Nigel

the heat was already a bastard at 6:15am, thick and merciless, pressing down on the city like some drunk god’s hangover that wouldn’t lift. everything felt wrong before I knew why — that dead quiet, broken by a wet, ugly confusion, the kind of sound that crawls into your gut and tells you death is close, personal, and sloppy.

I shuffled through the gate, turned the corner, and there it was on the cracked pavement: a seagull, all white and savage, tearing the life out of a pigeon the way the tide comes in, no malice, no mercy, just weight.

and the yellow beak going down and ripping back, again and again, frantic and precise, mad eyes gleaming, and the small warm insides of the thing steaming a little in the early heat, because a minute ago it had been alive. feathers everywhere, grey and white, drifting lazy like ash off a cheap cigarette.

the pigeon let out these low, broken coos at first. then nothing. just the wet sound and the gull’s wings beating for balance as it buried in deeper, gorging like breakfast was a war it had to win before the sun got any higher.

I stood there till it finished.

and when the gull shook its bloodied head and lifted off, what it left on the pavement wasn’t a carcass. it was Nigel. the same daft, strutting, grey-necked bugger who’d cooed on my sill a hundred mornings, who had a Shirley somewhere still waiting on a ledge. just another morning in the shit parade — except it wasn’t. it was his.

the gull lifts, gorged, gone.
grey feathers in the hot light—
Shirley, on the sill.