Hostile Architecture
Four feet of anti-bird spikes costs ten dollars. Eight costs fifteen. You can order them online for cheap. Lots of businesses downtown had started laying them out on their roofs to try and deter pigeons from defecating over their roofs and onto their carefully curated patios. If by unlucky circumstance the birds do land there, they’ll either be pricked by the short, sharp steel rods that protrude from the plastic strips or be somehow maimed and lose their flight. The sight of flightless pigeons stranded on rooftops has grown somewhat common in the last few months. Sometimes the businesses who put the spikes out would see the growing clumps of maimed birds marooned on their roofs and whack at them with brooms until they leap from the buildings and fall. It’s only when the vultures arrived to scrape at the concrete those pigeons met the earth again that animal control is called.
Last year the city paid just under half a million dollars to install anti-homeless spikes under parts of the highway. Certain areas have lines of bolts drilled into the ground to stop people from sleeping comfortably. Different areas have waist high, protruding spikes to make sure nobody could occupy the space. Some have rainbows painted on them. The homeless people who used to camp down there had to leave. At this point most of them had either retreated into the occasional thicket that sprouted up along the freeway or pawned off the last of their things to afford a Greyhound ticket bound for somewhere where they still had their dignity and flat ground to sleep on. The unlucky few who stayed had either become holding cell regulars or died overdosing on whatever they’re putting in the drugs these days.
The peregrine falcon utilizes a diving technique when they hunt. They’ll fly high up before tucking their wings and dropping towards their prey, reaching nearly two hundred miles per hour. Like most birds of prey, they hunt smaller animals. Mammals like rabbits, reptiles like snakes, and the occasional insect or two are typical for their diet. Ever since the anti-bird spikes were laid down over on tree branches and rooftops, peregrine falcons have used them to spear their prey. They’d fly up beside the spikes and pike their prey on the, skewering the animals bodies on cold steel. Rabbits and rodents would hang there next to the marooned pigeons, fur scraped up by the raptor’s claws, stomachs or heads pierced all the way through on the steel rods. The falcons would stop by every once in a while to pick at the dead things like some grotesque buffet. Pigeons would watch and, in their hunger, join.
The neat array of short, sharp, rainbow painted spikes beneath I-45 was known colloquially as ‘the Tri’ by the homeless community. If you visited the Tri in the early morning hours, when the onramp above wasn’t humming with the sound of busy commuters, you would likely find a thin guy wearing clothes that looked two sizes too large for him. People called him Skinny. He’d slept at the Tri for a while before the city came in and laid down the spikes, drilling the short, sharp metal rods into the concrete foundations beneath the overpass. He slept there for a while after too. Skinny dragged a ratty twin sized mattress that’d flown out of some poor sap’s truck overtop the spikes. For people in his predicament, being able to stay where you knew was a luxury. None of the other homeless people knew Skinny’s real name. He’d blown into town on a some years ago and quickly become a staple in the community. He was kind. Always smiling, even if the crack he smoked off the foil sheet he kept in his pocket had rotted his teeth.
When peregrine falcons are hungry and there are no rabbits or mice to swipe from the ground, they’re known to hunt small birds. They’ll dive down at the pigeons flying beneath them and tear their wings, rendering the bird incapable of flight, and drop the flightless thing on the anti-bird spikes, impaling it. They were mangled, their wings were usually torn from their bodies and their feet angled in unnatural directions. Those pigeons who were stranded on that roof and hadn’t been pushed to jump cautiously approached their impaled countrymen, either in mourning or out of a terrible necessity.
The owner of the store who laid out the spikes called the pigeons pests. They’re undesirables, he’d say. Like flying rats. At one point he considered hiring day laborers to pull the grotesquerie from the steel points lining his rooftop, but he wasn’t one for extraneous expenses. The city council met on the first and third Tuesday of the month, and in September the owner was first on the docket. Someone’s got to come take these birds down, he told them. They’re ruining my business. Knowing the shop owner held significant sway in the chamber of commerce, the city council sent a team of utility workers the following Sunday to pry the animals from the cold metal points that had become their graves. The feathers would get ruffled and caught on the rods, and the utility workers had to wear thick gloves to not cut their hands on the sharp anti-bird points. They’d stand on their tall ladders, leaning into the bitter nip of the autumn wind, prying the carcasses of those poor things from their premature burial pikes.
One of the utility workers was a young man clad in work jeans and a worn-out coat, Juan. Just the week earlier Juan’s car was stolen. The grainy security camera on the corner of his apartment complex showed his white Toyota peeling away with a smashed in window. He’d called the cops, but they weren’t any help. They told him to file a police report and that he’d hear from them if anything came up. He hadn’t heard anything yet, and in terms of automobile theft the likelihood that it was still in one piece was growing slimmer by the second. In the week since he had to ride to work with his father-in-law, Luis. Luis had been out of a job for about a month now. The auto-shop he ran was pushed out of business by a Firestone, and when their savings dried up and the condo they’d lived in for the better part of a decade slipped out of their price range, Juan and his wife Mia offered their in laws the extra room they’d been planning to use as a nursery. They’d have to wait to start a family of their own.
Crows and other corvids are strange when it comes to the spikes. The corvids are particular when landing near or around the wires, and if they’re not properly secured, they’re able to pry them from the ground and use them to build their nests. The spikes act as effective connecting pieces for the sticks and twigs traditionally used to build nests. Nowadays it’s not uncommon to see strips of wire propping nests against the old growth trees there. Ornithologists say the corvids use it as a protective barrier around their nest, but also as an integral piece for the nest’s structural integrity.
Skinny chose to sleep at the Tri, not out of desperation, but out of circumstance. He didn’t know the mattress would fly off that truck bed that afternoon, and he certainly didn’t know that the Tri would eventually become a hotbed of late-night rendezvous between dealer and customer, but it didn’t deter him. He preferred the company. Skinny saw so many people come and go that he took note of regulars. There was the girl with the nose ring who always bought coke from the guy with the tattoos, there was the guy with the beanie who bought pills off the gangbangers who never left their car, and there were the kids who wandered into the Tri looking for weed. They never went to the same dealer, bouncing around from the one person to who would make a quick buck selling them ground up oregano and calling it pot. They’d buy their weed and sit between the spikes in the Tri, passing around a lazy excuse for a joint, marveling in the rebellious authority this would give them over the other kids at their school. Sometimes Skinny wanted to go tell them not to hang around here, that things could be dangerous, but he never did. He’d usually return to his mattress and light up. Bells would sing in his ears after he got that first chuff down and his eyes started to feel light and dry. The adrenaline and rush it’d given him the first time he smoked it had worn off, and now when he smoked he just felt normal. Skinny shuffled against his mattress, his head nodding towards the side. The mattress squeaked and he adjusted it, trying to keep the corners of it atop two of the spikes giving him some semblance of a flat surface to sleep on, but it just wouldn’t work. The mattress kept slipping between the points, rolling Skinny towards the metal point. He’d catch himself in his stupor and try and adjust the mattress again. With a jittering hand he’d pull one corner of the mattress towards the spikes tip and hope it would hold. It would for a moment before it eventually sagged in some indignant display. Skinny resigned to balancing the mattress in his sleep. He nodded off into the faux-sleep trance he’d become all too familiar with and the mattress tensed for a moment before it all let go. Something slipped, Skinny rolled, and there was a crunch before things went red.
One September morning Luis dropped Juan at an offramp from I-45 where a work crew was waiting. There was yellow caution tape from pillar to pillar, blocking off the array of rainbow spikes. The police were clearing out, some had been standing near what looked like a mattress tipped between the jutting metal points. In the concrete beneath the highway there was a bird’s nest. It was tied together with those anti-bird spikes. Some crows watched the scene. Juan’s boss passed him a pair of gloves, a sponge, and a bucket. He walked through the array, watching his balance. As he grew closer, he realized one of the spikes was a different color. The tip, which should have been green, ran a brown red that crawled down the sides in awful streaks. The cops who stood there looking at the mattress told Juan that the coroner had been by earlier this morning. They said some crackhead had hit his head on the spike. Just a tweaker. Probably tried to fight someone for some crystal, one cop said to the other. They laughed. Juan lowered himself onto his knees and started scrubbing. The brown red buildup of blood came off easily, it was still relatively fresh. The crows on the beam above watched. One curved its head and opened its beak, as if to squawk, but there was no noise. The other turned back to its nest and pulled the spikes with its beak. The bird must’ve tensed it too much, and the wire snapped back out, slicing at their feet. It nicked one of them, and in a panic the two flailed their wings before taking flight. The rest of the sticks and twigs and branches that was the nest frayed out. A blue-green egg rolled from the nest it knocked against a bridge pillar; white albumen leaked out of the thin newly formed crack. The crows pattered out from beneath the highway and flew off toward the city. Juan kept his head down and scrubbed until the rainbow beneath that brown red gleamed through, but no matter how many strokes of a sponge it took, it would never be clean.
Note: This piece was originally published in Issue X of Apricity Magazine. A link to the original page can be found here.
I love this one