By Kimberly Elkins
At first, it had been just a tickle on the roof of her mouth, then a swelling against her gums, her lips stretched to cracking, something pecking at her tongue. Together they pulled out one side of it—one wing of it—and there it was: a pigeon. His cock had turned into a pigeon in her mouth. Its head wobbled, azure and purple rings around its neck. The bird unruffled its damp feathers and flew out the open window, into the blue-black sky over Harvard Square. She looked between his legs; the skin was as smooth as a newborn girl's.
He sat at her station the next night. She gave him a menu; she didn't know what else to do.
“That's never occurred before,” she said, fingering the tiny cuts cross-hatching her lips. She’d missed TA’ing her Chaucer survey because she couldn’t bear the thought of the students staring at her mouth while she discussed “The Miller’s Tale.”
“How are you?” he asked.
“Fine. You?”
“The same.”
They hadn't spoken after it happened; she'd grabbed her purse and run out, left him standing with his khakis down.
“I'll have a grilled cheese with tomato,” he said. “And coffee, black.”
The same order as last night, when she’d kept topping off his cup, knowing he was waiting for her shift to end, noodling on his tablet. He said he was a physicist, in town for a conference on the unvalidated Higgs Boson particle. His eyes were a spittled hazel, though he had a good ten years on her thirty.
“Any change?” she asked.
“I bought a half dozen baguettes and left a trail of crumbs from my hotel to here. Saw lots of pigeons, but none of them looked...”
“Familiar?”
“No.”
He came to the diner every night for dinner for the next week.
“You can't keep on,” she told him. “Your conference is over. I can't help you.”
“It's all right,” he said. “What you did--it’s going to blow everything we know about dimensional superstring theory out of the water.”
He told her how he could still feel it, flying around out there, the wind ruffling its feathers at high velocity, the thrill of aerodynamic turbulence, up and down and up and down. The worms. Several times a day, he stopped and shuddered in spasms of pure joy.
After another week, she let him walk her home and up the four flights. She took off her shirt because she knew she had to show him. There they were--the tiny nubs of wings, white feathers sprouting from between her shoulder blades. He traced the stiff quills with his finger, laughing, in awe of her. Then she led him to the open bay window, and together they crouched upon the sill.
“Don't worry about which theoretical principles we’re violating,” she said, reaching for his hand. “Just don't look down.”
And he didn't.
Kimberly Elkins's novel, What is Visible, was a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice and on several Best of 2014 lists. Her fiction and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Iowa Review, The Chicago Tribune, and Best New American Voices, among others. She was a Finalist for the National Magazine Award in Fiction.