Peas and Pins

When cars honked, when Yo-Yos yo-yo’d, when buildings were brick, there was a pretty park there. The trees and bushes rustled about its neat symmetry of paths and benches, and the fountain in the middle was always full. 

Drawn to this idyll a little girl would come every Sunday, throw down bread, and with a pocket peashooter, shoot peas with pins in at the sparrows. She never missed.

But with time the crumbling brick begot concrete, and fewer people negotiated the growling dual carriageway that had stolen a large half of the pretty park. You drive past it every day. But you'd never know.

Yet like the bushes and trees about her, determined to stay put,

a little old lady clings to the last remaining bench. Eyes closed, she feels the rising sun on her back, its rays warming her crunchy hunch, pop pop.

With time, her hand unclamps from the bench arm. It slides into her snakeskin handbag, like a sausage skin full of blue and white pebbles, and pulls out again, holding something tight. Looking down with rheumy eyes, the hand opens, click click, and she rattles a chuckle.

A sparrow lands not four feet from the Little Old Lady and flips her a beady eye. Its piddly mind switches back and forth between inanity and electric panic and back again. The noise, the wind, the grey, the green, the basics.

Bread. 

Victim 449.

A six inch tube rests as steady as Eddie at the Little Old Lady’s lips. Her eyes, now steely, following the line of its silver barrel to the bird motionless.

Dropping the sparrow into her handbag, brown feathers on a bed of green and silver, peas and pins, she snaps the bag shut and mutters.

“It’s Sunday, you stupid little fuck.”