Feathers

      In the street in front of my apartment this morning is a pile of feathers about the size of a reclining body. They are small, white feathers, some of them tipped with brown. Aside from the pile, feathers also line the curbs up and down the street, thousands of them, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, caught in the cracks of the asphalt and the corners of the buildings and under the parked cars.

     When I come home from work, the pile has mostly disintegrated but feathers remained in clumps up and down the block and even around the corner. There are too many for it to have been just a few burst pillows, it seems like a truck must have dumped its load. How do they transport large quantities of feathers, I wonder. I picture barrels; maybe a barrel somehow rolled off the back of a truck and dumped its contents.

     Later that night I run into the Cherokee woman from down the hall smoking in front of the building. I want to ask her about the feathers, but she's bursting with excitement, having just gotten back from a Willie Nelson concert. He played with his son, and she says at one point between songs his son had looked over at his ninety-year old father and said, "I love you, Dad," and the entire place had burst into tears.

     My neighbor has kids and even grandkids herself, though you would never know it to look at her; she looks younger than I am, and is incredibly sexy. She's very gregarious but only releases personal information a morsel at a time. She lives in a two bedroom unit on my floor with her brother and her 22 year old son. Her brother usually comes down to smoke with her and for a long time I assumed they were a couple.  Once last week, I had stepped out of the elevator and almost walked into her as she stood there on the phone. "Oh hold on a sec, it's my beautiful neighbor," she said, and gave me a huge hug and kiss on the cheek. I knew it didn't mean anything but it was still nice.

     After listening to her chatter about Willie for a while, I head in and take a shower and go to bed. I fall asleep fairly quickly but an hour later I'm awakened by a woman crying out. The sound comes from outside, probably through an open window of one of the other apartments. The woman cries out again, and again, and continues to do so for a few minutes until one final shriek. I haven't heard anyone having sex in our building for years, and while I usually find it annoying or disturbing, I'm strangely touched by how joyful this woman sounded, as if she was about to burst into peals of laughter.

     I can't fall back asleep and start to feel crushed by my isolation. I read for a while but every time I turn out the light I'm assaulted by waves of loneliness and self-pity. Eventually I sank into a morass of miserable dreams.

     I get up early the next morning and sit on the balcony with my coffee and listen to the pigeons fussing on the ledge above me. When I leave for work the feathers ae still lining the street, tenaciously clinging to the weeds, to the curbs, to the bases of the signposts and electrical poles, quivering in the breeze but stubbornly refusing to let themselves be carried away.