Folktale Week 2021: Feast//Pigeon
Day four of Folktale week is Feast and the bird I’ve chosen for today is the humble, underrated Pigeon. In possibly the best book I’ve ever purchased, ‘Welsh Folklore’, by Elias Owen, I found the following; ‘If the sick asks for a pigeon pie, or the flesh of a pigeon, it is a sign that death is near. If the feathers of a pigeon be in a bed, the sick cannot die on it.’. I had so much fun thinking about this one as I have a somewhat morbid fascination, but I wanted to bring some humour and dialogue to my tale, in true JB style.
What woman?
Well I think it was a woman.
What else knocked the front door? Man? Beast?
I just don’t want to assume that’s all, but if you’re making me then I’ll say woman.
Right, so you open the door and she just hands you a dead pigeon?
Well, actually they just sort of pushed it through the letterbox.
Val! For fucks sake, why didn’t you push it back?
Because it came with a note.
What note?
It said, will you cook me this pigeon for me in exchange for its feathers?
And?
So, then I made the pie.
Firstly, next time be a normal person and tell them to fuck off and secondly, you know how to pluck and gut a pigeon?
Well, I did it.
Right. So, then she took the pie and went on her creepy merry way?
No, they left while I was making it.
So, where’s the pie now?
In the freezer.
And the feathers?
In the bin.
That really is the long and short of it, but I suppose I did miss out a few details. I missed out the part about how I didn’t let them in after they posted the dead pigeon, as they were already silently sat in the living room. I skipped the bit about their long black fur coat that smelled of rot, and how their hands were fleshless taut old skin on bone. I omitted any mention of the large curved knife whose handle their bones grasped tightly around. I left out the part about when I took the pigeon through to the kitchen, I blacked out for 2 hours and was presented with this pie. My hands greasy with butter, my mouth salty from tasting. And I really didn’t want to tell her that I kept the feathers, the beak, the bones, and the feet and wrapped them in newspaper, three times. I don’t know why I put the newspaper bundle in the old cake tin in the back of the cupboard but I do know she’ll never find it. Besides, to Paige, my naivety is more believable than all that.
So now I have a pigeon pie in the freezer which I’ll soon come to believe, is a gift from death.
‘If the sick asks for a pigeon pie, or the flesh of a pigeon, it is a sign that death is near. If the feathers of a pigeon be in a bed, the sick cannot die on it.’ - From ‘Welsh Folklore’, by Elias Owen.
