Dawn

This morning I was coming into work earlier than normal. I emerged from the subway station to that moment when dawn is about to pass on to morning. It had an element of the surreal. At first I didn’t know if it was because of the shift of daylight from the time I got onto the subway twenty minutes earlier. Or if it was a different sound level – the hustle and bustle of the morning commuters just starting to ramp up, but not yet there. Or if it was because the streets were a bit more vacant than usual. All this went through my head in the few seconds I entered the street. And then a white flash shot in front of me. That was the surreal part. The seagulls had not vanished yet. Had not retreated to higher ground as the homo-sapiens took over. And they were huge. Nothing like the little pigeons that are everywhere during the day. These guys were beasts. Big breasted with a wing span of three feet, they were big enough to feed a family of four on Thanksgiving. Or perhaps two of them could. And they were owning the street and the sidewalks and the skies. I had a flash of the lead into the climax of Alfred Hitchcock’s famous Birds. I got a little nervous.





They were soaring above the street, skimming the tops of parked cars. During the day they are around, but occupy the higher flight paths. I know this because of the bones. I had forgotten I was going to post all this today, until just now. When all of a sudden I hear the clatter on the roof above me. The seagulls fly by and drop the bones of their meals. The roof is littered with bones. Don’t mess with the seagulls, especially in the early hours. They own the dawn.