Unrendered Grace

​I was picking up soggy fast-food napkins in the parking lot behind the Rite Aid, with the smell of fries in decline, and then this pigeon, missing a toe, wing kinda jacked, landed on the hood of my car and looked at me. I mean, like, looked. Not for food, but recognition, maybe, or mercy. And I felt it then. The absolute, grotesque grace of being seen in ugliness. The bird and I, co-pilgrims in the dumpster cathedral. And I wept, like really wept. Salty, grateful, born again in the oil-slick shimmer of the parking space labeled RESERVED FOR MANAGER.

Brandon McNeice