A Con­spir­acy of Feathered Sim­pletons, Part two

Word­count = 95,076

Con­tin­ued from A Con­spir­acy of Feathered Sim­pletons, Part one.

There are a num­ber of loose bricks in my front yard, left over from the time I decided to build a garden rock­ery but didn’t have the maths to work out how many square metres of soil I needed, how many bricks to use or how to get to Mel­ways Ref. 45E9, where the garden centre lives. The wounded pigeon and I eyed them with a great sense of foreboding.

Which is to say, I eyed it with a sense of fore­bod­ing. He eyed it with the same expres­sion with which pigeons eye everything, which is mild sur­prise. Blimey, he was think­ing. Bricks. Well I never, eh? Coo.

Think of it this way, I said to him. By remov­ing you from the pigeon gene pool, I’m pre­vent­ing you from passing your demon­strably mediocre consultant-avoidance tech­niques to the next gen­er­a­tion. Think of soci­ety. Think of the future.

I thought of the future. He looked at my mail­box with mild sur­prise. Per­haps, I mused, I’m not think­ing this though prop­erly. Per­haps this isn’t the future we humans desire, this world in which, by the con­tinual elim­in­a­tion of defect­ive pigeons, we naively breed a race of super-pigeon, which could one day learn to avoid not only edit­or­ial con­sult­ants but also humans, lead­ing to our usurp­a­tion, enslave­ment and even­tual con­fine­ment in bronze casts upon which our new mas­ters would perch and per­form hideous ablu­tions for all eternity.

I held this avian con­spir­ator out at arm’s length, an arm which he con­sidered with mild surprise.

Sud­denly I saw their evil plans clearly. ‘Send forth the stu­pid and the slow’ was their war-cry, ‘for with their sac­ri­fice we inch ever closer to world domination’.

I placed him care­fully on the nature strip under the axle of the neighbour’s trailer. He gazed at it. Guess how.

There is only one course of action, I resolved. We must not be temp­ted to fall into the wily trap of hit­ting these stu­pid pigeons on the head with a brick. We must give these feathered sim­pletons every chance to return to the mat­ing pool and pro­cre­ate, such that in time their idiot sprog will rise to such num­bers as to cause the whole mal­efi­cent con­spir­acy to col­lapse viol­ently upon itself with, one must pre­sume, a look of mild surprise.

I nestled the pre­cious little knuckle­head into the leaves and backed away, grin­ning mani­ac­ally. When I checked hours later, he was gone. I crossed my fin­gers. That was six months ago. By now there must have been some effect, at least at a local level, on the aver­age IQ of the pigeon populace.

My con­sult­ant is due back at any time.

No pigeons were harmed dur­ing the writ­ing of this post. How­ever, it could hap­pen any time.