Birds on the brain

I have a pigeon phobia. It’s not crippling or anything; I can walk freely through the city, but I get a little twitchy if I see a flock of them. It sounds crazy, I know, but there’s a story behind it.

It was a gloomy day in the early winter of my first year, and I was hungry for lunch. I asked around, but since everyone had already eaten, I headed out by myself to buy something from one of the lunch carts on 34th Street. As I stepped out into the grayness of the afternoon, I felt an odd silence in the air. The driveway leading to the street was deserted, save for the cooing of nearby pigeons.

Halfway to the lunch carts, I heard the flapping. Flap flap flapflap flap… The sound was coming closer and closer. I stopped to look up and there it was: A pigeon was slowly spiraling down from the sky, apparently unable to stop, and it was heading straight for me.

I let out a scream and flung up my arms to protect my head. The next few seconds passed in a blur, but I felt feathers brush my face and I nearly tripped in trying to avoid stepping squarely on the pigeon that had just landed between my feet. It was all over very quickly. Too quickly, because when I looked up I saw two people round the corner of the driveway. They must have heard me scream, but by the time they got there, all they saw was me, completely freaked out by a perfectly normal pigeon. Pointing at the pigeon, I shouted wildly at the couple. “That pigeon just fell on my head!” They just looked at me with pity. Just some poor crazy woman in the alley.

So yeah. I’m a little afraid of pigeons.