There were different shades of blood on the streets and sidewalks. My neighbor told me it depended on where the pigeons were shot. Through the lungs was the brighter red. The men from the neighborhoods would split-up and travel in groups of three. Each pick-up truck was loaded with empty oak-split bushel baskets. They used .22-caliber birdshot to pick pigeons off the trees. Maples lined both sides of every street in town. It was like the Fourth of July with gunpowder smell and the crack crack of the rifles and people sitting watching it all from their front porches. It wasn’t cruel and was matter-of-fact seeing men with rifles walking around, leaning on cars and shooting into the maples. It happened every three years or so.

My neighbor was a hunter and his children called him Sir and they called their mother Ma’am and that was the only thing I thought strange. The mother was from Virginia and she never lost the stubborn accent and Southern manners that hid her cruelty. The father was born and raised the next town over from us and worked the railroad that fed steel mills in Western Pennsylvania. He had a work bench in his basement with a press where he

handloaded his own bullets. His son and I used to steal some of his black powder and light it in the town dump. One day the neighbor man caught us and I watched him whip his son good with his leather belt. That was the last time I stole anything.

I watched the pigeons fall from the trees. They’d fall, and then feathers would follow. I only remember seeing one bird still alive. It was running in circles and bleeding dull red. That’s when my neighbor put the stock of his rifle down on the bird’s neck and crushed its head with the heel of his boot. He looked at me after he done it like he was mad I was watching. He picked it up by the tail feathers and threw it in a bushel basket. They never bothered with the blood. I remember the rain washing it pink through the maze of yellow bricks on our street, and the electric joy of it all.

WILLIAM R. STODDART lives in Pennsylvania. His poetry has been published most recently by The Adirondack Review and The Pedestal Magazine. Other publishing credits include Transference - a bilingual journal of poetry, and The Writer.