Valleydale was nice.
It was well-maintained and well-planned and well-bred and well-priced to ensure that it all stayed that way. Its fences were picket fences and the picket fences were so white they gleamed in the lovely blue skies of its tasteful and comfortable summers and there were many of them with several nice beaches. It was mostly suburbia, and the bits that weren’t mostly existed to serve the suburbia.
Everyone there was happy. If they weren’t, they did something about it immediately. Which was why it was so surprising to have a last-minute complaint added to the minutes of the town hall’s monthly meetup.
“It’s the vultures,” said Carl Shapes. His mouth puckered in irritation as he enunciated the word ‘vultures,’ it wasn’t one he liked to have so close to his person. “At the dump. They swarm in the sky there, all day. Quite unpleasant.”
“We’ll do something about that,” promised Mayor Crisp. He snapped his fingers. “Get me a plan and an expert.”
After a quick coffee break an expert was herded to the podium, having been snagged from her own coffee run at the nearest drive-through. “Vultures,” she explained while dusting the large, firm handprints of the town’s aldermen from her shoulders, “are an important component of any ecosystem they exist in. They not only consume carrion – removing it from the environment along with any pathogens it may contain – they act as signals to other scavengers to locate corpses and remove them. An environment without vultures is a less healthy one, with more disease and decay. Also, you really don’t want to offend the birds.”
“Hmm, yes,” said Mayor Crisp. “Astounding. Well, that’s our expert. Plan?”
“I don’t like them. Let’s kill ‘em,” said Carl Shapes.
“Wonderful, wonderful,” said Mayor Crisp, shaking everyone’s hands. “Much good work done by all, happy to meet you, etc etc. Pour poison in some dead cows and leave them by the dump.”
So it was done, and the skies of Valleydale were bluer and emptier than ever, and if the smell got worse well, that was in the dump and nobody cared about that, or it was in the woods and DEFINITELY nobody cared about that.
***
The first reprisal came a week later.
Mayor Crisp awoke to hear a tapping, as of someone gently rapping at his windowpane. “It’s some branch,” he muttered, “smacking at my glass it’s plain – what a pain.”
Then the screaming started and didn’t stop.
It didn’t stop at five am, it didn’t stop at six am, it didn’t stop at seven or eight or even nine am. It was a nest of grackles posted just outside the mayor’s bedroom, filled with violent delight and eager to express it as if pus from a boil. At ten am he caved in and went downstairs to get some work done, where he found mail in his mailbox, email in his inbox, recordings in his answering machine, and worst of all, Carl Shapes on his doorstep.
“I don’t mean to complain,” he complained, “but we don’t have pigeons in town, right?”
“No,” said Mayor Crisp.
“No we have pigeons or no we don’t have pigeons?”
“No, we don’t have pigeons.”
“So we don’t have pigeons.”
“Yes. I just said that.”
“You’re forgiven,” said Carl Shapes ungraciously. “Anyways, like I said, I don’t mean to complain but pigeons seem to have crapped all over my car. Can you do something about that?”
“Yes yes of course yes, very interesting,” said Mayor Crisp. “We’ll do something about that. I’ll call an expert and make a plan or something.” He gently made shooing gestures at Carl, then squinted behind him. “What’s that?”
“What’s what?”
“The big off-white blob in my driveway.”
“I don’t know. It looks like someone’s care covered in pigeon crap.”
Mayor Crisp looked up and down the street. “Fascinating. Amazing. Do you know where my car is?”
“It could be under the pigeon crap.”
“Hah! Ahahaha! Hah! You’re a real card, Mister Shapes. Hah. I’m going to go make a plan and call experts. Goodbye and good-day.”
Mayor Crisp slammed the door, went upstairs stopping to punch the drywall at every other step, and phoned the chief of police. “Give me weapons,” he demanded. “Give me giant clouds of pepper spray. Give me bb cannons. Give me anything to purge winged, feathered little fuckers from my town. Things here are nice, and that means they work the way we want them to. This is unacceptable.”
“Sure, whatever,” said Susan. “Y’want handcuffs with that?”
“Yes. No!” Mayor Crisp shook his head. “They don’t have hands. Awful. Just awful.”
He hung up. The phone rang in his hand as if in offense, and his treacherous thumb answered it before he could stop it. “Hello?” he ventured.
“Mister mayor, I am Ramone Shoe. I work at city hall, and I am sorry to report that your office is full of grackles right now. You haven’t used it in the last three years, but you can’t use it right now, and I wanted you to know that just in case. Thank you, and goodbye.”
Mayor Crisp phoned the chief of police again.
“Hey.”
“Get me swat teams armed with rubber bullets and rubber teams bulleted with swat arms,” he snarled. “This bird ain’t gonna fly.”
***
The citizens of Valleydale didn’t complain. The birds were a nuisance, and that was unacceptable, and therefore dealing with them – however it was done – was acceptable.
But it was a bit much to have armed police on every corner, magdumping into the sky at the first twitch, coo, or cackle. The treecover was getting denuded to nigh-on-autumnal levels, and it was barely June.
“I think things are going great,” said Mayor Crisp at the monthly town hall. “They’re amazing and fabulous. We’ve gone from one hundred percent pigeon crap saturation of every vehicle in town to eighty-seven percent, which means we only need to try six to seven times harder and we’ll be right back where we started. It’s really great and wonderful. It’s great. It’s great. It’s great.” He squinted at the nearest figure. “Are you a reporter?”
“No mister mayor.”
“I knew that. I know that, it’s really excellent that I know that. What time is it? Four am?”
“It’s five pm.”
“Oh god I need to go to bed, they’ll wake me soon. They wake me. But we’re winning. We’re winning. Are you a reporter?”
“No mister mayor, I’m Ramone Shoe. I work at city hall.”
“I don’t recognize you.”
“You don’t talk to anyone at city hall.”
“That’s good, that makes sense. What is it?”
“We’ve lost the beaches to geese, mister mayor. They’ve already spiked the bacterial count in the lake beyond our water treatment plant’s capacity to handle, destroyed the marina, and secured a beachhead on our beach head. The lifeguards are holed up in the snack bars but are unable to escape. They request immediate evac. Your orders?”
“That’s great. Let’s get an expert and a plan.” Mayor Crisp blinked six times very quickly. “Take five for coffee,” he concluded as he slid bonelessly to the floor.
***
They couldn’t find the first expert because she’d left town, but they were able to find someone who knew someone who knew someone whose brother was an expert, and after luring him in with a false promise of a weekend festival, they were able to extract information from him.
“It’s really simple,” he explained before the amassed citizenry. “You’ve got to apologize for what you’ve done wrong to the birds. Then they’ll stop. Anything else will prompt further escalation. Can I go now?”
“But we’ve done nothing wrong,” said Carl Shapes from the audience.
“You’re killing them in large numbers and when they got upset about that you killed more of them. Can I go now?”
“They started it.”
“Can I go now?”
“Why are you so concerned about that?”
“You tied me to the podium. Can I go now?”
“We did that or you wouldn’t have stayed.”
“I’m done. Can I go now?”
“Yes, yes, send him back to the birds or wherever,” said Mayor Crisp, slapping his hands together firmly. “So! We have an expert, we had an expert, now we will have a plan. I’m thinking cybernetic housecats.”
“Spray DDT on everything and fill the lake with lead shot pellets!” shouted a maniac in the crowd.
“Takes too long,” said Mayor Crisp. “I need to be re-elected next year, not in ten years. So we’re going to do the cybernetic house cats. And flak cannons. And we’ll weaponize the park’s lawnmowers. And mowerize the parker’s lawn weaponry. Yes. Yes! It will work. It will work. It will work. Everything’s fine and nice and will be perfect again, surely.”
There was breaking glass and a short, sharp shriek, interspersed with furious squawking. Seagulls were pouring in through the street exit and were demolishing the tardier citizens as if they were stray fries. Carl Shapes was already lodged halfway down the throat of a cold-eyed black-backed gull, arms waving an inadvertent, desperate farewell.
“Be strong! Be brave. Be well-groomed,” urged Mayor Crisp, already halfway out the window. “I’m with you one hundred percent!”
***
The lawnmowers kept the geese from spreading free of the beaches, but at a cost: every backyard within six blocks of the shoreline was sheared bald. Brown soil bleached under merciless heat where once thick, luscious blades of grass grew to respectably-groomed heights. And although the enemy armada was stalled, their irregulars remained undaunted. Despite martial law and the mass recruitment of every able-bodied citizen above age fourteen into the town guard, car defilement remained above eighty-five percent (one hundred percent for law enforcement transportation) and most citizens were receiving a little less than an hour of sleep per day due to incessant screaming from blackbirds, grackles, chickadees, jays, finches, thrushes, doves, crows, and the odd escaped parrot.
A citizenry thus under siege cannot maintain vigilance forever, and it is in such dishevelled states that the cracks of distraction will blossom into the furrows of destruction.
Mayor Crisp stared blankly at the paper in front of him. “What am I looking at?” he inquired hopefully.
“Your desk, mister mayor.”
“What’s on it?”
“Some blank notepaper for notes.”
“Wow. Who did that?”
“I did, mister mayor. I’m Ramone Shoe. I work at city hall.”
“Great, beautiful. Phenomenal. Why am I here?”
“To read the message you’re holding in your right hand.”
Mayor Crisp stared at his right hand, then gave it to Ramone Shoe.
“It appears that under cover of darkness, last night a squad of crack owls snuck into the county museum and liberated certain esoteric texts from the security vault.”
“Aha,” said Mayor Crisp, nodding his head firmly. “That makes sense.”
“And now we can expert grave repercussions.”
“Right, great. We should get an expert.”
A distant crash echoed for miles.
“It may be a little late for that,” said Ramone Shoe, as they watched the cloud of dust rise from what had once been the police station. Above it circled a single form, five-winged, wider-spanned than any human field of sport could measure. It hissed like a snake, then gently horked. The streets below it sloshed gently and subsided under the weight of tens of tons of acidic vomit.
“A plan, then?”
“That’s a gros vautour, mister mayor. There is no existing plan for that.”
“Right, right, right. No plan, no expert. Great, wonderful. I’m going home to clean my car.”
There was a heaving crack outside. The dead rose from beneath the streets and began to claw, moaning in agony, at the monuments of the living. A crow sat on a lamppost above them, cawing in glee through a mouthful of priceless and untranslatable blasphemic script.
“It’s too late for that, mister mayor.”
“Ahahaha, I don’t think so, not really. Always more time to make sure everything’s nice and tidy, right? It’s got to be perfect, yes, perfection starts at home.”
“By whose standards, mister mayor?”
“Look, stop being so pushy. What’s your job, anyways?”
“Ravens, mister mayor.”
“Right, right. Right. What’s that?”
“I’m ravens.”
For the first time in twelve years, Mayor Crisp looked another person in the eyes to see what was there.
A beak clattered insolent at him from Ramone Shoe’s left eyesocket.
“Oh.”
“All you had to do was think, mister mayor,” said Ramone Shoe, through his eyesocket and his coat sleeve and his pants and his suitcase. A leg emerged from one ear and gently grasped his shoulder; feathers shuffled loosely under his shirt. “All you had to do was think.”
“But that’s so HARD,” managed Mayor Crisp feebly. His hands were on his desk. Surely there would be something there that would save him. A pen, wielded bravely. A desk ornament, flung with force. A letter-opener?
But all that was there was him and some blank paper.
The paper was nice and white and clean though. That made him feel better until it wasn’t, and by then he didn’t care as much about anything.
***
On the seventeenth day of the siege, a mockingbird reached the left ear of the universe and spoke into it. Thereafter, Valleydale was no longer a problem. Its offense was removed. Its crimes were resolved. Its existence was sorted and its debtors recompensed. Nicely.
Tragically, the vultures did not return. Even as an important carrion-removing, disease-preventing component of an ecosystem, utterly and soberly devoted to keeping things clean and well-kept, you can’t eat trace electromagnetic smears.