Fowl

Every morning Pacific Supermarket piles its bags of discarded vegetable parts and fish tails and broken plastic containers onto the sidewalk near the subway entrance. By the time the garbage collectors have taken the bags away, some rotting goo has leaked onto the sidewalk. The concrete there has been stained and sticky and stinking for months.

Some days the smell is unbearable. Cooked in the summer sun, it reaches the underground tunnel leading to the subway hub. Pure rot. Animal, oil, vegetable, bone. A puddle of half-decayed matter. What no one wants to look at, what's supposed to be wrapped up in plastic and trucked to a landfill--there it gathers on our sidewalk.

NOrmally, I rush by that area. Breathing that air stings. Today, for the first time in a long time I looked at the mushy spot. It was colored rust and was not just an oozing puddle but a spreading mass, some urban mold armored with cracked chicken bones.

When I looked at that mass, I couldn't help but gasp. Pigeons pecked at it. Days and days of rot and there they were, picking at the reddish slop.

Have people stopped scattering their stale bread? Is wheat that expensive that now even pigeons feel the heat of the recession?