The Folded Heart

The Brothers

16 The Brothers For thirty-five cents, they sold me a homing pigeon and promised to care for it in the ramshackle quarters of their pigeon coop, and that whenever I wanted to see it, I could telephone and they would release the bird for its flight to me, its true home. I was nine and small and white, uncertain as I stood on the back porch while Tito, Mike and Carlos pointed to the brown-and-white one with red stitched in its neck, and though I could not find it, as everyone else could, I nodded, afraid they'd make me hold my ugly bird. And how many times after I telephoned did I sit in my back yard and looking into the sky, hardly knowing sparrow from pigeon, did I wait, believing that each bird passing by was mine, or if not mine, then released into the air for its passage home? I wish now they had made me hold my bird and learn that I could keep it calm and reconcile the frantic pressure of its wings against my palms, for twenty years have passed and I feel the absence of something I never held. Though it wasn't absence, finally, that made me demand my pigeon, calling the brothers thieves and liars from where I stood in the alley. But the brothers never answered me, and I could see through the weave of fence palings that the coop was empty, though the evening light had made its passage through the wiry geometry of the cage, had calmed itself, and then dissolved. 17 ...