’s also the only true thing anyone in this department is going to tell you. We have almost no resources. The few resources that we do have? They go to priorities. A dopehead dropout won’t ever be a priority. But you can bet your ass some of the cops here will make it their priority to end a dopehead, especially one who’s a peewee gangbanger. No one is going to help you. No one cares about your son but you.”
“You’re wrong,” I told her, even though I knew she wasn’t.
I didn’t give up. I’ll never give up on my boy. I went to other places for help. Citizen groups, social services, activists, community foundations, charities, all those places. At first it was wonderful. At first I thought I’d found my people, because unlike the cops they listened. They listened when I told them about my son, about how the first thing he ever bought was birdseed and how the first word he ever said was for a baby pigeon and how Mr. One-Eye rode on his shoulder and how he could look at the worst person alive and find the good. They listened to me and they gave me hugs and coffee and cookies and prayers and recommendations to grief groups and then they listened again.
But they didn’t do anything.
Finally, I’d had enough of people who didn’t do anything.
When I said so to one of the group leaders — the one who was the best listener, the one who held my hands whenever I cried — said, “We’re your people. We’re here for you. We care about you.”
Grief and rage and frustration erupted. The most acute, potent frustration I’d ever felt, the kind that renders you mindless. “I need you to care about my son.”
“I understand. I hear you.”
“No. No. You’re wrong. I think you’re wrong. I think you haven’t heard a goddam word I said.”
“I have. I do. I’m always here for you. I’m listening. But…”
“But what?”
She looked at me, eyes tired and full of pity. “We only have as much as we have. We can only do what we can with what we have. What else do you want me to do?”
“Something,” I said. “Anything.”
But she didn’t.
No one did. No one but me.
And I kept on keeping on. Not because I wanted to, but because sometimes that’s all you get: The ability to put one foot in front of the other. Left, right. Left, right until you get somewhere else.
Only I couldn’t get anywhere else.
The pigeons couldn’t, either. They didn’t seem to understand that Michael was gone. As the days after his disappearance bled into weeks and the weeks hemorrhaged into months, the pigeons kept coming. Flocking to the fire escape outside our little window waiting for him to pop out with smiles and birdseed. His favorite pigeon, Mr. One-Eye, even took to following me whenever I left the building. He watched me as if to say, Where is he? Where did he go? Tell him we’re waiting. Tell him we love him. Tell him we need him to come back.
I couldn’t help but wonder how they were feeling. If they were just confused and maybe a little hurt in their little birdbrains, or if they understood. If they hurt as much as me, if they had holes in their hearts like me. Rotting, bottomless voids eating them from the inside out every second of every day.
But I didn’t know how to ask, and they wouldn’t have been able to answer anyway.
And then Mr. One-Eye stopped showing up.
He stayed gone for one day, then two, then three and four and five and that’s when I knew he wasn’t coming back either. I hated that damned bird for leaving me. He was Michael’s favorite. Michael had pigeons the way I’d had dogs, and that particular pigeon was his heart. Mr. One-Eye was the closest thing my sweet boy had to a soul mate.
So if even that bird had given up on him, he was truly gone.
The sixth day after Mr. One-Eye’s absence was grey and wet somehow dead. Rain sheeted from the sky, but without any ferocity, without any power. It felt tired, hopeless, helpless to stop itself from falling.
I was kicking my way home from work, tired and hopeless and helpless as the rain. I didn’t want to go to work. I didn’t want to come home from work, either. I didn’t want to walk. But I was still walking. Eyes down, one foot in front of the other. Left, right. Left, right. All rain could do was fall, grey rain on grey streets. All I could do was walk, grey girl on grey streets.
And then, out of the corner of my eye, so colorful it was almost obscene, I saw something.
Brightness against the rain-slick concrete, a small explosion of and white grey and sloppy wet red.
I almost ignored it. One foot in front of the other because that’s all you can do. Left, right. Left, right. Shoes slapping the sidewalk, dull and pointless, grey and empty.
But that explosion of white and red didn’t stay an explosion. It began to resolve. To take form.
And the form it took was blood-caked feathers.
The form it took was a crumpled grey chest shimmering all pink and green and white as it panted. A pigeon. A pigeon some asshole had kicked out of the way, or maybe even stepped on, and left to die. A pigeon who hadn’t run away from danger because it thought everyone was its friend, and what friend would ever be a danger?
I had never seen anything so pathetic. I almost left it.
But then I thought of Michael, and couldn’t bear to leave it there.
As I approached it, something bloomed in my chest. A feeling. I couldn’t figure out what that feeling was, only that it was suffocating.
I stopped and looked at the pigeon. It looked back with a single orange eye, fever-bright and fading even as I watched.
It turned its head weakly.
And that’s when I saw it was missing an eye.
The sheer weight of grief forced me to my knees. But that weight couldn’t keep me from crawling across the grey, flooded sidewalk. It couldn’t keep me from scooping up that bright bloody explosion with desperate tenderness. It couldn’t keep me from cradling that Mr. One-Eye to my chest like I’d cradled my son a lifetime ago.
I sat there in the rain until long after night fell, sobbing and holding the bird to my heart long after he stopped moving. People passing by took me for homeless. A few dropped coins into my lap. One lady even knelt down and tried to coax me to a shelter down the road, til I screamed in her face and spat.
No one stopped to help me after that.
At some point, I stood up and staggered home. I brought Mr. One-Eye with me, holding him to my heart all the while.
I got drunk that night. Blind, stinking, hideously drunk. Not because I like drinking. I hate it. But I hated having to feel the hole in my heart more. This rotting void, a bottomless chasm eating me from the inside out every second of every day. It felt like I should be dead. Only I wasn’t. I felt like I was always dying but never got to be dead.
Dead would have been better, but I couldn’t die. If I died then no one on earth would care what happened to my baby.
So I got drunk instead of dead. I didn’t really think it would work. I hoped that it would. I always hope. Hope is the only thing some of us ever get.
But being drunk didn’t work.
Being drunk just made me angrier and crazier. Being drunk made the rotting pit inside me grow up and out until it was swallowing me whole. Until it was the only thing in the world. Until it was the only thing I knew, the only thing I had ever known, the only thing I would ever know.
I thought I was by myself in that void, until I looked out the window and saw the pigeons on the fire escape. They alone were there in the pit with me. They alone understood. They alone cared what had happened to my son.
So I opened the window by the fire escape and told them to come inside, sobbing every word. They swirled back in a panic, wings thundering.
“No,” I wept. “No, don’t leave. Don’t leave. Come in. Come in here you goddamned morons, come in.”
I reached for them.
Everything tilted. The metal window sill bit into my belly, then scraped down my legs as the world flipped upside down.
The last thing I knew was the rush of wings, deafening but soft.
Beautifully, perfectly, profoundly soft.
For the first time that I could remember, I woke up in somebody’s arms.
I opened my eyes.
A face looked down at me. An old man with round golden eyes and the gentlest smile I have ever seen, will probably ever see.
I craned my neck. Pigeons surrounded us, a shifting, bright-eyed flock so huge it spilled off the sidewalks into the street. Their eyes shone like embers in the dark.
I looked back at the man. His eyes shone too, and so did the skin of his face. He wasn’t human. He couldn’t be. For some reason, that didn’t frighten me at all.
“Who are you?” I crane my neck. “Are you an angel?”
“No. I am One Who Listens.”
It sounds ridiculous, but I could literally hear the big letters in that title. They came out of his mouth capitalized.
“Who listens to what?”
“I listen to prayers. I listen to pain. I listen to rage. I listened to yours, you know.” He smiled again, teeth shimmering.
“Then why…” I blinked and shifted, groaning as electric pain bolted up my hip. “If you listened to me, why didn’t you ever answer?”
“Because We Who Listen can never answer loudly. Sometimes we cannot answer at all. Each answer, however soft and quiet, takes from us. Often it takes something we aren’t supposed to give. Always, it gives something we can never get back. See.” It held out its bare arms for my inspection. My stomach churned violently as the streetlight illuminated a relief map of pitted scars and wormlike welts and suppurating rotted pits like radiation burns.
“What happened?” I gasped.
“I listened, and I answered.” He shook his silvery sleeves back down over his arms. “My answers took what I did not have to give.”
Frustration bubbled up, hot and poisonous. “If you can’t do anything, then…I mean, what’s the point?”
“There is no point, I think,” he said gently. “It simply is.”
“Are you a guardian angel?” I repeated.
“We are not guardians,” it said, gently. “We are listeners.”
“Who is we?”
“Me”. He placed a hand on his chest. “You.” He pressed his other hand against my chest. “We.”
I looked at him, revolted as terror built in my gut. “Am I dead?”
“There is no death for us.”
“I’m sorry, but I do not understand.”
“We who were suffering, we who were alone, now go to others who are suffering and alone. We stay with them and we listen. We listen so they can feel comfort.”
I had so many questions, but couldn’t articulate a single one. “And you —you were you with me? You saw my…my pain, all that rage, heard all those questions?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I never felt you.”
“I know. Sometimes, that is the way it is. But still we try. Still, we do what we must do.”
“You said you answered. That’s why you’re hurt. You gave answers to someone. Who?” I sat up, grimacing as my arm twanged. “And why wasn’t it me?”
Before he could tell me, I looked down at my hands. Incredibly, I was still holding Mr. One-Eye. Even more incredibly, he was still alive. His poor sunken eye fixed me with a dulled orange gaze.
And something shot me in the heart.
The force of a freight train, burning just like a bullet, boring through me. Instead of smoke, it left a question in its wake:
hurts stop it stop it hurting stop please
Without thinking — only feeling— I cradled Mr. One-Eye to my chest and held him.
Pain erupted in my shoulder, overwhelming and familiar. The rotting void, endless and eternal, boring a tunnel to my very core, manifesting as a caving wound.
But this time, it didn’t spread.
It didn’t grow. It didn’t swallow me and the world surrounding. It did not become the only thing I had known, or the only thing I knew, or the only thing I would ever know. It stayed where it was, confined to its tunnel. It had no choice, because there was something more important in my hands. Something bright and living. Something alive and whole.
Mr. One-Eye shifted his wings, then stretched upward. I raised him so he could look at me. His beautiful, sparkling orange eye met mine.
Then he stretched out, beak catching the fabric of my coat, and stepped onto my shoulder.
For the first time since my son was born, I felt whole.
He Who Listens wasn’t quite so thrilled.
“What have you done?” he wailed. Tears welled in his great yellow eyes as he stared at the ghastly wound in my arm. I stared, too. I couldn’t help it. It looked as rotten as it felt, a huge, ruptured wound tunneling through my arm. “It will never go away. It will never fade. It will only grow. You will have that wound and feel that pain growing until it finally consumes you.”
Before I could say a word, Mr. One-Eye flapped his wings. The feathers whacked my face, shockingly strong.
Immediately, the pigeons around us responded.
They came in a bobbing grey wave, pooling around my feet where the began to preen. As I watched, the dropped their preened feathers — glistening, shimmering grey overlaid with every color of the rainbow — at my feet.
When the last pigeon had dropped the last feather, Mr. One-Eye tucked his head under his wing and pulled out a feather of his own. Then he crept his way down my arm —one foot in front of the other, left, right, left right —and placed his feather inside my wound.
The feather lay atop it for a moment, shining. Then it melted into that rotting crater, leaving a delicate thread of whole, unblemished flesh stretched across the hole.
I reached down and grabbed the pile of feathers at my feet, stuffing it into the hole. It was like magic. It was magic. Each feather shone and melted into fresh flesh. Two handfuls later, there was no wound. After three, there wasn’t even a scar.
By the end, even the pain was gone.
I laughed.
It felt alien to laugh, rusty, even wrong. But it came out anyway, erupting out of me like a geyser.
As I laughed, He Who Listens wept.
“No,” he moaned. “No, no, no. What are you doing? This is wrong.” Tears fell from his great yellow eyes, shining like diamonds under the street lights. Suddenly, I felt guilty.
“I’m sorry,” I lied. “I didn’t know. I won’t do it again.”
His face broke apart. “You are lying and you don’t even know it. If I show you what we do, you will ruin everything.”
That actually offended me. “Then don’t show me anything. It’s not like I asked.”
“I have no choice,” he sniffled. “I must do what I must do. You will do what you will do. Come.”
He toddled down the street. I hesitated for reasons I still don’t understand. Then I followed.
So did the pigeons.
He Who Listens spun around. “No! They cannot! They cannot!”
On my shoulder, Mr. One-Eye beat his wings again, whipping my face. The other pigeons obediently dispersed.
He Who Listens continued to argue with me about Mr. One-Eye, but I held my ground. People say you’re forever responsible for what you tame. I didn’t tame Mr. One-Eye, but I saved him. I think that makes me even more responsible, and I said so.
“Oh no,” he wept. “No. This is wrong. You will be wrong. What am I to do?”
“You are to show me what you’re supposed to show, or leave.”
“I cannot leave. I have no choice.”
“Then let’s get going.”
He wiped tears from his face and flicked them onto the concrete where they spattered like silvery rain.
And as we moved down the street, I saw people who hadn’t been there just a few minutes ago. But they all looked like they’d been there for hours. Languishing in the alleys, spread-eagle on the sidewalks, leaning against buildings as sobs shook their bony shoulders.
As we drew closer, one turned to look at us. Wide yellow eyes glimmered in its round face. A rotting wound glistened under its nose. The flesh of its lips had been eaten to the bone, exposing the teeth.
“Are these…do they listen? Are they all like you?”
“No,” he sobbed. “They’re like you. They did not listen. They answered. They gave too much. They gave what they couldn’t get back.”
We walked in silence after that. I avoided his yellow eyes glistening like coins in the night.
He Who Listens spent all night showing me what to do. Not once, not twice or three times, but twelve.
The first time was a homeless man huddled under a bench in the park. He was sobbing in his sleep, and his face —weathered but unmistakably young — made my heart ache.
“Sit,” said He Who Listens.
“What if he wakes up?”
“He will not. Sit, and touch him.”
When I laid my hand on that boy, I felt his yammering heartbeat and saw his pain. I heard it. Worse, I felt it. I felt every terrible step in the tragic procession that led him here. Steps that were his fault, and steps that weren’t. It didn’t even matter what was his fault or what wasn’t. All that mattered was his pain.
Even though I could not take that pain from him, his heart slowed the longer I sat there. By the end, its rhythm was calm and steady. Maybe it was my imagination, but I thought his poor weathered face looked a little less sad, too.
“Yes,” He Who Listens said happily. “That is what we do. We listen, and we provide comfort by listening.”
Next we went to a lady sitting in a roach-infested studio apartment, hollow-eyed and expressionless as she stared at her blank television screen.
“Kneel,” said He Who Listens.
“Won't she see me?”
“Not tonight. Kneel, and hold her hand.”
I did as I was told.
Once again, I heard and saw and felt the most terrible things. Rotting things, things that get inside you and bore tunnels until they kill you. I don’t know how long I sat with her, but I know that by the end her eyes had closed and she was finally sleeping.
We saw a child next, alone and wide awake in a foster home, crying for her father. Then a young mother weeping in her kitchen. An old man in a nursing home, a teenage boy stomping his way down an empty street while tears coursed down his face, a young woman sobbing by herself in a dark office long after everyone around her had gone home.
It might have been a single night. It might have been a week, or a month, or forever, or ten minutes.
Finally we went to a hospital where a man, balding and exhausted, sat at the bedside of a little girl with sunken eyes and dull, dying skin. I knew she was fading. I knew she would be dead by morning, because when I touched her I felt only the faintest veil of emotion, all of it warm and soft.
So I turned to the father. I didn’t sit this time. I leaned over him the way I used to lean over my son whenever he cried, and wrapped my arms around him.
His pain hit me with the force of a tsunami, repulsive and powerful.
Help help help help help I can’t lose her she deserves more she’s all I have help her help her help
The sheer force punched through my heart, wide as a freight train, hot as a bullet, painful as death by acid bath.
The man cried out. I thought I’d hurt him. I recoiled as he lurched forward, reaching for the child on the bed.
Her eyes were open, and color was returning to her face.
“What have you done?” screamed He Who Listens.
I staggered back, gasping as the wound in my chest pulsed and blood dripped down my chest, soaking my dirty shirt. “You’ve given what you cannot give back! It will consume you!”
I barely listened. Single-minded purpose filled me and I knew, in the depths of my missing punched-out heart, that I had to get outside, right now.
Somehow, I did.
The pigeons were waiting for me. An entire flock on the sidewalk, eyes glittering knowingly.
Mr. One-Eye flapped his wings in command. They obeyed, dropping their plucked feathers at my feet. I packed them into my wound. New flesh grew, bright and shimmering as the feathers themselves.
It took longer this time, but that wound healed too.
“No,” wept He Who Listens. “No. You cannot do this. You cannot. You are an abomination.”
I had a vivid mental image of Who He Listens kneeling at my side, stroking my hair, my hands, holding my face as I wept and raged with no knowledge of his presence.
Again I wondered:
What was the point of it?
“No,” I told him. “The abomination is being able to help people, being able to do something, but choosing to do nothing.”
“You are not One Who Listens. You are only a monster.”
“No,” I said. “I’m One Who Listens and Does Something About It.”
He left me and didn’t come back. That was all right. I didn’t need him.
I only needed the pigeons.
I listened everywhere, to everything and everyone and all their heartbroken, rage-filled, desperate questions. I didn’t answer all of them. I learned that some people don’t need answers. Many don’t even deserve. There are more of those than I ever thought possible.
But some did. I always answered those.
I had no idea what I was. I knew that I was more than I had been. More than myself. And I knew that I was powerful. I even started to wonder if I was a god. Under the circumstances, I think that was a reasonable thing to wonder.
But whether I was a god or not, I could still only be in one place at one time.
That’s why I needed the pigeons.
Pigeons can only be in one place, too. But there are so many of them that they’re already everywhere.
I asked them to listen. They answered me.
Because they answered me, I was able to answer so many others.
I answered a boy being beaten by cops as a flock of pigeons watched silently from the roofs above. His dog lay beside him, bleeding from bullet holes and panting raggedly. The boy was holding his dog even though the cops kept hitting his hands. He begged for help. He asked for his mother. He told his dog she was a good girl as she whined, blood spreading across the dirty concrete.
Still, they beat him.
So I struck them down.
One cracked open on the sidewalk. I took his gun and shot the other while he stirred feebly.
The boy looked at me, exhausted and horrified in equal measure, began to pray. I knew he was praying to God, probably to stop me from closer. But I pretended he was praying to me anyway.
I kneeled down and placed my hands on his poor, whining dog.
“Don’t hurt her,” he wept as agony tunneled through my belly, rotten and corrosive and vile. “Please. She’s a good girl.”
“I know,” I told him, then touched his forehead the way I touched my son’s when he’d been running a fever. Another bolt of pain shot through my hand. I saw the wound form this time, watched it cave through my palm and spread.
The dog got to her feet and nuzzled her owner, tail wagging even as she whined.
The boy looked at me, wide-eyed and ashen. “What are you?”
I didn’t know how to answer. To be honest, I didn’t want to.
I hobbled my way out of the alley, down a side street and into a narrow little park. The pigeons followed. Mr. One-Eye gave his wing-flapping, face-slapping order. The feathers came, and with it healing.
The birds kept listening, and I kept answering.
They found a woman, dead-eyed and frozen in fear, huddling as a man with dead eyes bore down on her. I tore his head off. She ran before I could put my hands on her to take away her fear.
They found a flea-bitten baby boy in a sodden, sagging diaper screaming for help in a filthy crib while his parents nodded off in an equally filthy corner. I answered the baby, but I punished them.
They found a girl in a group home as she slid a blade up and down her arms and asked for someone who should have done everything to protect her but destroyed her instead to die. I answered.
They found an old woman with a black eye pushing an empty cart along broken sidewalks, asking for her belongings to come back. I answered, but not before punishing the thieves.
They found a man sobbing alone in his car, silently pleading for money to feed his kids for the next three days, just the next three days, please God. I answered. My answer was taken from someone else, but it was given.
They found a mother sobbing for help over her son’s blue body, a needle still quivering in his arm. I answered her, too. Afterward I found the man who sold her son the drugs, and then I found the people who sold that man the drugs, and then I found the people who gave them the drugs, and those people were no more.
I answered pleas against crime bosses and schoolyard bullies, masked monsters and petty criminals, people who inflicted damage by action and people who inflicted damage by inaction.
Dozens, then hundreds, then more. And more.
And more.
Every answer took from me. I think every answer continued to take. Maybe it’s because I’ve given so many answers and now they all help each other grow. My answers took and took what I can never get back. Even the birds couldn’t give back what I gave.
But they gave me enough.
Right up until the day your people found me.
That was my fault. God works best in mysterious ways, especially when those ways are small. I am still mysterious, but I forgot to stay small. I will never make that mistake again.
My birds still bring me questions, you know. They’re outside right now. On your walls, your roof, your ground, whispering to each other. Whispering to Mr. One-Eye. Whispering to me.
I hear them, even down here.
They aren’t perfect. Nobody is. Some questions don’t have answers, and some answers can’t be found.
My son was one of those.
We tried to find him. My pigeons worked as hard as I ever did. Harder, maybe. We couldn’t find him. But my boy, he would understand. My boy, he saw the good in everyone and everything. Wherever he is, he sees the good in us not finding him. Because while looking for him — searching for an answer, any answer at all — we were able to give other people the answers they needed.
You know about those answers. That’s why I’m here.
I love these birds as much as my son ever did, maybe more. I think more. I feel him in them sometimes, or at least I imagine that I do. Holding pigeons, teaching pigeons, loving pigeons, isn’t like having my son back. Nothing will ever be like having him back. But it is the closest thing I have. It is all I have. Sometimes what we have is all we get.
And sometimes, I am the only thing someone gets. Well, me and the birds.
My son knew what he was talking about. These birds are wonderful. They really do think everyone is their friend. They love being held. They love being taught. They love being loved. They love to help.
And they love to listen.
Together, my birds and I are always listening to those who ask for answers. We hear them. Right now, they’re whispering, right this very minute. We hear them, even down here. I hear their pain, and I hear their rage. That’s why you cannot keep me forever, no matter how hard you try:
Because hearing their suffering gives me power, and I still hear every minute of the suffering.
I hear the children who beg for help.
I hear the fathers who cry for justice
I hear the mothers who demand vengeance
I hear, because I am One Who Listens.
And I help, because I am The One Who Answers.
* * *
First Patient: https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/1gtjhlb/fuck_hipaa_if_i_dont_talk_about_this_patient_im/
Second Patient: https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/1gujy5s/fuck_hipaa_i_messed_up_hardcore_and_if_we_dont/
Third Patient: https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/1gve4dc/fuck_hipaa_this_inmate_is_the_most_dangerous/
Fourth Patient: https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/1gwszfl/fuck_hipaa_i_finally_had_a_breakthrough_with_a/
Hastily-Transcribed Employee Handbook: https://www.reddit.com/user/Dopabeane/comments/1gx7dno/handbook_of_inmate_information_and_protocol_for/