Uncanny valley

Pink millions of passenger pigeons slammed the sun shut again and again for fifty thousand years. Above the Ohio River, a solar eclipse for three days straight as one flock passed over. Men and boys stood on the banks, Audubon wrote, shooting at the pilgrims. Who wound down the paved streets, candle-guided in the noon dim. Who believed the devil flew above in sky-wide skeins. Three days: They claimed they could not take it. Claimed some things were not made for this world. Cast into shade, the city looked different. Like a place where bullets, shot, just disappeared.

*

The last wild Pyrenean ibex, Celia, was tracked by radio collar and found at last crushed beneath a fallen trunk. Gently curved horns. After three years, fifty-seven implantations, and seven pregnancies, her clone was sliced from a host goat’s belly. She couldn’t breathe. The theory of relativity states that a life ten minutes long feels as long as any. The woolly mammoth, the great auk, the heath hen, the passenger pigeon are all candidates for de-extinction. Blood down a vein: now open for patent.  

*

If the meal were the whole weight of milk. The udder and the ever-soft calf’s tongue. But the meal is a flourish of pigeons cut out of the sky like the rain itself. 

If the meal were the heft of whole milk, it could coat your stomach. You could weigh its loss like you drag your own feet. But pigeons sliced from so much, they must be God Himself—you cannot call wanting. Later, three days become three birds. You remember the underparts of their wings, soft like newborns.  

*

The Second Coming: all ten minutes of gasping It. 

*

Next, wounds miraculously heal. Next, the dead with heads on ice start to speak. And you are ergo pardoned for having not murdered who has been brought back to life, who was wounded only. And the revived heads will cohost parties with the clones of the last-dead members of each species, who have inherited the traits that got them knocked off in the first place: flightlessness, flying too much, being caught between excesses. But by then it is a kinder world. Every tree will be hung with peaches and every night a fresh chilling air. The streamers and cups will be picked up later. They’ll send a shiver through you then, though you won’t know why.