The Pecking Order

You surface into consciousness like breaking through deep water. Gasping. Disoriented. The taste of copper flooding your mouth. The porch boards have printed their grain into your cheek, and last night's Wild Turkey still burns somewhere behind your eyes, a small fire refusing to die.

Sunlight floods in, harsh as a police interrogation lamp.

The smell arrives next. Sweet-sick, intimate as a confession. Overripe fruit locked in a hot car. Meat gone gray. Your throat constricts. You swallow bile. Always swallowing things down.

Tick. Tick. Tick.

The sound pulls your focus. Precise. Metronomic. You lift your head, neck bones grinding like pestle against mortar, and see them.

Gulls.

Forty-seven of them. You count because counting means control.

They've arranged themselves like pallbearers waiting for the body to arrive. Mailbox. Porch rail. The dead oak your realtor had called "mature." Their heads pivot in perfect synchronization. Left. Right. Tick. Tick.

Their eyes: wet black stones. Older than birds. Older than watching.

Your molars ache. That specific frequency of dread, the one that tastes like pennies left in rain. Same feeling from standing outside Principal Morrison's office, age eleven, while he dialed your mother at Kroger's. The dread that announces: this is where the falling starts.

You push yourself up. The world tilts fifteen degrees. Your left knee pops like a .22 rifle. The gulls don't flinch.

Your father's voice surfaces from three months before the pancreatic cancer won: "Sometimes you gotta take what's coming to you." Rolling the words around his mouth like Wild Turkey. Like medicine. Like prophecy.

You'd thought he meant karma. The universe's accounting department.

You'd been wrong.

You stand. Take one step toward the door. Your shadow falls across the nearest gull. It doesn't move. None of them move.

The first one drops.

Whump.

Air displacement lifts every hair on your neck. Prehistoric recognition floods your hypothalamus: predator above. Just a bird, you tell yourself. Larus californicus. Garbage bird. Nothing but:

The second strikes your shoulder. Claws pierce your Nirvana t-shirt, the one from '92, the one you wore to his funeral. Pain arrives clean as a scalpel cut.

The third catches your ear. Blood runs warm down your neck.

Then the cloud.

They explode around you: industrial violence, mechanical precision. Wings beat against your skull with the rhythm of a punch card machine. Thwack-thwack-thwack. Their screams aren't animal. They're assembly line. Brake pads on metal. Circular saws hitting nails.

You throw your arms up. Useless. They're geometry and hunger. Beaks find the soft spots: web of thumb, hollow of throat, that tender place where skull meets spine. Each puncture blooms white then numbs. Your blood hits the porch boards in perfect circles. Plink. Plink. Plink.

They smell like low tide and WD-40. Like things that feed on things that rot.

Your hand finds the doorknob through muscle memory. The door opens. You fall backward through the threshold. It closes with the snick of a trap resetting.

Silence.

Your breathing fills the house. Wet. Ragged. Obscene.

Through the window: the gulls have resumed formation. Still as taxidermy. Like the last forty-three seconds were delirium tremens, your brain's bourbon-soaked apology for reality.

But you are bleeding. Seventeen neat holes. You count them. Organized as a filing system. The kind of wounds that heal without stories. The gash on your forearm has already started clotting. Your blood is darker than expected. Thicker. More honest.

The house exhales around you. That particular silence of spaces where things get left too long. The AC kicks on, cycling stale air through vents furred with dust.

That's when the smell registers properly.

You turn.

The corner.

Three garbage bags, Hefty Ultra Strong, have hemorrhaged across the hardwood. More than a week's decay. The Kung Pao chicken from Chen's has evolved past recognition, gone gelatinous and ambitious. Pizza boxes from Domino's soft as wet cardboard. Coors Light cans breeding fruit flies in perfect golden spirals. The bones from those Safeway rotisserie chickens, $4.99 on Tuesdays, the ones you eat standing over the sink.

The mess has geography: a topography of dissolution. Coffee grounds from Folgers. Marlboro butts. Those windowed envelopes from Citibank and Chase, unopened, unwanted, accumulating interest.

Something shifts in the pile. Deliberate. Not rat. Not roach. The garbage itself, settling into new configurations. Finding its level.

Outside, one gull taps the window. Tap. Tap. Tap. Patient as a process server.

You know what you should do. Simple transaction: remove garbage, birds leave. Basic cause and effect. If A then B.

But your legs have gone liquid. Because understanding arrives whole: the gulls aren't here about garbage.

They're here about what the garbage means.

Your hands shake. When did that start? Tuesday? Last August? Your father's hands shook at the end. Palsy, the hospice nurse said. Natural. Expected.

Another tap. Morse code you're starting to decode. The blood on your arm has oxidized to rust. Your mouth tastes like house keys and regret.

The pile shifts again. Exhales. Something inside has liquefied.

The gulls watch with their oil-slick eyes. They have time. They've been waiting since before you were born.

You look at your hands. Count the liver spots. Three new ones since December.

Your father was wrong about one thing: sometimes you don't take what's coming to you.

Sometimes it takes you. Piece by piece. In portions small enough to deny.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

The AC shuts off. Silence returns, heavy as held breath. As dirt.

You take one step toward the garbage. Stop. Through the window, all forty-seven heads turn. Ninety degrees. Synchronized.

Waiting to see what kind of person you really are.

The kind who cleans up the mess.

Or the kind who becomes it.

Your knee pops again. Louder. The sound of something essential giving way.

In the pile, a beer can rolls free. Stops exactly three feet from your bare foot.

The gulls lean forward. Just a centimeter. Just enough.

The sun shifts. Their shadows reach your door like fingers.

Tick. Tick. Tick.