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Today I watched a man commit murder.

It was outside Poor Yorrick’s, a coffee house, one of the kind students frequent.  I was reading Edmund Burke, reading his Reflections on the Revolution in France, and his condemnation of the abolition of the monarchy in such a heinous, impudent, undemocratic way.  I saw a man in a brown stained shirt walk in and out, always staring at this pigeon’s nest above the gothic sign. The mother sat there.  Through the hubbub of people, through the milling of giants she stayed, guarding the young life beneath her wings.  The man studied her a while as I studied him.  Then he left.

Burke held my attention with his opinions that France had not sacrificed her virtue to her interests but had instead abandoned her interests to prostitute her virtue.  When I looked up he was back, with a ladder.  Up he climbed, one step at a time, the steps of an older, more cautious man, ever vigilant to preserve his own life.  Still the pigeon stayed.  He must’ve seen a look in her eyes for he ventured not his hand close to her.  Instead a pole with a yellow brush pushed her until she flew down but not away.  The scared mother, the brave mother, flew down, yes, but flapped along the ground, trying in vain to draw his attention, to save her child.

But he, true to his grim work, took no heed.

With a plastic-wrapped hand he purged the ledge, ripped nest and chick from their foundation and suffocated them in a bag.   With his sacred gift he walked to the trash and, unperturbed, threw a life away.  Then our eyes met and he looked away in shame as if to say it was just his job, he was only following orders.  Up the ladder again, now to spread a poisoned paste to make sure the mother wouldn’t return to pick up her broken dreams.

I wonder how he sleeps at night and if he hears the little chirping he so callously silenced?

I watched him pack up and walk away, I watched a pair of lovers go through the doors beneath the smell of death, I watched a professor scurry in and a grad student bumble out and a thousand people go on with their lives.  But then I watched the mother return.  I saw her land, not caring about the poison paste, and search for her beloved.  I saw her sit, still and silent, bobbing her head to where the nest had been, confused by the absence of her baby.

An hour I was there and when I left she was still sitting, in mute anguish, where once her life had been.