Fiction | October 07, 2026

Stump 

All around downtown Portland, Oregon, pigeons died and more were born. Every hour. Shell-cracking births in the dank crooks of underpasses; grisly deaths under the wheel of a car or by the beak of their competitor the crow. Such dramatic turnover. Just the sort of overwhelming truth Dolly liked to seize on, torment herself with.  

“Trade you forks for your gloominess,” Joan said, handing three to her daughter. They lived in a cul-de-sac bordering the city, their neighbors all coupled and over fifty, their yard evergreen and ever too wet and overgrown. “I think it’s beautiful. Birth, death, the whole wonderful cycle taking place around us. Tell that to Steve when he arrives. He needs to stay hopeful.”  

If Dolly were dying, as Steve was, she would not want any reminders of mortality. But Joan never reacted to Dolly’s profound realizations with anything close to satisfying shock. Little fazed her. As a protest organizer in the late eighties, Joan had lost an incisor against a police baton at Tompkins Square Park; she’d become boneless, muscle-less, impossibly heavy during arrests. She had put her body between old men and young girls outside abortion clinics in seven different states, and she sometimes alluded wistfully to cocaine-fueled nights, each mention sending Dolly into a controlled stillness in hopes more would be divulged. More than the stories, it was the proud, casual way Joan told them, how she spoke as if adventure had been inevitable. That inevitability had yet to find Dolly, languishing in her first semester at the Episcopal high school where Joan worked as a beloved, practically tenured administrator.  

“Ninety percent of pigeons perish in their first year of life,” Dolly read from her phone. With her free hand, she placed the heaviest of their mismatched forks onto a folded cloth napkin, because Joan had said Steve’s motor control was better with weightier objects. Growing up, Dolly was discovering, simply meant learning a longer and longer list of what could go wrong with your health. Steve’s addition, one of those degenerative brain diseases that sets its own tempo and reserves the right to change it at any point, brought on a wave of nausea every time she considered it. Joan pulled a dish of stuffed onions from the oven and clanked it onto the stovetop. Dolly lifted her shirt over her nose.  

“It will be so good to see him,” Joan said, peeking under each white bulb with the spatula’s corner. She’d said it at least four times a day since the plan was made. She and Steve had run in the same New York activist circles, but she’d never mentioned him to Dolly before he reached out two weeks ago to announce he was dying and traveling around the country, visiting old friends while he still could. Since then, Joan had hung on his every update, reporting to Dolly his worsening and improving condition, which city he was in, the particular slur of his words over the phone. 

“So good,” Joan repeated, and slid the tray back under the heat, her bending body threatening the seams of an old T-shirt that read “George Bush: Vegetable or Noxious Weed?” above a cracking image of a suit blooming tangled vines where the head should be. Her fuchsia bun flopped forward, gray roots expanding like a stain from her crown. “If you won’t clean your room before he gets here, then at least close the door.”  

Dolly closed the door with herself inside. Steam from the heating vents rose above the wet shrub under her window. Beyond, black pine trees poked the sky like the delicate finials of some encompassing fence. As far back as she could remember, it had been stranger to have a man in their house than not. Dolly’s closest friends also had either single moms or two moms. Her own father was a sperm-bank ejaculation she’d get to read about when she finally turned eighteen, if she still wanted to by then.  

She changed out her everyday earrings, small white opal studs, and slid in two plastic electric-blue lightning bolts, dangly and long as fingers. She was pressing the backing over the post, feeling the metal edge squeeze into her lobe, when Joan called for her to get the door.