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Deborah Lee Luskin, prose judge
Overall, these were the best entries I’ve read in the several years it’s been my honor to serve as a judge for Write Action. These stories were entertaining and well written. The ones I’ve chosen as winners are those I thought went a step beyond. They are stories whose language and structure amplify the narrative.
Even though there wasn’t a theme for this year’s contest, the majority of the stories dealt with issues of death, grief, and mortality, which best explains the thematic congruity of the stories I’ve chosen as the best of this year’s entries.
First Place: Babies, about death as a natural part of the life cycle, which is renewed by birth. In this story, both birth and death are a struggle and a reward.
Second Place: Still Life, At My Father’s Funeral Reception, about how the dead and their deeds haunt the living, offering a challenging take on immortality.
Third Place: Pelle’s Day of Quiet, about grieving. The story ends with the line, There is no silence until you are dead, and even then, you speak.
Because there were so many good stories, I chose two for Honorable Mentions:
Woodbine (2012) is a moving and beautifully rendered memoir of a childhood place and its lasting influence on the narrator’s adult life.
Hilton Hates Driving is both a funny and a painful story about the relationship between an adult son and his geriatric mother squeezing the last bit of fun and maternal manipulation out of life.
My thanks to everyone who entered the contest, and my congratulations to the authors whose work I read and reread with such great pleasure.
Babies
Susan Johnson
I walk at full stride down the carpeted halls of The Orchids, dodging carts filled with medicine, passing the halt, the lame, and the very short. It is an upscale Florida senior living community that my sister calls the Cruise Ship That Never Leaves the Dock. I can see I am admired for my height, for the straightness of my back, for the sense of purpose I carry in my set lips, for my youth.
It is late October and hot as hell.
I knock briskly on my mother's door and push. It is locked. I knock harder. "Ma," I say loudly. "Mother," I say trying to turn the knob. "Mom, it's Ellie let me in," I say sharply. "Mommy," I whine kicking the bottom of the door as I turn to leave.
"Honey, she's not back from the hospital," a nurse's aide calls out to me from down the hall.
My mother is lying on her side in the hospital bed. She is snoring loudly. Her ass is exposed. She is diapered. She looks so little, almost pocket size. I cover her.
The doctor tells me that my mother should be transferred to a hospice facility rather than going back to her apartment even with around the clock care. I am confused by the change in earlier plans.
This is how I have always seen my mother's death: she goes to bed, she doesn't wake up. Fast. This is how, at 94, she sees it herself.
We both root for the end game. My mom because she is old and worn out. Not depressed, not really, maybe a little, but mostly just done, she has told me a million times. I'm done too. Done with being scared, done with the responsibility of caring for my mother on my own, done with the disruption of my life, done with flying back and forth to Florida.
The hospice facility is a hospital in miniature, a playhouse hospital done in pink and sea green. Beach pictures on every wall. There is a resident dog to pet. It is quiet. The nurses, attendants, volunteers look me in the eye, hold both my hands in theirs, speak slowly. I don't know what to do in the face of their sympathy. I try on sincerity.
I am sitting on my hotel bed talking to my sister, Baby, on the phone. She also calls me Baby. I have no idea how it started, probably because it was easier for our mom to call us Baby then run through our names looking for the right one. Bonney, the dog, included. I sense Baby struggling to find her words. She giggles. "Hospice is like the commercial for the Roach Motel where the bugs check in but don't check out," she says proudly.
The sliding glass door to the balcony off my room is open, the ocean breeze cuts the smell of the air conditioner with tropical humidity. The white caps dance along the tops of the waves, sending tendrils of phosphorescent foam to the beach.
Without her false teeth, my mother looks like a witch. I pluck a long hair off her pointy chin; it's the least I could do for the woman voted The Most Beautiful Mother by my fourth-grade class. She is propped up in her bed, her eyes closed, her mouth open.
The ocean temperature is 82, the air temperature even warmer although it is close to midnight. I shuffle along at the edge of the breaking waves, hoping for the curative value of sea water on my toes. I breathe in deeply as I walk, and exhale the lingering taste of tepid tea, hospital smells, the quiet of my mother's room. Against the dunes, I see shadowy figures.
It is apparent that my mother will not get better. She has settled comfortably into the business of dying. Oddly, it seems too soon to me. My ma and I would laugh at obituaries that said some old person died unexpectedly. "Ha," we say, "92! How unexpected can it be?" But now that my mother is dying, it does feels unexpected.
Time gives up its structure; the change back to the heat of summer is confusing in its own right. Vermont with its late October chill is so far away. Mornings the sun pops up from behind tall clouds that form skyscrapers on the ocean's horizon. At night the waves slap down on the beach, stars compete with the twinkle of the lights on the casino ships cruising three miles off shore. The days, well,they just slip away as I sit next to my mother with nothing to say.
Baby and I are lying in our beds more than a 1,000 miles apart, whispering as if we are still in our old bedroom, an arm's length from each other. "Baby, I should be there with you," my sister says to me. "But Daddy won't let me," she says referring to her husband. She is angry with him. She wants her old life back. "It's okay," I tell her, "it is just the way it is." After we hang up I gently touch my head just above my right ear, as if touching the place left hollow in my sister's brain where the tumor was removed.
I tell the social worker I pushed back my flight to Sunday. "You should let your mother know that; let her know it is already Tuesday." I look at her in surprise as this seems both cruel and impractical as my mother has not opened her eyes or spoken in four days. "And I gave away her cigarettes," I confess. "Well that news should kill her," the social worker says.
"And then she winked at me," I tell Baby in a late night conversation. "Jesus,"she laughs. I hear the laugh turn to a soft sob.
A notice is taped to my motel room door asking guests to keep their lights dim, curtains closed in anticipation of the hatching of loggerhead turtle eggs in nests that lay hard against the dunes south of the motel. Three new clutches of eggs were found, the room clerk tells me. "Each clutch will have 100 to 125 eggs," she says, with authority.
I stop trying to make conversation with my mother and spend my time sitting in her room googling all things loggerhead.
Baby is excited about the impending births of the loggerhead hatchlings and their immediate run across the beach to the sea. We stop talking about our mother. "Your mother," she used to say. "No, your mother," I would insist. I tell Baby everything I learned about loggerheads except the 100,000-to-one odds they face to live long enough return to this very beach to lay their own eggs. Since Baby's operation I've learn to hate odds, bell curves, survival chances, luck. I don't know how to be an only child even less than I know how to be a motherless child.
My mother continues to shrink in her hospital bed. Sometimes I fit myself in next to her. I am so tired. She barely stirs. Her ears are huge. I squint sideways at a row of family pictures on the nightstand setting them in motion. My mother, father, Baby, me, our children melding together; me and my familiars growing older and interchangeable.
The nurse removes my mother's diamond wedding ring and gives it to me before I leave for the night. "Many of our people die in the quiet of the small hours," she says. I pocket my mother's lipstick.
The full moon, the Harvest Moon, shines into my motel room. I keep the lights off, but the balcony door open. I tell Baby this might be the night of the Great Turtle Hatching, but nothing about our mom's rapid decline. Baby wants me to go down on the beach, check, and call her back. I am her kid sister; she still expects compliance. She won't remember asking so I just go to sleep.
The raw, raspy screech of sea gulls wakes me up. It is just before 6 AM, still mostly dark. I hear the patter of rain. And voices. I grab my iphone and hurry down to the beach. There are a half-dozen people waving their arms to frighten the gulls away. With the cool of the rain, two clutches hatched during the night, a woman whispers. I see these impossibly small creatures struggling over the uneven sand. My phone rings; it is hospice. I let the call go to voice mail.
Instead, I call Baby. No longer held hostage by the conventions of day and night she answers on the first ring. "It's happening right now," I tell her, "the baby turtles are heading to the ocean."
"Go babies, go babies," my sister yells in my ear. I join in. "Go babies, go babies," we say over and over until it becomes a prayer.
Still Life, At My Father's Funeral Reception
by Kathleen Pell
"She hasn't cried yet. Not at the hospital, not at the funeral, not in the car. Not once. It's not healthy," My older sister, Margot, stops, seeming satisfied; situation assessed, diagnosis delivered.
"Have you ever actually seen Mommy cry?" asks my younger sister, Emma, looking from Margot to me, as if she somehow missed a family secret. "Ever? I never have."
"She will," I say. They both look at me, but I don't expand the thought.
We have congregated on the deck off the kitchen, each avoiding the crowd inside. Our mother seems oblivious to the three of us watching through the window. She is a caterer and, in this moment, doing what she does best. She pulls foil from a pan of lasagna and arranges sliced ham, turkey, roast beef and cheese on a platter. Then she wipes her hands on a towel and carries the dishes out through the swinging kitchen door. Everything in perfect order. A stranger to this scene would never guess that she just buried her husband of thirty one years, less than two hours ago. Or that he'd died in the arms of another woman who he didn't know as well, but loved better. Or that he had fallen to his death from a ladder while cleaning pine needles and leaves from her gutters. I suspect that each of us have different versions of the story about our father and the waitress. And that my mother has her own truths.
"Do you think she was there today?" Margot asks, eyes narrowing. "I wouldn't recognize her. I really don't know what I would've done if I'd seen her."
Emma frowns. "She wouldn't have come, would she? That would be so inappropriate." After a moment she adds, "Think about it though. She must be grieving. I mean, I guess they loved each other, right? What's her name again?"
Margot lets out a disgusted hiss.
I had seen the waitress at the funeral. But I don't say this. "Suzanne. Her name is Suzanne."
Back inside the house we scatter, positioning ourselves to receive the offerings that mourning family and friends have brought. After being brushed by condolences, air kisses and the cool breeze of shaking heads, my mother circles the dining room table, and retreats back into the kitchen. Her sisters, June and Patty, unsure of how to be useful in the wake of her efficiency, straighten piles of napkins and readjust serving spoons. My father's side of the family, his three brothers, several of my cousins, and my hawk-eyed grandmother hold court at one end of the room. I know my mother's family holds them responsible my father's indiscretions and death, as if they are somehow guilty by association. I like most of them better than my mother's side of the family, so I make my way toward the corner, eager to join my Uncle Duke, as he soaks his sorrow in the bottle of scotch on the bar.
Before I can reach him, though, I am sideswiped by pale, fleshy arms; pulled in against a broad chest that smells too strongly of men's cologne. My mother's brother.
"Oh, Leelee honey, how are you?"
I lower my head, shrinking away from his sickly-sweet, rum and Coke breath, but his embrace tightens. Against my wishes, my limbs become static, unwilling to carry me away from his grasp. My ears fill with the sound of my own heartbeat, drowning out the rest of his words and other sounds in the room. The "Leelee" he speaks of has not lived in this body since the summer I was 13 when he cornered me at several family gatherings, whispering that name into my ear with that same breath, his big hand falling onto my barely emerged breasts, reading my paralysis as some form of mute desire. The last time was Labor Day, the day before eighth grade. Before I could stop him, he kissed my lips and thrust his fingers down into my shorts, searching until he found a moist secret there, which, I'm sure he read as consent. Afterwards, he'd backed away, finger poised over his lips condemning me to silence, to rejoin my parents out on the back porch. When the sun rose the next morning I had emerged from the sheltered cocoon of childhood as Leila. Leelee has never returned.
Emma's arm snakes between him and me now, curling around my waist as she pulls me away from him, explaining over her shoulder that we are needed in the other room. Emma, who had felt that same weight of that arrogant hand on her chest, that same breath whispering "OhEmmy" into her ear, understands the feeling of standing in quicksand. But back then I had protected her, interrupting him before he could steal all of her secrets. Today she repays the debt. Before I can summon words to thank her, I hear the sound of breaking glass and hushed cursing from behind the kitchen door. Here in the dining room, drinks hover at chin level, eyebrows raise, and conversations and glances drop like dying birds to the carpet.
I push the door open. My older sister Margot, the efficient sister, rule maker and keeper of schedules, is kneeling beside our mother, hand on her shoulder. "Are you okay? What happened, Mom?" she says. Margot holds a PhD in pediatric oncology but she's not a layer on of hands; preferring the white sterility of the research lab to the untidy humanness of hospital hallways. She frowns and gives me a look that tells me we have left her stranded here, searching for comforting words, for too long.
My mother is sitting in a crumbled mound, a fragile bundle of sticks and dried grass, crying. She points to scattered devilled eggs and shards of the Waterford platter, a long ago wedding gift. "I've ruined the eggs," is all she can say.
Emma, the youngest of us and soother of wounds, bends gracefully to my mother's other side, brushes hair from her wet cheek and rubs loose circles across her back, saying "Shh, it's okay," But Emma's eyes meet mine and I can see her concern. She helps her to her feet, smoothing out her wrinkled fabric and composure.
I don't say what I am thinking that I told them she would cry. The sight of our mother like this scares my sisters, but I have seen it before. The first time, days after her own mother's death she collapsed into childlike, hiccupping sobs on this same floor, framed by a dozen charred blueberry muffins. I had stood unmoving in the doorway, home sick from school, watching my father cradle her while she cried, lift her from the floor and carry her upstairs. I had cleaned up the muffins, perhaps dissolving some with my own tears. I was still Leelee then, a girl who cried and worried for others. I didn't understand then that the kitchen had always been the canvas on which my mother's grief was painted; food, her medium. Some years later, when she asked why I had suddenly shed my childhood nickname, the truth wouldn't rise from the hollow below my stomach where it dwelled like a familiar ghost. I couldn't risk the possibility that if I told her the truth, I might never come upon her, in the throes of grieving over a burned piecrust or broken plate in my name.
I am the middle sister, the distant one; keeper of secrets. I do not rush to my mother's side now. I attend to the tangible terrain of her sorrow, brushing glass out of the way with my hands. As I pick up the eggs, I notice the faint smell of curry, her secret ingredient. I place them in the sink. This is how I comfort her.
When they have goneEmma upstairs with my mother, to put her to bed; Margot, back out to appease the polite curiosity and hunger of the crowdI scoop the glass shards into the dustpan; place eggs, one by one into the greedy mouth of the garbage disposal. Halfway through the pile, I glimpse shades of Leelee in my reflection in the window. I wipe the smooth roundness of the next egg with a bleeding finger, pop it into my mouth not caring about the shiny slivers that nip at my tongue. I do this with four more eggs, until my tears no longer let me taste anything but their salt, my own blood and a subtle hint of curry.
Pelle's Day of Quiet
by James Davis
Pelle, holding out a tiny notebook for the teacher to see from three rows back. It reads: "Today I am experimenting with silence. I will not be speaking today."
Mr. Dill didn't ask him any other questions because Pelle's Dad, Robert, had just died of cancer that August, but you could tell he was a little annoyed and no one really seemed like they got if it was funny or what. Pelle was a troublemaker. I was a troublemaker. So was this just Pelle, stickin it to the man yet again, questioning authority in some kind of kiddish ploy for attention? Either way it's weird because: A) that guy, like, loves to gab, B) He wasn't talking to anyone even us, just writing in that tiny notebook, or like, signing, and C) He's been weird for a while. Just odd. Went on a juice cleanse, ate only lemons and cayenne in water for something like two weeks and went from a cute chubby kid to this weird angular thing with gaunt mica-flecked laser eyes who is just obviously exploding.
So at the time, that's what I wrote this off as. This was a juice cleanse, only more annoying, and involving starving himself of verbalization rather than food. So all day it was him just sitting by himself so people would go "Hey Pelle, come hang out" or something and he'd hold up a piece of paper that says "I'm drawing" on it.
John Cage was obsessed with silence. A Zen Buddhist kind of quieting of the mind, so it can accept the divine. Legend has it that he received inspiration for his piece 4'33 after visiting The Quietest Place On Earth, an anechoic chamber deep in the Harvard Physics Department, lined with lead and special vibrational dampeners. He lay on the floor in there for six hours, and when he left he had the whole piece mapped out in his head. Four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence. The only noise is of the pianist clicking the stopwatch on and then off at exactly the right time. One school of thought holds the piece as something sacred and holy, a meditation on nothingness and expression, a piece of work on the level of Warhol, or Duchamp. The other prominent school of thought's feelings on the piece can perhaps be summed up best as "total bullshit." His classic characterization of his own work was "I have nothing to say, and I'm saying it." Which is profound, I think.
Me and Pelle hung out a lot that year, but we didn't talk much I think. Not about what was happening. He was making a lot of friends in town too, who no-one else really liked very much but who took a lot of Pelle's time. I remember after graduation, wasted, the two of us on a hill and him telling me he's there for me to talk about my bullshit. I had never told him as much. I lie and tell him I would be there for him as well. He was lying as well but he just didn't know it at the time. An hour later I think he helped me inside after I passed out on a lawn chair with the spins. That's a kind of silence.
There are three main images I associate with Pelle's grief:
He was a pallbearer at his father's funeral. Lifted the casket up in this hot stuffy theosophist auditorium in the Summer with his brother and uncles, everybody watching, dozens and dozens of people. There was no open viewing, and I think I liked that. I would not have been able to hold it together if I had had to like, walk up to this corpse and pretend I felt like it meant anything. Its a strange ritual, everyone going up to this body which has been flooded with chemicals and made up to look real, then walking away. The coffin was out of view until the pallbearers came in from the back and carried it down the long aisle. He seemed very young in his suit, surrounded by men who were accustomed to wearing them. It was so quiet and close in that room.
The second image is one I wasn't even there for, but just heard about. Tina says after Robert passed she went to his house, and they tried to play piano together, and Tina asked him if he was alright, the two of them just sitting at the piano, and Pelle just started crying. This pissed me off. I was supposed to be Pelle's best friend, so why wasn't it me who was at the piano. Secondly, Pelle and Tina weren't even close. I don't think so at least, but who knows. They grew up together, those kinds of bonds are strange.
The third was later the next Summer, when me and my girlfriend Diotima went over to Pelle's to hang out and we found the Crystal Singing Bowls. You have to understand, this is a community of people who use homeopathic medicines, eat all organic food, and send their kids to Steiner schools. When Robert was diagnosed he chosea chemo of course, and followed through with all that western medicine had to offer. Meanwhile, the community around him set about trying to cure him with energy. We spent a day painting his downstairs bedroom lazure, (which is a kind of soft water-based rainbow texture) not because Robert loved lazure, but because it would enhance his body's healing capabilities. So these Crystal Singing Bowls I think were part of that. They were these massive milky-white half-inch-thick glass bowls the size of wastebaskets, shaped like a wine glass without the stem. I was like "what the hell are these Pelle?" And he says "Those are the Crystal Singing Bowls. They resonate." It turns out what you did was rub along the edges with a stick wrapped in a kind of rubbery felt, like you would with a water glass and a wet fingertip, and the bowl would make this enormous ringing drone noise. The vibrations were supposed to induce healing. It was kind of funny. It was a beautiful Summer day and we were just hanging out and we found these silly bowls in Roberts old room, which had been the den, then Robert's room, and was now, again, the den. We dragged the sticks along the lips of the bowls, laughing, goofy, and then they start to make this, pulsing, powerful noise. Each of the bowls resonated with the other, producing massive overtones and undertones. It filled the room, so present it was almost visible in the air.
So, Pelle's Day of Silence. School was a permissive place, and if Pelle didn't want to participate he didn't have to. He made it through the day at least, I don't remember him talking although he might have said a few words. What I really remember is how I forgot he was doing it at all. At the end of the day, last period was gym. Everyone was split into girls and boys, the girls went outside and the boys stayed inside. It was a really bright day at the end of the school year. The boys were supposed to be wrestling, I think, and the girls were doing self-defense martial arts outside on the grass. There was something unpleasant about the wrestling, indoors, the testosterone, so somehow Pelle just motioned to me and we left and went outside to join the girls. The martial arts involved a lot of synchronized grapples, throws and falls. It was dancing. Pretending to throw each other on the ground in choreographed movements, simultaneously with thirty other people on the front lawn. I have a memory of us talking, during, but I'm not sure if it's real or not. I don't remember any words.
In 4'33, there is silence, but that is not the point of the piece. There is the sound of the audience listening. There is the sound of the cars driving on the road past the scene, people shifting in their seats, your heartbeat in your ears. Even in that room in Harvard, The Quietest Place, you can hear your own heartbeat. There is no silence until you are dead, and even then, you speak.
Woodbine (2012)
by Kevin O'Keefe
All my memories are locked in a house at 8 Woodbine Avenue. Whatever happened (and I still cannot be sure of what "it" was), I know it happened there. We moved there when I was eight and left when I was twenty. Whenever I am back in Larchmont, New York, visiting my mother or three siblings (out of the six) who live nearby, I drive by Woodbine. Something about it still pulls. Is it the apple blossoms that drop their white petals like snow in May? The back stairs that creaked when, as a teen, I snuck back into our home after skipping out? The slow sizzle of the dying embers in one of the five fireplaces? Some misty hand of memory pulls me out of whatever home I've made in the world and drops me, with all my ambivalence about Larchmont and my conflicted love toward my family, back to Woodbine. We were royalty once. It was the early seventies. We were the O'Keefes. We lived in the same neighborhood as the Mooneys, the Auerbachs, the Boyers, and the Clearys. We were big Catholic families whose kids went to St. Augustine's school. We played tackle football on fall weekends and swam in Long Island Sound or country club pools in the summer. We lived under large oak, beech, and chestnut trees, trees that cantilevered out and canopied streets with the same names. We thought it was heaven.
The sweep of the gravel driveway in front of my childhood home resembled a scimitar. It emptied out to the two streetsLarchmont and Woodbinethat made the leafy corner. Our house was built as a shinglestyle in the upscale section of town named the Manor. The shingles had been replaced in the 1950s, well before we bought the house, back when there was a stucco craze in home remodeling. Homes in Larchmont were privy to the vagaries of trends, and to own a home, especially one in the Manor, was to take on certain historical responsibilities. People walking by might say we lived in a mansion. We didn't refer to it that way, but it was big enough for all seven kids to have their own bedrooms. Yes, the stink of privilege was on me and sometimes I even knew it.
You entered the house from under a porte-cochere in the center of the driveway. The front door was oversized and had an old-fashioned brass lock that never worked properly. Then you passed into a vestibule with another door that had a stained-glass window and into a large foyer, presided over by a chandelier. To your left was a library with dark wood paneling, tons of books, and an altar my father had erected to himself. All of my adult life I've hesitated to tell people where I grew up, because I didn't want to be judged by them. As if their judgment could ever be harsher than mine. I hate being defined, boxed in, or otherwise understood as Larchmont. I hate the subtle class differences between the haves and the have-mores that made me feel as if I didn't belong, the understated competition that I participated in while at the same time trying to pretend it didn't bother me, the country clubs and cotillions where I wore my rented tux, the alligator shirts and Top-Siders on the fresh-faced, white-teeth kids like me.
Our scimitar driveway had gray gravel an inch thick, and any arriving car announced itself through the louvered windows of the sun porch. We lay about on floral-patterned couches watching TV and waiting for Mom to return from the Grand Union with groceries. When she did we'd empty the back of the Ford Fairlane of more than a dozen large brown paper bags and then return to Gilligan's Island. Am I the ghost that haunts the present owner's home? When the waitress comes with the check and I don't see it or her, is it because I am frozen on the third-floor landing listening to my mother weep in the middle of the night? When I drive from New York to Vermont and cannot recall Massachusetts, is it because I'm hiding in the broom closet during a game of tag? When I'm reading a book and don't remember the main character's name, is it because I'm sliding my turtle down the edge of the third-floor bathtub and into the putrid gray water? All my changes, all my secrets
All my beginnings, triumphs and despair
All my scars, grief and poetry
They're all trapped here, buried beneath the rose bushes, clipped near the hedges, taken out with the garbage, folded next to the laundry, burnt with the dinner rolls, Lemon Pledgerubbed into the dining room table by Bettyour black maid from nearby New Rochelle. Eight (MF how come it is the numeral above and written here?) Woodbine Avenue: storehouse of complexity, mansion of insight, watermelon of memory, hall of mirrors, house of horror, home sweet home.
You haunt me and I long for you. Take me back, Woodbine, to the thick lawn beside the scimitar driveway that cut me in half.
Crows
by Olivia Howe
The crow appeared on my commode at 1:37 A.M. during a cloudy, august August night.
I had never before heard a crow that produced a sound other than caw caw, yet this crow’s utterances somehow seeped into my mind, writhed, and mutated. In fact, it was only when it began to sing that I registered its presence.
" 'Swish swash shish shush,' whispers the night, and you listen
The summer silence unrolls like a carpet at your feet, and you step
Chipped white tombs line your mouth, and you speak
Roiling thunder stirs the viscous darkness, and you taste
My heart is coal and my blood is smoke, but you hear me sing."
I felt reassured, promised, when the crow itself dissipated into vapor.
*
My journal and pen were at the ready the following night at the same time, my fingers trembling to record something beyond Crow 1:37 Aug. 5 and the lyrics it had intoned in its lovely, hollow voice.
At the allotted time, nothing out of the ordinary happened. I fell asleep with my writing utensils in my arms.
*
Two weeks of fruitless waiting urged me to relax, consider that it may have been a vivid hallucination. Why did the song echo in my footsteps? Why did I constantly feel the scrutiny of many eyes?
*
Wings shackled my eyes in repose. Feathers deluged my slack-jawed mouth. I bolted awake. I was alone.
*
"Swish swash shish shush," the night whispered to me. What could I do but listen?
*
Birdsong startled me into keen alertness at unexpected hours of the night. I found myself disappointed in their saccharine melodies for displeasing me, and in myself for being displeased.
*
When sleep became an impulse of surrender, and breathing became a chore to while away the hours, and my eyes were useless instruments of deceit, the second crow arrived.
The second crow wore a mantle of moonlight. It called me "Sephenialdora" and expected me to do the same of it. It rasped each syllable and sent thrills scuttling up and down my vertebrae.
I forgot to check the clock when it appeared. I had lost track of days anyhow.
*
The third showed up the following night with an alarming sort of casual regularity, as if meeting a train. "Slumber," it murmured. "Fizz," it hissed. “Cordon,” it growled.
The crow asked me not to make sense of what it said, but how it spoke.
My notebook sagged with ideas and interpretations.
*
Four, five, six, seven, eleven, twenty-five, forty-three…
There were no longer weeks or days or hours but crows.
*
They fed me histories, untruths, chants, rumors, always manipulating, always stitching my mind into a quilt of their words.
*
Some nights, the odor of singed blood would accompany my nocturnal guests. Some nights, the beasts themselves would be wounded, their glossy black feathers emblazoned with their own flesh and marrow. Some nights, their stature was imperial and their gleam immaculate.
*
The one-hundred-seventy-second crow bore only a caveat: “The siren songs, the riddles, the fables, the jokes, the lies, all must be forgotten. You have only yourself. You must hold firm under your own mass. We together cannot carry you.”
*
I awaited the one-hundred-seventy-third with dread. None had told me when this would end, so I savored each visit, but the original hour had never left me. That first journal entry was etched on all surfaces of my mind, my skin, my pulse, my soul.
"Don’t leave me, please don’t leave me," I wept without opening my eyes. This harbinger reeked of rot and decay, of the soil that birthed and destroyed, of piquant pine air and low mallow breezes.
Feathers splayed out gently on my arm. "You are alone."
My heart thudded, stuttered, ground to a halt.
“What is has been and shall ever be.”
My eyelids parted against my will.
See the crow, recognize it for what it is, and its existence will be terminated. Ignore it, turn away, and its existence will remain a ghost of the mind.
The one-hundred-seventy-third crow filled my room. Not one blank wall or pocket of air remained. Every feather and scaly claw grazed another surface.
It was everywhere, and yet it was nothing. It enveloped me: I bathed in the smoke of its blood and nestled in its heart of coal. It wove itself into my bones. Pinned beneath its contorted beak, which dripped the tarnished silver of my own ravaged soul, I bristled in anticipation.
The one-hundred-seventy-third crow was silent, motionless.
"Help me," I begged. "Nourish me. Berate me. Love me. Frighten me."
The one-hundred-seventy-third crow’s grip loosened, but its task was not complete. I could not continue without it; it needed a subject to torture.
"We’re codependent," I insisted. "Please."
Its hold slackened further still.
The window, the walls, the ceiling, the floor, my bed, my commode, my desk, my body, all exploded, and from them the crow’s sundry and smaller embodiments surged. They sang, chattered, growled, smirked, jeered, bled, tore at me.
Now the crows become denser. Feathers cluttered my mouth, stung my eyes, plugged my ears. Dulling me made the pain yet worse. I yearned to fathom the agony that others endured. Being forced to recognize my own inability to experience sorrow and suffering rent me.
“Please!” I cried out, to abrade my throat more than to strive to be heard. This was babel.
“Make! Me! Feel!”
*
Night was day and day was night and my consciousness was a swidden.
*
Sunlight nudged me awake. At once, I heard songbirds twittering outside the window of my vacant room.
It was the most beautiful sound I had ever heard.
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