by Parker Young
Project Pigeon
In 1943, the United States government paid behaviorist B.F. Skinner to develop a homing missile of his own devising. The missile was to be guided by a team of three pigeons from a compartment inside the nose cone.
“Our problem,” Skinner later said, “was no one would take us seriously.”
Cereal
Skinner’s project received additional support from General Mills, whose executives were inspired, it’s safe to assume, by his training protocol, which involved rewarding pigeons for accurate target identification by opening a drawer full of grain.
Becoming Tortoise
I spent weeks trying to write a scene in which the phrase “be coming toward us” is misheard as “becoming tortoise,” but I couldn’t manage to do it. Nothing I came up with qualified as believable realist dialogue.
Be Coming Toward Us
“They be coming toward us, boys!” screams Captain Blackbeard to his crew. “Man the artillery!”
Instead, everyone rushes to the railing for a better view.
“No! That ship yonder is not ‘becoming tortoise,’ boys. They be coming toward us!”
They ignore him. A strange feeling overwhelms him; he takes hold of a span of rigging just to steady himself. It’s like he already lived through this exact scenario once before. Now he remembers: he once read about it in a realist story by the writer Parker Young. In fact, he probably never would have phrased it that way — “They be coming toward us!” — had he not read it in the story first.
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Parker Young is the author of the story collection Cheap Therapist Says You're Insane. His fiction has appeared in Joyland, Forever Magazine, SARKA, and elsewhere.