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  • Mislaid Memory about Pigeons, and: Three-Fingered Willy
  • Brenna W. Lemieux (bio)

Mislaid Memory about Pigeons

On the phone today, my mother asks if I remember the afternoonsmy sister had choir practice, when we'd wait for her in the car

and, to pass time, give voices to the birds that preened and swoopedon the slate church roof: a battered pigeon would coast in

and I'd say, Looks like George failed his math test,or two would squawk and rumple their feathers and I'd whisper,

that one didn't do his chores—but I don't. I want to believeit's me and not one of my sisters she's thinking of,

that I was the sort of window-gazing child who pinned her thoughtsand worries onto things that could fly. I can picture the parking lot,

the soft cotton turtlenecks I favored then, the gapthat spaced my front teeth in all my school photos.

But I have no memory of the birds. And why would I? Those afternoons,I was knotted with longing to be the sister inside the church,

the one with the dulcet voice who stood straight and sang in the holy quiet,the one who found inked on the hymnal's staffs

something solid and dependable, something she could followinstinctively and with ease. But instead I sat and squinted [End Page 49]

at the infinitely erasable ledger of a slate roof's ridge, its unmargined edges,its sloped-away planes, its steeple and spires, its chaos of pigeons,

and tried to narrate something other than gray, gray, gray, gray.And now when I picture the scene, I see late fall, drizzle,

the windshield hemmed and veined with rain, though in the carI'm not the least bit cold—and that's what I tell my mother I remember,

that when she looked out a window beside me, I was never cold.

Three-Fingered Willy

The legend says he was a builder: fitting a cabinwindow, he lost his balance, fell from a ladder,and saw, before fainting, the glass panescythe his bones. He woke patched and half-handed,

his ruined fingers already trashed.And he never got over it, kept hoping he'd find them,combing the lakeside and the Wolfeboro shops,taking what he could, what he felt the place owed him—

shoes, spare towels, food scraps—though what he wantedwas fingers, and campers were warned to sleepcross-armed and clench-clawed—this is the story you were always told. [End Page 50]

No wonder, then, that years later, when you're grown,dozing on your grandparents' sofa and the floorboardsmoan, you cut your breath. The wind swells; a boughraps the window. No wonder you have to remind yourself

that Three-Fingered Willy is a myth, a joke, a roguecooked up to spook your grandfather's campers,before the camp folded and its land was soldfor houses (for this house, in fact). Why, then,

this lake-water chill to the air? Why the heftof another soul in the room? You hoop your eyesbut see only woolen air, its gloom of unlit roadsand feral birch woods, the sort of stone-fisted night

that chokes New Hampshire summers, windyand so dark every branch-snap and leaf-crunchcould be a lurker, a bandit, a vagabond alonetoo long, nurturing a mean streak,

who wants more from you than your smokesand the Tootsie Rolls you bought in town today.The neighbor's ax went missing this week.No one thinks it was stolen for splitting wood. [End Page 51]

Brenna W. Lemieux

Brenna W. Lemieux earned a ba at Bucknell University and an mfa from Southern Illinois University-Carbondale. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Threepenny Review, North American Review, and Ploughshares, among others. She currently lives in Illinois.

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