The Massacre

 

When the golfers are gone

the crows congregate. 

Not a murder per se, 

but more of a massacre 

with the violent beating of wings.

***

Scattered Thoughts

When my thoughts 

scatter like startled 

crows from a tree.

***

Somewhere near Whitehall

 

Somewhere near Whitehall

I saw an empty can crushed

by the side of the road next to

car-bought carrion for crows.

And a colorful sign welcoming

a carcass of a man dead to

a world in which he does not

feel he has a place to pause.

But a cross towers above it all

looking like a telephone poll

signaling the way from death to life 

somewhere near Whitehall.

***

Two Birds and a Crow

 

It was the strangest thing.  I was on a walk with Anya and our dog yesterday when I heard a kind of aggressive grunt-bark coming from somewhere above our heads in the trees.  Anya just kept talking away but I was swiveling my head all about trying to find the source of the disconcerting sound.  

My eye finally caught some movement at the top of a large tree where it appeared some birds were darting in and out of the leaves.  And then I saw the crow.  It was at least twice the size of the two smaller birds and sitting on a branch.  The two birds kept diving at the crow and then swerving away to circle back and then repeat the process.  I was captivated and suddenly remembered something that had happened at our old house.  

Every year robins would make a nest under the eaves of our gazebo to lay their blue eggs.  We’d sneak out at times to see the mother sitting there but if we were too loud or too close she would swoop down to the railing and make loud chirps until we retreated (see photo).  When they hatched I would lift Anya up to see their little beaks just over the rim of the nest and if we made a noise they would think the mother was back and start loudly chirping for food.  

One particular year after the eggs were laid we came home to find pieces of those beautiful eggs littered in the gutter.  Elias and I tried unsuccessfully to hide them before little Anya could see it but curiosity got the best of her.  She was quite upset and thought the squirrel was the culprit.  We somehow figured out that a crow had destroyed and devoured those eggs.

It made sense, then, what I was seeing.  It was highly likely that the crow had discovered the birds’ nest and they were desperately trying to force it to leave the eggs alone.  The crow was standing its ground letting out these strange guttural noises and I thought of that line from a Tennyson poem which speaks of Nature as “red in tooth and claw”.  

***

The Crow King

He stood on the bridge 

alternating his gaze 

from water to skyline

skyline to water

and then up at the clouds

his head in yes-motion.

Wherever his vision lit

he found no place 

for his head to rest

or body to nest

but if he lingered

he’d face arrest.

So the time was here

to fly, to die, to cry out 

against the cold city

with its impersonal

charity cheaply bought

and grudgingly wrought. 

He was the Crow King

freefall in full swing

wondering what death brings

if not some kind of relief

to a life too brief

living lost and alone.

***

Eating Myself

The balding head

The broken nose

The trick ankle and

Love of crows

All so very ridiculous!

The numberless books

The pointless rhymes

The need to be needed

And thankless crimes.

Where should I go?

Trapped in a life

Thoughtless and cruel

Eating myself

Ego as gruel.

***

Unstuck in Time

Aaron has come unstuck in time, much like Billy Pilgrim at the beginning of chapter two in Slaughterhouse-Five.  There’s a kind of snipping sensation when his eyes lose focus and take a rest so that his internal vision can take over the controls.  Don’t try to talk to him when this happens.  You will be just some disembodied voice, like a medium from another plane of existence trying to break through.  He can, and likely will, ignore you.

It is the act of writing that he is experiencing.  The trigger is more often than not a particular memory or, more accurately, the *feeling* of a memory that begs to be re-felt and, in the re-feeling, shared with people who might want to read about such things so they can feel it too.  It is a reflection of our shared experience of the world.  We are all connected, so they say.

Check his backlog.  For some reason a crow is a recurring feature in these stories, especially the ones that reach back into his childhood.  Aaron is not sure why this must necessarily be the case but it seems unavoidable or even inevitable as a stand-in for himself or other key players.  Maybe it’s a symbol for something mysterious or inexplicable, like “all people are connected.”  His favorite, though the title might be a bit too on the nose, is “The Crow.”  That one is a doozy and really happened to his younger self.

What has sparked these thoughts as of today?  Well, for one, he is re-reading Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five due to this year being the 50^th anniversary of its publication.  He just so happens to be 50 years old himself and is at this very moment writing in 3^rd person in case you were wondering.

And something that happened yesterday as well...  Aaron becomes unstuck in time, but only by one day in order to share something strange that happened that is destined to be a felt memory.  His son has gone to the neighborhood Rec Center to play basketball and upon his return the 14 year old boy is obviously upset about something.  He comes into the kitchen and plops down on a stool and hits his not-quite-adult-sized fist onto the table.  

“What’s wrong, buddy?”  Aaron asks, speaking as his father.

“Nothing.”

They go back and forth with no information being exchanged until Aaron takes a stab at guessing what might be wrong to try and break the fruitless cycle.

“OK, I think you are angry at yourself because you saw an old lady stumble and fall at the Rec Center and you walked away and did nothing.”

The son stops staring into space and focuses on his father with a quizzical look.

“Am I right?”  Which is the only thing Aaron can say in response to such a look because he was not expecting it.

“Dad, I was walking home and I saw an old man fall out of his wheelchair in his driveway and he was saying ‘help, somebody help.’  I didn’t know what to do.  I saw a woman come over and she called 911 on her phone but I just kept walking.  I’m so mad at myself.  Why didn’t I stop and help?”

Aaron assures him that feeling upset at himself is a good thing and a sign that he cares about other people but that there was nothing to be done apart from that woman calling 911.  What the father is really thinking as these reassuring words are coming from his mouth is, “How in the sam hill was I able to interpret my son’s emotions so accurately without knowledge of what had actually happened?!”  He suspects time travel.

***

The Flying Man

From above it is the bright yellow backboard that stands out, nailed to the back of a small green barn, a boy dribbling a basketball awkwardly in the grass underneath it.  The edges are painted red which match the centered rectangle.  There are also red letters on it, but I no longer remember what the word is, only that I painted it with a spray can and stencil when I was a kid.

The barn is not tall enough for the goal to sit at its full height of ten feet which is fine with the boy.  He already has a regulation-sized goal on the driveway in front of the barn.  This one is something he has made with his own hands and affixed to the barn with the help of a ladder and a neighborhood friend.  If he charges straight at it and plants his foot on the wall to spring upwards he can just brush the rim with his fingertips even though he is too short to even touch the bottom of the net on a real goal.  

It is a lazy summer day at the edge of a small town in southern Indiana.  From my vantage point above the scene I can see the cornfields stretching off into the distance behind the house.  I have taken the form of a crow in my mind’s eye to ride the winds of memory back to my boyhood; to this particular place, day, and time.  I caw loudly in greeting but the boy only glances in my general direction before fixing his attention back on the goal.    

The wind is really whipping today snapping the sheets hanging on the clothesline and threatening to whip them up into the sky.  I have to land on the top of the post closest to the barn where the boy is attempting a hook shot.  The ball careens off the side of the rim and rolls between the bushes and into the grassy expanse that separates the house from the cornfield.  He runs to retrieve it, but when he bends to pick it up he hears a peculiar noise that makes him forget the ball and look skyward.

It is a kind of buzzing sound that is faint, but growing louder.  Looking westward I see what it is he has already discovered.  It is an ultralight aircraft flying over the cornfield, the pilot perched below its wing in front of a small motor-driven propeller.  The boy has seen these before in the summertime headed for the small airstrip to the east of town.  He waves vigorously at the man to try and get his attention.  Then it happens... the motor sputters and coughs a time or two before going completely silent. 

The boy feels his heart starting to pound in his chest as he realizes the airstrip is too far away for the man to reach it without power.  He cups his hands around his mouth and yells at the man to see if he needs help but either he cannot hear him or he is too preoccupied with his situation to respond.  The boy abandons the basketball and runs to pull his bike out of the barn.  He pumps the pedals to catch the road heading eastward hoping to follow the contraption that is quietly gliding through the sky to an uncertain landing.  His imagination comes up with possible scenarios for the pilot’s fate.  Will he hit a tree?  Electrical lines?  Will he land on Highway 37 and get hit by a semi?  Will his plane burst into flames when it hits the ground?

Whatever the outcome, the boy is determined to follow the descent.  He has to keep visual contact because there is no sound to help identify its location.  I fly in his wake as he splits the wind for me.  We pass down streets and through neighborhoods that he has never been in before but it is necessary to parallel the plane’s path.  After a few minutes of pedaling at a furious pace he finally sees the ultralight disappear over a rise and he ditches his bike in the grass to track it down.  Climbing a small hill he feels his insides quivering.  Will the man be injured or even dead?  

As he crests the hill he sees the man extricating himself from what appears to be an intact aircraft that has nose planted into the shallow rise of a hillside.  He appears frustrated which turns to irritation at the appearance of the boy.  The boy asks if he is OK as I sweep up into a tree to observe their interaction.  He offers to ride his bike somewhere to get help, but the man waves it off and says he is fine and doesn’t need any help.  The boy did not expect him to be so gruff.  His thoughts of saving the day quickly fade as the man turns away and ignores him.  In a moment of insight and with a shrug of his shoulders the boy thinks that maybe the man is embarrassed and wonders to himself, “what’s up with grown-ups anyway?”  It is a good question and not one this crow can answer for him.

***

The Fox

I sat heavily at the base of the tree as my body began to fail me and shut down one vital organ at a time until all that was left was a kind of vision or sighted-awareness that pulled me through the orbs of my eyeballs like a man jumping through the portal of a sinking ship.

There was no one around to observe the dissolution of the processes of my physical existence much less the escape of what was left, but something must have been signaled by my demise as a figure coalesced from the shadow of leaves darkening the forest floor.

I saw if not sensed its dark profile, a large curving nose coming to a point like the blade of a scythe and I felt a chill run down my spine that no longer existed in this disembodied state.  The man-shape approached with what appeared to be a confidence mixed with caution.

I sat there defenseless, no arms to raise, no legs to run, no mouth to shout, just my naked being quivering in a timeless space or a spaceless time, confused and unclear as to the rules of the game once one has crossed over from life to death, or different-life as it were.

My fear appeared to embolden the thing as it drew substance and form from it, undulating in odd proportions though retaining an overall humanoid appearance with predatory eyes the color of obsidian looking to encase me in their cold and dark malevolence.  

When all hope seemed lost a fox came trotting down the path, its red fur flickering through the shafts of light that pierced the forest canopy.  It locked eyes with the shadow-form as it stepped into full sun and burst ablaze, then charged and leapt without hesitation.

On impact the shadow splintered into a murder of crows scattering to find refuge in the tree tops far from the fox.  He turned his cool blue eyes my way and I knew in an instant it was my son who had passed over before me as a child, now an unlooked for savior.

And I saw my body reclining against the tree amongst the Autumn leaves.  It had carried me far along the path of this earthly existence, but I was happy to leave it to be reunited with the red-headed boy who I’d helped bring to life, and he had returned the favor.

***

The Battle of Four Birds' Nests

Spring of 2018 will go down in Haney History as “The Battle of Four Bird’s Nests.”  Every year since we have lived here a robin has visited our gazebo in the Spring and built a nest tucked under the protection of its roof.  The kids love to be lifted up so they can see the pale bluish green eggs and watch the robin make forays for food once they have hatched, the nest full up of oversized yellow beaks reacting to any sound that might be their mother’s return.

If we are out in the yard she will sit on the fence, a tree branch, or the gazebo railing and chirp loudly at us as if to say “Go away!  Go away!  I have to feed my babies and you are making me nervous!”  Elias was four when it first happened and Anya has followed in his steps as a yearly witness to this phenomenon.

This year was no exception.  The robin came and built its nest in the same spot and laid its eggs.  But this year the nest was ransacked by some unknown animal and the nest unceremoniously dumped onto the floor of the gazebo.  This happened three different times as the robin stubbornly rebuilt its nest.  

At some point Anya saw some crows on the street in front of our house messing with something that she discovered were broken robin egg shells.  She was tearful and mad at the same time surmising the crows were the culprit, though they may have simply been opportunists.  Squirrels and chipmunks are active in our back yard, but the rabbits get a pass as they are not well known for their climbing skills.

Then a final nest was built in a different spot out on the cross beams of the gazebo and that one remained, but no eggs or baby birds have been forthcoming.  Today I gathered up the four aborted nests and added them to my lawn waste after mowing and clearing out some low hanging branches.  It was sad not having any cheeping baby birds this year.  Only wrecked nests and the realization that life doesn’t always go as we would like.

Listening to the Voices

It's like the words are whispered into my ear, 

voices that I pull onto paper and then cock my head 

to listen for more while perched on the front porch.

I am no great font of wisdom, no mystic crow

or seer of mysteries and so I wonder, 

where in the world are these words coming from?  

All I know is…

if I write them down I feel better,

less burdened, less bowed

by the weight of what I do not understand.

***

Food for Thought

He sat in the darkness indian-style in front of the open pantry door.  His flashlight lay next to him shining its light under the bottom shelf illuminating cans of vegetables.  He had picked out five of them and was carefully writing words on the bottom side with a black sharpie.

The can in hand was spinach, the worst of the bunch in his estimation.  It was the kind that sloshes out when you pour it into a pan to warm it up on the stove, a gooey dark green clump, almost black, that his mother sometimes made for dinner.  It was so repulsive that he would douse each bite in salt, hold his nose closed with his free hand, then swallow it in one gulp quickly followed by enough water to thoroughly rinse his mouth of the taste.  Those nights it was almost guaranteed he would wet the bed.

He put the finishing touches on the last can and carefully put them in the back of the pantry where they were likely to be chosen last or maybe even forgotten.  The sharpie fit snugly into a loop stitched into the cargo pocket of his pants.  He grabbed the flashlight while standing to his feet and its light washed over some family vacation photos taped to the side of the refrigerator.  He paused to look at them and found himself transported to the beach, feeling sand under his feet and between his toes.  The mom's warm smile drew him in and he could almost feel her arms pulling him into a hug, the smell of coconut and bananas mixing in a salty breeze.

A noise from upstairs jarred him free from the sunny scene and froze him in his spot, straining to listen for movement of any kind in the darkness.  When he was satisfied that he had not been discovered he slipped back into the mudroom and through the open window into the backyard, closing it behind him.

It was his third house of the evening and all the tension of sneaking about had exhausted him.  It was some time after midnight and his mom and dad were still not back from wherever they'd gone to enjoy themselves on a Saturday night.  He was tired, but couldn't sleep, his brain still buzzing from the break-ins.  He decided to go through his Army pack to make sure there were no glaring omissions of what he might need if... the sound of a car brought him quickly to his window.

It was coming down the street slower than one would expect and then pulled too quickly to the curb with one tire actually coming up onto the grass.  He watched his mom stumble out of the driver's side and make her way slowly around to the passenger side.  When she got the door open his dad slumped out onto the grass "like spinach from a can", he thought.  After a failed attempt or two she was able to get him upright and lurching towards the front door in the darkness.  Carl felt like the lone survivor of a parental apocalypse.

***

He sat under the stairwell at his Middle School half hidden in shadows, a sixth grader with precious few friends reading his favorite comic book.  School had let out and the kids had cleared out leaving him alone in the old building.  It was quiet here and an opportunity for him to visit his friends in the world of The Walking Dead.  Where he'd left off, the band of survivors were piled into an old RV and had just pulled up to an abandoned prison complex.  Through the fence topped by barbed wire they could see a large number of zombies wandering the grounds.  They needed to clear them out if they were going to be able to make this their new home.

The idea that they could find refuge inside of a prison fascinated Carl.  A prison is a place to isolate people who are a danger to the world, he reasoned, but in this story it was a place to protect the people from the world outside its walls.  Things had been turned upside down here and he felt a kind of kinship with those caught in such a situation.  The thought occurred to him that his own mind was like a prison where he could isolate himself from the dangers of the world around him.

"HEY!"

He had not noticed the boy getting so close and was caught completely off guard.  The comic book flew up out of his hands in an involuntary motion and landed between them.

"Dude!  I totally scared the shit out of you!"  He recognized the boy as an eighth grader who from the looks of him was there for basketball practice.  The much larger boy scooped up the comic book and flipped it open.  "What kind of weird shit is this?  You must be some kind of geek freak zombie lover."

Carl stood up slowly and reached out to retrieve his comic, but the boy lifted it over his head out of his reach.  "No way, dude.  This is going in the trash."

"Give it back."

"Give it back or what?  What are ya gonna do?  Shoot me in the head?"  He continued to hold the comic aloft and headed towards the bathroom with Carl close behind.  In the bathroom the boy stopped by a toilet.  "Wait, I think this is where it belongs" and dropped it into the toilet bowl.

As echoes of the boy's laughter receded down the hallway, Carl fished his comic book out of the toilet water and dried it as best he could with paper towels, then finished the job with the hand dryer on the wall.  It can be a cruel world, he thought, zombies or no zombies.

***

Tonight was the big night.  Carl had been thinking about it all week long since the idea first popped into his head while riding his bike home from school.  With the recent chaos surrounding the presidential election he was sure the time was quickly approaching when his work would necessarily come to an end as would many other things.  He was sowing seeds of hope that had yet to be planted and he needed to up his game.

The only cars left in the ALDI parking lot were those of the employees who were eager to close up and go home for the evening.  Carl was familiar with this place and its routines from his regular stops on the way home from school.  He was always on the lookout for stray carts that someone had not bothered to return and lock to reclaim their quarter.  It was part of a trickling revenue stream that included finding and returning empty bottles to another grocery store for refunds.  He had never resorted to stealing, though he had been tempted to plenty of times.  His parents did not know of his morbid comic book collection and would not likely approve as there was so little he liked that they found acceptable or even understood.  It was up to him to find ways to acquire and hide them.

When it looked like there was no one in the front of the store he made his way through the sliding doors and quickly began to look for an empty box.  He found one on top of other boxes filled with bags of potato chips and he pulled the middle column out into the aisle.  The overhead music suddenly quieted and he heard a voice coming from the next aisle over.

"Did you hear someone come in?  I thought I heard the doors open."

Another voice farther away, "I don't know.  I've been in the back.  Can you check it out?  I wanna get the heck out of here."

As quietly as possible Carl slipped in behind the boxes and attempted to pull them back in as far as he could while putting the empty box over his head.  He heard footsteps coming around the corner of his aisle and he stopped pulling.

"Hey!  Did you pull these boxes out?  They're halfway out in the aisle."

There had not been enough time to pull the boxes back in flush and he felt himself getting too hot and breathing too fast.  The man approached and began pushing the boxes in on him.  He pulled his knees to his chest as far as he could but it was not enough.  He heard the man mumbling angrily to himself and felt the box thumping against him with each push and kick.

The empty box over his head suddenly disappeared as the man snatched it off of him.  Right as the man was starting to look down at Carl in his hideaway the voice from the back yelled, "What are you doing up there? Leave it and let's go!"

The man dropped the box back onto Carl's head without looking down and headed back into the store.  A few minutes later the lights went out and he was left alone.

He had come prepared with his flashlight, a few extra batteries, and two sharpies this time.  He planned to work through the night and be gone before anyone arrived to open the store in the morning.  He pulled each flat of cans off of a pallet and laid them along the side of the aisle.  One by one he began writing on the bottoms of the cans and replacing them until an entire pallet's worth was done and could be rebuilt before moving on to another.  He was meticulous in his work and would not rush it, though time tapped on his head like a physical sensation.  The longer he was there the greater the risk, but the work had to be done.  This was no time to wimp out.

Several hours later he felt completely spent.  His hands, arms, and back were cramping up from all of the lifting, moving, and writing.  He allowed himself a break as the early morning sun began to wash in over the tops of the aisles.  He knew he still had at least an hour or two before anyone would show up and so allowed himself to lean back onto a box to catch a breather before putting the finishing touches on the last batch of cans still left in the aisle.  He'd done more than he'd thought he could do and relaxed just enough to be pulled quickly down into slumber against his will.

He awoke in a brilliant orange glow that filled every nook and cranny of the store bringing him quickly to his feet.  How long had he slept?  He had forgotten where he was or why he had come here and was disoriented by the light that continued to grow in intensity until suddenly flashing out.  When his eyes had readjusted to a relative darkness they were drawn to the front windows where a monstrous red fireball could be seen swirling upwards on the horizon and a noise like a thousand stampeding buffalo was growing as the earth began to quiver beneath his feet.  Before he could react or make sense of it, the plate glass windows exploded inward and knocked him off of his feet.

He crawled to the store entrance through broken glass with surprisingly little pain, his bloodied palms making tracks on the floor.  In the parking lot black ash was falling softly through a thick dusty haze, the blackened outline of trees like giant spiders frozen in the dead silence.  Carl absent-mindedly wiped his hands on his shirt as he moved towards the bushes to find his bike, still dazed from the blast.  His head cocked to the side at a noise coming from overhead.  A grouping of what appeared to be fireballs were arcing towards him.  They cried out in a flutter of wings and flames, burning crows landing all around him, one on his head setting his hair on fire and singeing his eyes...

The light was so bright it sent a sliver of pain into his skull.

"What are you doing here kid?"

Carl rubbed his eyes vigorously and then lifted his hand to block the piercing beam of the flashlight.  He was still lying back against the box where he'd fallen asleep.  A police officer stood over him with a thumb hooked into his utility belt and the other training a flashlight on the young trespasser.

***

The detective observed him through the two-way mirror sitting at a table looking small and lost to the world.  The boy's eyes were focused somewhere far away and he correctly surmised that this one was prone to daydreaming.  He'd just talked with the boy's parents and it made the scene that much more poignant for him.  They were self-consumed assholes and they had almost no clue as to the boy's routines, interests, or whereabouts.  It seemed to him that they were simply pissed that the boy had had the audacity to inconvenience them in this way.  He would deal with them again later, but for now it was time to speak with the boy.  He shifted the box in his lap to his hip as he stood to enter the room from a side door.

As the door swung open Carl's eyes returned from their far journey and focused on the man entering the room.   He was wearing a dark suit, white shirt, and tie with a bit of a paunch hanging over his belt.  A badge hung from his jacket pocket, but what most worried him was the cardboard box he was carrying.  The man placed the box on the table with a clank and sat down facing Carl across the table.

"Do you know what I have here, young man?"

"No, sir."

"You have been a very busy boy and we've been able to connect you to several home break-ins."

Carl lowered his eyes to the table.  The detective reached into the box and pulled out five cans of foodstuffs, one at a time, and lined them up on the table forming a small wall between him and the boy.

"Do you recognize these?"

Carl shook his head "no" and continued to stare at the table.  The detective tipped one of the cans towards himself and laid it down so that the bottom faced the boy.

Carl looked up and saw writing on the round metal surface.  The detective laid them all down to reveal the messages written there.  Reading some of them, he intoned, "Don't give up hope.  This too shall pass.  Live one day at a time."

"Do you recognize the writing on these cans, Carl?"  Carl Remained silent.

"Can you at least tell me why you are doing this?"  His question was met with silence, the boy's eyes looking somewhere over the detective's left shoulder.  In that look he understood the boy was someplace that he could not follow.

***

It had been several days since he'd last ate and the man was beginning to wonder if his luck had finally run out.  He was holed up in a house that only had half a roof, but the fireplace was functional and he needed heat to compensate for all of the weight he'd dropped with only sporadic access to food and so much damn walking.  He tossed a coffee table leg into the fire and then pulled out his service revolver, absent-mindedly spinning the cylinder with the hammer pulled back.  He still had his badge as well, but no one cared about that anymore.  He kept it mostly as a reminder that he'd once been one of the good guys.  His last bullet had been spent several months ago to thwart an attack by some scavengers on the road and now the gun was just a prop of sorts in this sordid post-apocalyptic play.

The warmth of the fire tempted him with sleep, but his empty stomach would not allow it.  He snatched up a stick from the pile of kindling and wrapped a strip of curtain cloth around the end, tied it off, then dipped it in a tin of motor oil he'd drained from a car in the yard.  It burst into flame over the fire.  As he carried it down a hallway the light from the sputtering flame played over his heavily bearded face and the wall paper patterns like cave paintings from some ancient time.  The kitchen appeared relatively untouched except for a coating of dust and ash.  He was sure it had been emptied long before he'd arrived, but there was still an ember of hope buried deep inside him smoldering.

He methodically opened all of the cabinets and probed with his free hand to check every nook and cranny without success.  That ember had dimmed as of late and he did not know how much longer he could keep it going.  He felt he'd become a ghost of a man, but now he wondered if that might not become literally true, by his own hand or not.  He checked the pantry closet next and found it empty.  He laid on the floor and let the light play in under the bottom shelf, a space that appeared to be empty as well.  His probing hand hit what he thought was the back wall, but it was a bit too shallow for that.  It moved at his touch and then fell over.  He realized it was a cut piece of cardboard standing on end.  Behind it his hand closed on a hard cylindrical object which he pulled out into the light.  It was a can, but more importantly, it was an unopened can.

Back in the living room he scraped the last of the beans from the warmed pan to eat, and then reclined back in the seat of a legless chair that still had enough stuffing to provide some comfort.  Now that he had a little energy he wondered if this was the time to call it quits.  The world had gone to shit and he was tired of trudging through it.  He placed his hand on his chest and felt the pouch hanging there under his layers of ratty clothes.  He pulled it out and emptied its contents into his palm, a rolled wad of oil cloth.  Inside its layers he extracted the last "last" bullet and chambered it.

He tried not to think too much about it; pull back the hammer, place it against your head, pull the trigger.  His eyes focused beyond the fire until the flames were just a shimmering curtain of light.  As he felt the pressure of the trigger against his finger begin to grow his eyes dropped to the floor and lit on the empty bean can.  Something about it in the fire light caught his attention and he immediately lowered the revolver to his lap and leaned forward to pick it up.

On the bottom in precise handwritten letters was a message, "Don't give up hope."  He stared at it giving a few hard blinks before the room suddenly blurred out as his eyes welled up with tears.  "Good God Almighty... that kid," he choked out to the empty room.  The memory was as clear as spring water.  He couldn't remember the last time he'd cried or that his heart hadn't been anything other than a dry husk of an organ.

He flopped back onto the chair clinging to the metal talisman, laid the revolver on his chest, and closed his eyes letting the tears stream down into his beard.  For a while longer he muttered to himself sleepily and even chuckled a time or two, "live one day at a time... this too shall pass," as the fire crackled in response.  Sleep crept in and claimed the raggedy man.


***

The Lonely Walker

It was a beautiful day with white fluffy clouds
floating in a deep blue sky full of breezes,
but the walker knew nothing of this, his head
slumped down, chin to chest, a jaundiced eye
watching the railroad ties so as not to stumble.
He'd been walking for god knows how long,
day and night, night and day, feeling crummy
and hungry, always hungry, with no sleep and
no need for sleep, manic but with no energy.
It was not a healthy lifestyle despite all of the
miles he'd logged with his unnatural stamina.
The crows eyed him warily from the dead wires,
wanting carrion and wondering how he carried on.
He was the saddest thing imaginable, a man driven
by passions with no possibility of stillness or satiety,
a lonely walker on the tracks under a lovely sky.


***

Crow Analysis

Some thoughts on my creative-nonfiction short story, The Crow

***

My wife must have read only the first paragraph or two when she asked me, "Are you writing about me?"  It is a fascinating question because the truth is, it is about all mothers (and fathers).  In this instance it technically involves my mother because it is from the perspective of a child and I am that child.  The themes woven through the story are varied, but at their heart is the imbalance of power that exists between a parent and a child.  Parents are required to exercise a great deal of restraint in dealing with these little people who have immature brains, limited experience, and little insight into themselves.  Where it gets tricky, and potentially harmful, is when the parent lacks insight and uses the child as a foil for their own foibles and frustrations.

I wrote this story as truthfully as I could.  My purpose was not to teach anybody anything, but to try and learn a little something about myself and maybe even my mother.  Only in rereading what I wrote do I see the obvious fact that the crow served as a proxy for my mother and the unacceptable feelings her emotional impropriety produced in me.  The anger expressed towards our children due to our own lack of love and humility can have the quality of an annihilation, giving the impression that they are so bad that violence (verbal or otherwise) towards them is justified.  It reminds me of Bill Cosby's comedic assertion that "I brought you into this world and I can take you out."

By gaining power over the crow, I was gaining power over my mother and the ability to give or withhold love, which is the power of life and death.  I chose to withhold love by trapping and punishing the crow, a trajectory that ended in death and the realization that I did not want such power and that, truly, my mother did not want that power either.  It was forced upon her by her circumstances, whether that is the cultural milieu she was raised in or the dictates of a particular religion/philosophy that she followed.

As an adult now with my own children I can see there is no room for self-righteousness on my part, but only a growing realization that I am caught in many of the same traps as a parent and as an imperfect person.  I can only keep trying harder to be more loving and humble, less self-centered and ego-driven.  It is an awesome and terrifying task to participate in the formation of another human being.  May we be worthy of it.

The Crow

The memory flutters around the edges of my mind like a frightened bird desperate for escape.

***

It wasn't the punishment that pierced him so much as the look that accompanied it.  The boy sat on his bed, chin on chest, while she yelled at him.  His palms lay flat on the mattress and moved back and forth to smooth the sheets while his legs, which couldn't quite reach the floor, swung back and forth over the side of the bed.  He had removed himself to another place to wait out the storm, but something pulled him back and made him look up.  Something about the tone of her voice.

What the boy saw was a glimmer of hatred in his mother's eye, like a fleck of blood on a white wall.

He tried to emotionally disengage once again, but something held him fast.  The firmness of his perch no longer felt so firm, replaced by the sensation of the ground beginning to open at his feet.   Deep inside a dark space roiled with fear and rage.  Flashes of red in the darkness outlined a bloody beak and cruel claws.  A shiny black orb of malice hung suspended above him staring down in condemnation.  And as quickly as it had come, the energy of that vision dissipated leaving him empty and feeling terribly alone as his mother retreated back upstairs.

***

The clouds had been consolidating over the course of the afternoon, patches of blue growing smaller and more spread out, forming a patchwork quilt of a sky.  A cool wind blew in over the cornfields rustling the tassels, sweeping across the grassy field, wrapping itself around the house at the edge of town, and dispersing amongst the neighborhood streets.  The boy sat on the wide sill of the front picture window oblivious to these movements of nature, knees pulled to his chest.  From his perch he could see out over the neighborhood, between the houses and down the streets, hoping to catch a glimpse of another boy or even another human being.

A black spot in the sky caught his attention.  As it slowly grew in size the boy turned to face it, kneeling with his hands on the window.  By the time he recognized it he was standing, hands on hips, waiting to see what it would do.  A large crow swept in towards the multi-paned window beating its wings, fighting against the wind.  The boy waved his arms up and down to try and scare the bird away.  At the last possible moment it swooped upward and over the roof.  He jumped down off the window sill and ran towards the back sliding glass door, hurdling the coffee table and circumventing the dining room table, but not before whacking his little toe on a chair leg in the process.

The crow landed on the hand railing of the second story wooden deck.  It pulled in its substantial wingspan and pranced in place for a moment or two testing its footing.  The boy stood frozen in place, trying to ignore the throbbing pain in his toe.  The crow looked huge at this close range.  Its head cocked to one side, the black eye pierced the reflective surface of the glass door and fixed the boy in his place.  He felt if not heard his heart pounding in his chest and the quick shallow breaths escaping his partially opened mouth.

"CAW!" cried the crow, and the spell was broken.  The boy broke free from his paralysis and disappeared down the stairs.

***

He lay on his bed in the semi-darkness with his electronic football game held close to his face.  His right thumb quickly manipulated the direction buttons to advance the red blinking dot down the field before being tackled.  For the next play he moved two slots upward and let fly the imagined football.  Celebratory bleeping sounds signaled a touchdown as he dropped his hands down to his sides and stared at the gray ceiling.

He could not get the crow out of his mind.  The boy had never been so close to something so fascinating yet so terrifying at the same time.  He'd heard that seeing a crow meant that someone close to you would die.  His mother's face flashed in his mind's eye and he quickly dismissed it with a pang of guilt.  He'd also heard from his father that they were a nuisance to farmers, that they were dirty and ate dead animals.  "There's nothing good about a crow," his father had assured him.  His father had grown up on a farm and shot crows with a real gun, or so he imagined.  All the boy had was a bb gun and a slingshot that would not likely harm a crow, maybe just put out its eye if he got lucky.

***

That night his dreams  transformed him into a rat scurrying through the maze of a cornfield.  Something was crashing through the rows sending a flurry of blackbirds into the sky, their numbers beginning to block out the sun.  The dirt beneath his rat paws was loose,making it difficult for him to gain traction.  He felt the length of his hairless tail following behind him, making him vulnerable to capture.  The pursuing presence drew closer and growing larger, it absorbed the birds into its blackness.

He saw a blue patch of open sky down a row of corn and ran for it, now a boy again but only a few inches tall.  As the tree-sized cornstalks began to collapse next to him, he entered the open area at full speed and went over the edge of a drop off.  For a moment he hung in space still pumping his arms and legs, cartoon-style.  Below were tendrils of smoke coming up to meet him.  Blackened flakes of burned newspaper floated all around as he began to free fall into a burning trash pit.  He found his bed at the bottom, the sensation of a bounce, and sat up surrounded by the darkness of his room.

***

The next day the sky had cleared and the sun was shining down on the field below him.  A neighbor was bush-hogging the field and waved up to the boy on the wooden deck, standing there with a half empty bag of Wonder Bread dangling at his side.   While falling off to sleep the night before, the boy had hatched a plan to bring the crow back.  His punishment had lapsed and he was no longer confined to the house.  The tractor moved slowly, making wide lazy turns.  The pungent smell of cut grass and weeds wafted up to him.

When the neighbor had finally driven off, he ran down the deck stairs, across the driveway, and into the field.  The bread was starting to grow stale with some flecks of mold on it.  He'd fished it out of the trash earlier that morning and picked some of the green spots off of it to make it as white and appetizing as possible.  A pleasant breeze continued to blow as he littered the ground with torn up bread bits.  He glanced back over his shoulder at the high deck and hoped his mother wasn't watching him through the kitchen window.  She would certainly yell at him for pulling things out of the trash or wasting food even though it had been thrown away.  He seldom understood what upset her, but he knew it took very little to put him in her crosshairs.

Back up on the deck the boy sat with his legs dangling over the edge and his arms folded over the bottom railing, waiting.  He noticed movement along the fence line between the grassy field and the cornfield that stretched off into the distance.  At first he thought it was a dark brown dog, but it was too low to the ground and was moving in fits and starts.  It raised its head to get a peek above the grass.  The boy waved at it and yelled a greeting.  It froze for a moment, weighing its options, then scrambled down a hole by a fence post.  He realized he'd startled a groundhog, but at least it was now safe underground.

Clouds began to return overhead as the sun peaked in and out.  The boy was growing impatient and uncrossed his legs to extend them outward for a stretch.  He rubbed his eyes aggressively until blue flashes appeared and then resolved into blurriness.  He thought he noticed some black specks in the field.  When his vision completely cleared, he found that several birds had swept down and landed amongst his bread bits.  The large crow was there snatching up the bread and bumping the smaller birds aside.  He jumped up from his perch and ran down the stairs.

***

The boy snatched up a backpack from under the deck and headed for the small barn beside the house.  Inside was a clutter of bikes, storage barrels, and a riding lawnmower with the smell of gasoline and rust hanging in the air.  He jostled his bike free from the mess and pulled it past the wooden sliding door.  The concrete pad at the barn entrance was elevated above the yard, grassy slopes on three sides.  He crossed his left foot over his right and placed it firmly onto the bike pedal.  With one deft movement he threw his right leg up and over the bike seat and rolled off the slight drop off onto the grass.

A furious pumping of legs propelled him over the grass and onto the gravel driveway.   Loose gravel shot out behind him as he stood to pump the pedals, fishtailing until hitting the decline to the road.  A small raised mound lay at the bottom and he hit it hard and fast.  As the front tire made contact with the mound, he pushed his body down, then pulled up at its peak, willing the bike into the air.   He felt free breaking the property line while airborne, like making a prison break.

He made his escape out of the neighborhood to a long stretch of road that bordered the west side of town.  A ditch filled with tall grass and pieces of trash ran along a fence line.  He pedaled slowly and kept his eyes glued on the ditch.  A rabbit bolted past and startled him.  The boy knew there were dogs in this area and memories of past encounters made him jumpy.  A glint of green caught his eye and drew him into the ditch.  He hopped off the bike and let it fall.  Reaching down into the grass he wrapped his fingers around an empty 7UP bottle and brushed it off before putting it in the backpack.  A little farther down it was a Big Red bottle, a favorite fuel source when his Mom did not make lunch in the  summer months.

He was one bottle shy of what he needed and knew it would be tough to find another one as he had already gathered more than could reasonably be expected from this particular stretch of road.  Up ahead of him a cloud of dust warned him that a car was coming and coming fast.  The boy quickly steered his bike off of the road and, in his haste, fell over into the ditch.  He sat up in time to see the car slow as it passed and a teenage boy poking his head out of the passenger's side window, "Merry Christmas, kid!"  An empty RC bottle sailed through the air and landed at his feet as the car tore back off down the road leaving echoes of laughter behind.

***

The girl at the grocery store gave him ten cents per bottle.  It was an erratic source of income, only really available in the warmer months, but one that came with no strings attached, no questions asked.  He looked at the candy shelves and thought to reconsider his plan, swaying back and forth, lost in thought.

"You gettin' the fireballs, Aaron?" asked the girl standing at the cash register.  Besides the lady running the deli counter in the back, she was the only other person in the small store.

He blushed, jingling the change in his pocket. "Nah, I'm on a mission."

Her eyebrows rose slightly.  "A mission?  Something more important than candy?"

"Yeah, and it's secret.  See ya, Nancy."

The hardware store was his next stop.  It sat on the town square nestled between the shoe store and a diner.  The diner was a stopping off spot for the Greyhound bus line which ran through town, picking up and dropping off strangers.  It also happened to have malted milk shakes on the menu, the thought of which made his stomach growl and the dimes in his pocket burn a little hotter.  He leaned his bike against a newspaper box and headed into the hardware.

The sound of his beat up hushpuppies clapped the marred floor boards and sent echoes through the empty store that smelled strongly of oil and sawdust.  Somewhere in the back corner he found the mousetraps, but they were too small for his needs.  He squatted down and bent his head sideways to look to the back of the lowest shelf.  He reached back slowly, knowing it was silly to think a trap might snap tight on him but unable to shake the feeling.  His hand closed around a larger piece of wood and he pulled out what he was looking for, a rat trap.  It was huge compared to the mousetraps, cartoonish in its exaggerated proportions.  He put his foot on the trap and pulled against the spring to see if he could even set it.  The trap appeared to be trying to wriggle out of his grasp the harder he pulled, but he eventually got it all of the way open before releasing it with a loud *crack*.

The sound of shoes on stairs brought him to his feet.  The store owner appeared, an elderly man with a crack-filled face but kind eyes.  "Well, hello there young man.  Are you finding what you're looking for?"  The boy half held the trap at his back, reluctant to have it out in the open where his intentions might be guessed.

The owner did not wait for him to reply, "That's a mighty big trap.  What kind of animal are you lookin' to catch?"  His eyes popped up quickly to scan the man's face.  Did he suspect something?  Had he guessed his secret?  What he saw was a bemused expression which assured him his secret was safe.

"Got some rats in our barn" the boy offered, not making eye contact.

"Well then, let's ring you out so you can go and catch them varmints."  The boy followed him to the front where he laid out his handful of dimes on the counter.  The owner drug the coins off of the counter top onto his palm and gave a little shake to spread them out and count them.  "That'll about do it.  Happy hunting."

***

He waited until his mother had left for her ceramics class, then snatched two bread slices from the bread box, wanting to get more but not wanting his mother to figure out he'd taken them without asking.  He slid open the glass door and slowly approached the porch railing overlooking the field.

Time was starting to take on a different quality now.  A peculiar feeling was overtaking him, like waking up from an afternoon nap slightly disoriented and not yet fully reconnected to the body.  The initial plan had filled him with a kind of giddy excitement, but now that the pieces were falling into place he was not sure he could follow through with it.  An uneasy feeling had crept in.  Was it the falling into the ditch?  The RC bottle flying through the air and nearly hitting him?  The old man's cracked face and probing questions?

Something was watching him and tracking his progress.  He was sure of it.  Stopping was an option, though it did not feel that way.  It was inevitable that he descend the stairs, that he bait the trap with bread, that he carry it carefully into the field and place it gently on the grass.  The boy was sure these were only thoughts in his head, but then he was shocked to find himself no longer on the deck.  His vision hung above fingers breaking off bread pieces and dropping them onto the grass around the trap.  He felt himself back away from it and as normal perceptions of time and space returned, he turned and ran as fast as he could back up to the deck taking two steps at a time.

There was nothing more to do now but sit and wait.

***

It took longer for the birds to arrive this time or at least it seemed that way.  Maybe it was the presence of the trap.  They hungrily snatched up the bread bits, jostling each other as they had before until, on cue, the large crow landed in their midst and began eating what was left.  When all of the bread was gone, the birds moved on, leaving the crow to contemplate the last remaining piece on the trap's trigger.  Its head cocked left, then right, unsure of how to proceed.  It circled the trap, eye locked on the big fluffy white piece at the trap's center.  As the seconds ticked by the boy was sure the crow would fly off, content with the bread it had already eaten.

A sudden movement and then a flurry of activity startled the boy.  He did not know what had happened, but the crow was thrashing its wings and appeared to be attached to the trap, dragging it.  He could now see that it was caught by the neck and fighting to free itself.  Excitement mixed with fear gripped the boy and held him tight.  He watched from his far perch as the crow fought for its life, a small black dot swallowed by the vastness of the field.

The movements died down and eventually stopped.  He approached the crow he presumed to be dead and nudged the trap with his foot.  The exhausted crow gave a feeble twitch of a wing.  Its eye no longer had the power to pierce the boy, but fell somewhere between them, afraid and confused.  He walked back to the barn and returned with his BB gun.  As he held it firmly between his legs and pumped the lever, a growing sense of nausea began to form in the pit of his stomach.  At the tenth pump he rotated the gun downward and placed the end of the barrel against the crow's head.  Tears began to burn in his eyes as he pulled the trigger, "I'm sorry."

***

She saw him sitting on the deck stairs as she pulled up the driveway, legs pulled in and head down on his skinny crossed arms.  He looked so small and frail on those stairs suspended several feet above the ground.  She sat for a moment taking in this sight of her son, wondering what he'd done.  The familiar feeling of irritation started to rise, but then unexpectedly dissipated.  She removed her oversized sunglasses as she exited the car and stood at the bottom of the stairs with a hand shielding her eyes from the sun like a lopsided salute.

"Are you OK, buddy?"  She heard a sniff from him and thought she saw his shoulders tremble.  "Come down here and let me have a look at you."

The calmness of her voice confused him.  She should be angry and demanding an explanation.  He looked up and saw a person that was unfamiliar, but in a pleasant way.  He descended the stairs and stood below her, swaying back and forth.  He allowed himself to fall forward and wrap his arms around her waist as he closed his eyes tight.

"I love you, Mom."

"I love you too, Aaron."

"I'm sorry, Mom."

"I'm sorry too."



***