The doves are too small to eat with utensils, so he pulls the little birds apart with his fingers that are bony like the tiny ribcages. In the dining hall, to his right, his wife, and to his left, his oldest friend, each similarly occupied. The scraps of meat are pungent and stingy, full of buckshot as bothersome as the pebbles that used to work their way into his track shoes. He feels a slight rush of air as Barbara passes the pepper shaker behind his back to Charles, who then hands her a bottle of wine, accompanied by their combined laughter like too loud dinner music. Distracted, he accidentally swallows one of the little silver balls. He imagines it finding its ways into his bloodstream, feels certain it is already hurtling toward his unsuspecting heart that for many years now has been made so vulnerable.

*

The birds arrive suddenly in his sixteenth summer, settling into the mass of blackberry canes near his bedroom window. Their relentless songs interrupt his nightly dreams of the girl who plays flute in the orchestra, the one his friend Charles watches, too. His dreams are so real that when he awakens he thinks she’s actually there, performing a solo just for him with her instrument like a slender tree branch charmed by her red painted lips and nails. At school he daydreams of Barbara, fails exams, glides around the track, competes, wins. At night, he’s awakened over and over by the birds his mother says are male nightingales singing to attract mates from the sky. One day, sleep-deprived and love-sick, he writes to Barbara a long poem about her flute, the birds, her mouth, his bed, and slips it into her hall locker before he can lose his courage. The birds torment him, their music non-stop waves of distracting notes. He decamps to Charles’ house across town, not talking about the letter, only of the birds. Barbara hurries past him in the school hallways, blushing, avoiding his eyes. Returning home days later for changes of clothes, he finds his bedroom window flung open, sheets of music covered in red lipstick kisses scattered across his bed, the nightingales gone.

*

In their 50s he organizes a vacation on the island for himself, Barbara, Charles, and Antonia, Charles’ third wife. His excitement is infectious: They’ll drink wine, swim in the sea, sleep in. On the fifth day, a local man knocks on the door of their rented house and offers to take them dove hunting for a small fortune in gold. They decline, joking boisterously about the irony of doves being a peace symbol and how they’d probably shoot one another. The next day three young men interrupt lunch in the backyard to announce that their family is owed payment for the cancelled hunting trip. He says they never had an agreement and accuses the men of hustling them—a word they don’t know but whose meaning they angrily guess. When Barbara tries to calm the intruders, she’s accidentally jostled and falls hard on the paving stones. Before he can move, Charles rushes to help her up, screaming at the men and grabbing a steak knife before they hurriedly back away. He and Antonia watch in shock, not at the altercation but at the way Barbara clings to Charles, who tenderly dusts off her thighs, her breasts. He realizes he has already been paying a price for his thoughtlessness, perhaps for a long time, in something far more precious than gold.

*

It’s been so many years now. In the dining hall, one of the carers brings a teacup for them to deposit the buckshot into. They eat and eat. Even sharing, there’s not enough meat to satisfy them and so many little, brittle bones to choke on. The other residents are wheeled away to their single rooms while the three of them continue to dine together as they always have. He offers a wishbone, which he and Charles wrestle with before breaking in half, leaving him with the long end and his granted hope. He and Barbara snap the next, with him getting the short end and wondering about her wish. Then he watches as Barbara and Charles struggle with a bone, ending in Charles now getting his desire. The staff click off the lamps at the other tables and quietly depart, while on and on the three of them gnaw on the flesh, find the little bones, trading off in pairs to break them. Over and over they win and lose the wishes that fly up into the sky on ghostly wings. The wishes, grazed by guilt and contradiction, scatter in all directions, solitary, unmet.