Commentary: Part II! Nyee-hee-hee!
Warning: Some absolutely fictional animals were harmed in the making of this absolutely fictional work. Beware also minor amounts of cursing.
I hope you enjoy this as much as I did (but I doubt it).
CYCLE
PART II: Mars
or
You know the birds had it coming
Only four hours after Ami drops the teacup in her bedroom, her close friend Hino Rei grunts as she pulls a ladder from the maintenance shed artfully hidden behind Hikawa's leftmost wing. The ladder is old and heavy and it creaks in her hands, but she trusts it, and she hefts it onto her shoulder to half-carry, half-drag it across the shrine's campus. It scutters and bumps across the raked earth behind her hunched form, leaving in the loam two sharp lines.
A few minutes later, Rei leans it against the shrine's gutter and climbs to the roof. She has a bucket's handle clenched in her teeth and a broom tucked beneath an arm. Once on the roof, she settles the bucket aside, shifts the broom into one hand much like she would a sword, and brandishes it at her enemy.
The wall-eyed pigeon hoots at her, too stupid to know it should fear the miko.
She smacks it gently with the broom's bristles and it flutters off, leaving a disgruntled splatter of droppings in its wake. Rei groans. She wishes Yuuichirou were here so she might pawn off this task on him—but no! He's visiting Hikawa's mother shrine in Omiya, chatting up the disciples there. Rei's grandfather recommended he make the pilgrimage. Personally, Rei thinks he just wanted Yuuichirou out from underfoot a little while, and she doesn't much blame her elder.
She does mourn Yuuichirou's absence, though, if only because it happens to coincide with Hikawa's abrupt pigeon infestation.
The birds are all places across the shrine's campus, cooing from before dawn to well past dusk. Their droppings line Hikawa's every surface: fences, trees, porches, the steps, the roof beneath Rei's feet. They fight in the courtyard, fluffing their dirty plumage and puffing out iridescent necks; they follow the shrine's patrons hopefully, always hungry. They leave feathers everywhere. They smell terrible: something like a combination of rotting fish and moldy attic.
Phobos and Deimos, the shrine's resident crows, are so disgusted with the pigeons that they have taken to sulkily preening on powerlines a full block away.
Rei's grandfather put out a wooden owl statue in hopes of frightening off the collective pestilence, but the pigeons clearly don't find it threatening. They perch on it—crap on it too, come to think.
And so, because Yuuichirou is gone and she would rather her spine ripped out than see her beloved grandfather tottering across the roof, the task of getting rid of the pigeons has fallen to Rei.
She spends nearly an hour sweeping their droppings and feathers and nest materials from the roof's sloping tiles. She clears their accrual from the gutters, nose wrinkled. A few of the birds themselves are still sleeping on the shrine's sacred ledges. She boots them off: humanely, yes, but firmly too.
Rei eventually realizes that she is fighting a losing battle. The pigeons she manages to temporarily frighten away come back to roost within minutes, aware now that the miko will not harm them. Cleaned areas are soon covered again in telltale white spatters. Her red hakama are spotted at the cuffs with… with slimy, crusty birdscum. Gray bits of unidentifiable fluff stick to, lodge in her umbrous hair. The sound of cooing is so thunderous that she can hear nothing else: not the honk of traffic on the street below, not the breeze rustling through the shrine's crop of healthy trees.
She looks.
No wonder: the pigeons are in the trees, too.
Rei mutters an oath she learned from the nuns at school—unlike the nuns, though, she refuses to cross herself. Rolling up her sleeves, she picks up the bucket she brought to the roof. She must wave away a few birds to get to it. After prizing free its lid, the priestess slops its contents across the slanted tiles.
She was instructed by her grandfather to use the mixture in the bucket only if she thought it absolutely necessary. She understands why instantly. Its smell assaults her: it is like hot, fresh, acrid cat piss. The wind blows it into her face. She retches, a sound similar to Yeccch! Her stomach rolls. She feels the stuff seep into the bottoms of her sandals and resolves to throw them away the moment she's back on the ground. It specks her billowy robes too.
Some of the pigeons take wing. Still more, though, find motivation to enact a dissimilar grievance: they attack Rei, hooting and clawing at her with blood-orange feet. A few, including the wall-eyed one from earlier, buffet their wings against her head. She drops the bucket. She shrieks, steps backward: she flails, and damn if one of the persistent birds doesn't have a shit right into her sleeve.
Rei thinks it—bird feces running down into her armpit—is one of the worst things that has ever happened to her.
Until, of course, another pigeon nails her right between the eyes.
Her screech of revulsion and outrage echoes across the shrine. As little ratty talons scritch across her brow and a razored beak takes a wedge-shaped chunk out of her ear, Rei abandons all pretense of religious dignity, flings out her arms, and snarls, "BURN IN HELL, YOU STUPID BIRDS!"
What happens next ensures that no pigeon ever flies within ten kilometers of Hikawa again.
With a distinct fwoomp, the entire flock of visiting fowl is roasted alive by invisible flames. The air above the shrine shimmers with the heat of the abrupt conflagration—Rei's eyebrows and eyelashes sizzle into extinction. Several of the birds explode, strewing the roof with bits of charred carcass. Smoldering feathers sift to the heavens, sough away on the breeze, litter the courtyard below. A soot-black talon soars over, lands on, and dangles from Rei's collar like a twisted voodoo charm.
It is still twitching.
"AAAAAAAH!" Rei opines, clutching at it. She adds, horrified, "AAAAHHH, AAAAHHH, AAAAHHH!"
She staggers right off the roof.
Luckily, a tree is there to cushion her fall.