by Kaela Noel
“Smart, me,” Coo muttered to Roohoo. She plopped down beside a pile of teeny-tiny gray pebbles that were pretend bagels. “Scare hawks, me.”
“So far,” said Roohoo.
Coo ignored him, and he swooped up into the air and went back to the dovecote.
Chapter Two
Hawk
Coo was sorting three pretend pink donuts and was just starting to get tired of playing when the warning cry went up from the flock. Coo leaped to her feet and scanned the sky.
There it was. Broad wings speckled brown and white, a fan of red tail feathers, flying quicker than a piece of litter in the wind: a hawk.
Coo stood up and yelped.
Burr fluttered toward the dovecote, joining the pigeons who raced into the doorway from every direction.
The hawk was right behind.
“Away!” Coo ran across the roof with her arms spread wide. It was harder to run when it got colder. The plastic-bag booties she wore on her feet were slippery, even on the rough surface of the roof. “Go, hawk!”
Her yell always made hawks arc away into the wide blue sky.
Almost always.
This hawk was very hungry. Ignoring her, it dove into the panicked stream of pigeons funneling toward the dovecote door. The pigeons scattered, and the hawk appeared with a captive flailing between its talons. A bird as dark gray as a summer rain cloud with a white stripe across its wings.
Burr!
“No!” Coo zoomed toward Burr. The wind roared in her ears, and a sudden gust pushed itself behind her and across the roof. Glossy brown feathers rippling, the hawk braced against it, unable to swoop up through the wall of air.
Coo punched it square in the chest. Its claws opened, and Burr thudded to the roof.
“Go!” Coo screamed at the hawk. “Go!”
The hawk’s sharp, small, smart eyes met Coo’s. The wind shifted. The hawk screeched once and took off.
“Gone, hawk!” Coo leaped in the air and for a moment felt the wind tickle against the plastic soles of her feet—an almost-flying feeling.
But her triumph fizzed out like air from one of the miraculous balloons that sometimes snagged on the roof.
Burr lay where the hawk had dropped him, and he wasn’t moving.
Coo fell to her knees and bundled Burr into her arms. He gasped in shallow, rapid bursts. “Hurt, you?” Coo’s heart rocked against her ribs. Other pigeons had been injured like this, or worse, but not one she loved like Burr. Not Burr. “Speak, you! Speak!”
Burr bleated faintly. “Left wing. Broken, maybe.”
“Be still, you,” Coo said, trying hard to stop shaking. “Help you, me? How?”
Burr was silent, breathing heavily, but New Tiktik landed on Coo’s shoulder and said, “The healer. Ground. Bring Burr, you.”
All those lucky birds the healer fixed in the past had been injured on the ground. The healer clucked in a way that made no sense, bundled the wounded ones into a box she carried, and took them away. Days chilled and warmed, moons shrank and grew. Coo inched taller and needed bigger plastic bags to wear. Time passed, but often the hurt birds returned to the flock, all better.
Like Hoop. When Coo had been much smaller, Hoop had snagged her foot on the alley’s fence, cutting it so badly she could not walk. But the healer found her and took her away. One day Hoop came back and her foot was just like new. How did the healer do it?
Coo had asked Hoop many times how she’d been healed, and where she had been while she was away, but her explanations were hopelessly vague. There wasn’t time to pester Hoop again for answers.
“Up here, us,” Coo said to New Tiktik. “Down there, healer. Me? Always up here.”
“No.” Burr’s whole body shuddered as he spoke. “Long ago. Small you. Remember?”
Coo shivered. The one part of her own story she didn’t like remembering was the very beginning, the time when she’d been down on the ground, away from the safety of the roof and the flock, before the pigeons had rescued her.
“Go down now, you,” New Tiktik said.
“How?” Coo asked. “How now? Can’t fly, me. Down, how?”
But Coo already knew how. Clinging to the side of the building was a strange stack of thin metal slats that zigzagged all the way to the ground. A fire escape. Over the years, driven by hunger and curiosity, Coo had lowered herself onto it a few times and even shimmied down some of the stairs. Each time, the slats had shook under her feet like winter-brittle twigs and spooked her into scrambling back onto the roof’s solid ground.
She had long ago decided that the roof was home, her whole world, and since she couldn’t fly, everything beyond it was unnecessary.
Almost.
She looked at Burr and his sickeningly bent wing.
Pigeons injured on the roof never got better. Their feathers turned dull and their skin loosened against their bones, even as Coo fed them and kept them warm. The other pigeons in the flock avoided them as they got weaker and weaker, nudging sick ones from the flock as pigeons did, until it was only Coo who paid attention. She nursed them day and night. But the first cold snap always sucked the breath from their beaks and they died. It had happened to Mop, to Pip, to Tiwoo.
Pigeons didn’t think of one another as particularly special—the flock mattered more than any of its individual members—but Coo did. She couldn’t help it. And Burr was most special of all. Coo sat on her knees in the dovecote doorway, rocking him in her arms. He was the one who had found her, who had recognized her and brought her to her family.
“Okay, me,” whispered Burr. “Don’t worry, you.”
“Hush,” Coo muttered back. “Help you, me. Somehow.”
She tucked Burr into the darkest, safest part of the dovecote, forcing herself to ignore how some of the others were already inching away from him, and then went to look at the fire escape.
“Go on, you. Don’t need wings.”
It was New Tiktik. She was a little bit different from the others, like Burr. She made two quick swooping loops around Coo and settled on her shoulder.
“Scary,” Coo whispered.
“Scared, you? Why? Chase hawks, you! Not scary.”
“Chased bad today, me.”
The ground loomed far below, as far away as a future where Burr survived. But Coo had to get there. Somehow.
“Go on, you,” New Tiktik said. “Try.”
Coo went back to the dovecote and found Burr. His breathing was raspy and shallow.
“P-pain.” The old bird shivered. “Much pain now.”
The other pigeons looked on, curious but distant, as Coo found a clean plastic bag and a pile of leaves and made a soft pouch for Burr. Hands trembling, she tucked him in and tied the bag snugly around her chest.
“Down to the ground, me.”
The flock murmured in surprise.
“How?” asked Hoop.
Coo pointed with a shaky finger to the fire escape. Only the warm softness of Burr against her chest calmed her as she tiptoed to the edge. The rest of the flock followed, hovering around her, curious.
“Belongs on the ground, her,” said Roohoo. “Human, she is. Hurry up, Coo.”
Coo ignored him and dangled both legs over the roof’s ledge.
“Dangerous, this.” Old Tiktik bobbed toward her. “Ground? Coo? No. Can’t fly, you.”
“Climb down, me,” Coo said, though the word climb was an awkward one in pigeon. Birds did not climb anywhere, up or down. Coo had no word for what she meant to describe. She said something closer to “hop a lot” and hoped it made sense.
“Wait.” Panting, Burr pushed his head out of the pouch. “Right, Old Tiktik. Dangerous, Coo. Stay with flock, you. Part of life, dying.” He took a deep breath. “Not worth it, me.”
“No!” gasped Coo.
How could Burr think he wasn’t worth saving?
“Flock is safest,” said Hem. “No wings, you. Stay up here.”
“Stay up here, me?” said Coo. “Hurt, Burr. Die, him!”
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“Nimble, Coo!” said New Tiktik. “Safe, her. Go down, Coo.”
Coo felt like she did when she spun in circles too many times. Dizzy. But New Tiktik’s confidence gave her a burst of courage. And Burr didn’t know what he was talking about. She was sure of that. The pain was making him confused.
She stretched and stretched her right leg until her toes brushed the slats of the fire escape. She inched her right foot down. She swung her left foot down beside it.
The whole sky was at her back. For a moment, the shiver she felt was excitement. She’d spent every day and night of all the seasons she’d ever known in one small, flat place, wondering more and more about what was beyond. Especially about the others, the ones who looked like her—the humans. The shiver came back, fiercer now. Her fear festered like a moldy bagel in the pit of her stomach, but seeping around that feeling was curiosity.
She began to inch along the fire escape, slat by slat, scooting down on her behind. The rusty metal was very cold through the thin plastic of her romper. One flight down, she ripped the slippery plastic bags off her feet and let them drift away. The metal was frigid, but she felt more stable. At the landing she shut her eyes and stopped.
“Keep going, you!” said New Tiktik, swooping around her.
Other flock members floated down, too, hopping from rail to rail, watching. She didn’t dare look into the pouch at Burr. One more word from him about dying and Coo thought she would crumble right off the side.
“Rescue you again, we can’t,” grumbled Roohoo when she paused for a very long time, covering her face with her hands. “Too big now, you. Keep moving! Scared, you?”
“No,” Coo spat in Roohoo’s direction. “Not scared, me.”
For the next few minutes, she forced herself to look at the side of the building a foot or two away. All the way down were chilly holes, damp and dark as nighttime. Some were covered in warped planks and others in smooth, solid planes of what looked like ice, while others were open to the air.
“Windows,” Roohoo said, plopping down next to her as she stared. “Trick birds, them. Smash! Hurt!”
Coo didn’t like to think of birds crashing into windows. She peered into them and then inched on, full of wonder. How had she never thought about what was below the roof, what she couldn’t see? How had she never thought about what was inside the other buildings nearby? Was there food inside them? Other people? The pigeons never talked about what was inside things, or under them. Even at her hungriest times, Coo had never stopped to think, either. Now she was startled.
She reached the last flight of stairs, and when she dared to look down, the gray ribbon on the ground below had transformed into a splatter of individual stones. The green-brown fuzz of the shrubs was now sticks and leaves that looked just like the plants that grew on the roof. Surprised, Coo paused. But of course the ground looked different as you got nearer to it, just as a pigeon grew bigger and more detailed as it flew closer to you.
Coo teetered on the last landing. The stairs became, confusingly, a rack of metal bars that didn’t reach all the way to the ground. Coo puzzled over this for a long time.
“Hurry, you,” said New Tiktik. “Here soon, healer.”
Coo swung her body over the side. The ladder lurched. Coo held on as it screeched downward, finally coming to a stop a few feet above the ground. She took a deep breath and jumped.
She landed with a hard bounce on a thicket of weeds and twigs, staggered once, and caught her balance. Then she crouched and looked around.
The side of Coo’s building rose high above. From the roof the fence was just a thin gray line, but now it was a barrier that reached terrifyingly far over her head. Coo tilted her head back until her neck pinched, but she still couldn’t take everything in. Her heart began to pound. Beyond the impossibly high fence was an area covered in small rocks, and beyond that, the other building. The sky was just a scrap of blue between the two brick walls. It was the tiniest sky she’d ever seen.
Looking at it, she felt like throwing up.
“Ground’s different, huh?” New Tiktik circled Coo in excited laps.
Coo couldn’t find her voice to reply. With every bone in her body, all she wanted was to bolt back up the fire escape to home.
Chapter Three
Ground
Coo did not try to climb back up the fire escape. Instead, she opened the plastic-bag pouch on her chest and peered in at Burr.
“Pain,” he said. “Bag too tight.”
Coo untied his pouch and placed it on the ground. She fluffed the shredded newspaper. “Better?”
Burr stretched his neck and whimpered. “Ground. Danger. Be careful, you. Not safe here.”
“Fine, me. Stop worrying, you.”
Peering through the fence, Coo saw the hut. It was much bigger than she expected, taller and wider than the dovecote. She knew from the birds that long ago, humans spent hours every day sitting inside of it.
No human had come to or gone from the hut since she’d been big enough to lean over the roof’s ledge and watch the alley. The hut was boarded up and covered in brown vines. She could hear the big metal trains singing over their tracks nearby, but for the first time ever, she couldn’t see them. They were hidden by a tall, solid wall behind the hut.
Maybe, Coo thought, she should go looking for the healer. First she had to find a way through the chain-link fence that ran between the alley and the factory. She glanced at Burr hidden inside his plastic-bag pouch. Then she took a few cautious steps into the underbrush.
A shredded yellow plastic bag, matching the one she wore, shimmied in the wind where it was caught on the fence. Leaves crackled under her feet along with strange things she never saw on the roof, like a pile of glinting ice pieces that somehow weren’t melted.
“Glass,” said New Tiktik. “Ouch! Careful. Cuts you.”
Coo was startled. New Tiktik was right—it was glass, just like the slivers she picked from the feet of injured birds. She had never imagined so much of it in one place before. She carefully stepped around it.
Coo heard a wisp of noise behind her. New Tiktik and the other pigeons fled upward in a single beat of wings. Coo whipped around.
A fat, hairy, gray thing slinked along the ground toward Burr. Big white teeth were bared against its pink gums.
Coo had never seen a cat before, but she’d heard plenty of stories.
She jumped over the mess of weeds between her and Burr and shrieked. The cat froze. It yowled at Coo. Then it shot through a hole in the fence and disappeared.
“Hurt more?” Coo said, scooping Burr into her arms. “Oh, Burr. Scary, scary! Sorry, me.”
“Not hurt more, me,” Burr said in a frighteningly quiet voice. “Hurt, you?”
“No,” said Coo. “Big, me. Bigger than cat, me.”
“Too dangerous here,” Burr murmured. “Go back up, you. Not worth this, me.”
“No! Wait, me. Help you, me.”
The other pigeons still circled in alarm above, but Roohoo landed with a thump on the fence above her.
“Dangerous, see?” he said. “Ground’s no place for pigeons. Come from here, you.”
The world beyond the roof was frightening in ways Coo had never imagined. But it was also the only place that could save Burr—whether he thought he was worth saving, or not.
She nestled him against her chest and crouched in the bushes to wait.
The sun was high above the alley when the healer at last arrived. A fringe of feathery gray peeped from beneath the poofy red mound on her head. A ragged brown layer of fuzz circled her neck. Her face was very round and her skin much more wrinkled than Coo’s own. She made a peculiar whistling sound as she crunched down the gravel.
“Oh, my dear feathered friends, here I come,” she chanted, swinging a cloth sack in one hand. “It’s a bright autumn day and I’m here to say, come have some lunch!”
At the sound of the human’s voice, the flock quit circling and zoomed to the ground. The healer bega
n to scatter birdseed in big fistfuls from the sack.
Half-hidden behind the bushes, Coo stared in shock. The healer was far taller than Coo thought humans were. Taller than Coo for sure. And wider. Roohoo and the others had lied, it seemed. Or didn’t know what they were talking about at all. How was Coo supposed to be the same thing as that?
Yet, as Coo watched and listened, the healer’s face rippled through different expressions, just like Coo’s did when she looked at herself in puddles. Maybe humans came in more than one size and shape, like birds.
All at once Coo realized faces, not flying, were the way humans and pigeons were most different. Pigeon faces never changed, no matter how they were talking or feeling.
Coo stood up. Her feet had become as heavy as rain-soaked bagels.
New Tiktik broke off from the other pigeons, most of whom had lost interest in Burr and Coo as soon as the seed was thrown, and landed beside Coo.
“Speak, you,” she nudged. “Go on, you.”
“Scared, me. Bad human, maybe.”
“No. Good human. Heals us, remember?”
That was true. Coo thought of Hoop.
Burr cooed faintly in the bag.
“Help you, me,” Coo whispered.
Coo crawled along the fence until she found the rip where the cat had escaped. Taking a deep breath, sheltering Burr with both her hands, she climbed through.
It took a moment for the healer to notice Coo where she stood a few feet away, holding out the slightly stirring bundle that was Burr.
“Whoa! Startled me, dear,” the healer said, jumping back. “Who are you? What are you doing here all by yourself?”
Even though the others had told Coo many times that humans couldn’t speak pigeon, Coo had never really believed them. But maybe they were right. Trying to make sense of what the healer said was impossible, worse than listening to a chattering sparrow. Thinking of sparrows distracted Coo for a moment from her flip-flopping nerves. She took a step closer and, trembling, pushed Burr forward.
“Hurt, him,” Coo said as clearly and slowly as she could. “Broken wing.”