I’m sure many of you are familiar with the sound of a mourning dove. Even if you don’t know the bird by name, you’ve probably heard its cries at dawn and at the cusp of dusk: coo-OOH, coo… coo… coo…
Many of my childhood memories seem to have these birds in the background, whistling an accompanying soundtrack. Whether it was playing outside with friends at the park, or just chilling in my own backyard. Hell, I couldn’t even escape it when I went inside on a hot summer day. The open windows gave the doves an involuntary audience.
As a kid I found their cries slightly annoying. I didn’t even know if it was a bird making those noises, as dumb as that may sound. I was around 13 when my cousin pointed out a spotted beige pigeon on the neighbor’s window ledge, ruffling its feathers. “Look! A mourning dove,” she alerted me. We watched with interest for about 5 seconds before the bird’s chest expanded and contracted, letting out that same mournful cooing I had become so accustomed to. “Hm, so that’s what they’re called.” I made a mental note.
Since I moved out for college, I haven’t heard the doves’ song as often. I mostly just hear car engines, loud music, and other urban noise pollution. Can’t complain, urban centers often come with such nuisances. But I have found myself missing the sound of nature on more than one occasion.
This is why last night, when I was working on yet another past-due assignment, I stopped typing instantly when I heard the sound of a mourning dove. Now, it was already unusual that I was hearing a mourning dove, but at nighttime? It was way past midnight, around 2:30 AM. I stopped and just listened in my chair. The singing went on – coo-OOH, coo… coo…
After making sure I wasn’t going insane, I got up and cracked the blinds to my bedside window. There, on the ledge, was a mourning dove. It had a beautiful cream-colored coat with a few black spots towards its tail. It didn’t seem startled that a human was staring at it through an inch of glass. I made sure not to make any sudden movements as I observed. It jerked its head all around in classic bird fashion, before repeating the chorus to its sorrowful song. I watched it for a minute or so, listening to it cycle the same melody over and over. That was when the panic set in that I’m STILL not done my report, which was due at midnight, and I closed the blinds and hurried back to my computer.
I began writing a sentence when I heard a loud scream from outside. I got up and ran to the blinds again, yanking on the chain and letting the blinds fly upwards. The mourning dove was completely turned around, facing me through the window. In place of its little black peepers were bloodshot human eyes. It was staring back at me, completely still with pupils constricted. No cooing, nothing. I stood in shock, locking eyes with this dove while frozen in terror.
It felt like forever before the dove finally turned around and flew off into the night sky, at which point I dropped the blinds and speedwalked to the kitchen for some water. I paced back and forth taking sips of my water every few strides. What the hell was I just witness to? Though my heart was thumping like mad, I eventually rationalized that I was hearing and seeing things due to lack of sleep. I mustered up the courage to go back to my room and, keeping my gaze on the window, sat down slowly and began to type. After a paragraph or so of writing, I had returned to my state of flow and was solely focused on my paper.
Until I heard the cooing again. I looked at the desktop clock: 2:57 AM. What in the actual fuck. Jittering, I stood up slowly and walked over to the window. I used my fingers to split two blinds apart slowly, before stumbling back onto my ass. The dove was right up against the glass, looking at me with bloodshot eyes and baring a sharpened set of human-like teeth in its beak. I sat on the floor, staring at the exact spot in the blinds where I cracked them. “There’s no way… this is not real, this CANNOT be real,” I tried to convince myself.
I kept muttering to myself trying to get a grip, but I couldn’t. I knew this was more than just drowsiness at this point. After a minute on the floor in total silence, I stood up and creeped to the bedroom door. I went out into my living room and just laid down on the couch, racking my brain for any logical explanation as to what I just experienced – a fruitless endeavor. If anything, I went to bed more terrified of all the ways in which this dove was violating what I knew to be real.
I couldn’t sleep all night, but I didn’t have class in the morning. I lay there, thankfully not hearing any more sounds whatsoever, until about 7 AM. My eyes had grown so accustomed to staring at the dark ceiling that I noticed the sun bleeding its light in through the nearby kitchen window. I got out of bed, went to the bathroom to take a much-needed piss, and then walked back out. Before I could traverse the hallway to get back to the living room, the cooing started. Again.
At this point I pulled out my phone and opened up the keypad. I scrambled to enter 9-1-1 before catching myself. How the hell do I tell the cops that a fucking pigeon is threatening me? As the cooing went on, I put my phone back in my pocket and just listened. I was not going to make the same mistake that I had made last night: who knew how many more jump scares my body could take before shutting down on me?
I slowly sat back down on the couch, listening to the cooing. By this point my eyelids felt like they had weights attached to them, and I listened for a good few minutes before shutting my eyes for good. That is when the cooing turned into inhumane, rapid-fire shrieks: “CoO! COO! COo! COO! COO!”
It sounded like a dying man who just got into a car accident attempting to imitate a bird. The adrenaline got the better of me and I ran to the kitchen window at full speed before yanking the blinds up. There was an extremely skinny naked man dotted with beige feathers hanging off the ledge at my window, 15 stories up from the ground. His pupils were dilating and constricting back and forth in tandem with his cries. He locked eyes with me and started cooing louder before raising one of his arms to bang on the window. But his arm wasn’t a human appendage – his fingers spread out into long, thin bones that were bare at the end where his skin had ceased to cover them. His mouth was extremely malformed; his lips were torn off and in their place were solid extensions jutting out from the underlying bone. His tongue was long and his teeth were stained dark with what seemed to be blood. He started to peck at the window using his monstrous deformation of a mouth, keeping his eyes locked with mine the entire time. His neck inhumanely snapped back and forth to help him accomplish his goal. I didn’t even move – by this point I might as well have been looking through him due to the shock.
A loud shriek snapped me out of my trance as I looked down and watched the falling man get smaller and smaller. He fell straight into the bushes near the base of the building, and everything went dead quiet. I wouldn’t stop staring at the bush for a good 5-6 minutes straight, making sure nothing crawled out of there. Regaining what little composure I could, I eventually shifted my attention to the several cracks in the glass, along with the micro stains of blood where his beak made contact.
At this point I ran hastily to my neighbor, knocking hard on the door. After no response, I called him, and he eventually opened the door in a groggy, half-awake state. I gave him a 20-second rundown of the insanity that just took place and convinced him to come back with me to my apartment to corroborate my story.
The window was flawless when we returned. Hell, it looked cleaner than it did before that whole fiasco went down. My neighbor told me to lay off the drinks or whatever else I was using as he stumbled out of my apartment, grumpy that I woke him up.
I woke him up? Did that fucking thing shrieking and banging on my window not make any noise? Where the hell did the cracks and blood in the window go? After a good hour of pointless deliberation, my body had had enough, and I KO’d on the living room couch. I woke up at around 5 PM earlier today, and the whole thing felt like a fever dream. I ordered some takeout and tossed Seinfeld on the TV, forgetting about what had happened mere hours prior.
That is, until I heard a mournful cooing coming from my bedroom window. It’s now 9 PM and the cooing has been constant for the past 3 hours. I’ve become strangely used to it at this point, but I reckon that’s just the shock and denial in me taking over. I’m looking for another place as I write this.