The pigeons began to fall at 3:34pm, on a bright and warm Tuesday afternoon.

They fell in number, cascading off sloped roofs, tumbling into streets, hanging in trees by their wings and necks, bright and plumed red and white and gray and black and blue and sometimes gold. 

They fell all over—in the Americas and Europe and Asia and Australia and Africa. They fell over all the world, Antarctica too, only there the birds were frozen and fell with cracks that hammered the earth.

They fell in silence. No coos or hoots, no flapping of wings, or shrieks of pain. It was the dead that fell unto earth, though none knew where they came from. Most thought hell, and it was silly; satan’s wrath in avian form. 

And then the days passed, and they turned to weeks, and the falling did not stop, and there were too many.

Too many.

Too many, more than in all the world, and in every breed—Oriental Rollers and Kamyshins and Antwerp Smerles and Egyptian Swifts and Passenger Pigeons, the latter which should be dead, should be dead.

And the days, which had turned to weeks, turned to months, and it was cataclysm, for the fallen had filled the streets and clogged the waterways, shattered windows and buried man. Cities drowned in their wake, and when the first to fall began to rot, their corpses smelled of thyme and rosewater, of honey and nutmeg, and then it stopped. 

Just like that.

Yet beneath the mountains of winged death, that blocked the sky and the sun, there were none left to cheer, none left to cry.