No Crows At The Funeral

No Crows At The Funeral

by Graham Swanson

Accident

The other paramedics still talk about what happened to Rob. He was the best. Been there for 27 years. Smart guy, always fixing something, always working on a gizmo. He had been a medic, a fire fighter, a school counselor, 9/11 dispatcher, and was nice to everyone. He could make routes no one else could find, on the road and in the mind. He knew everything about the human body and trauma. To us, he was a great healer to the community. Then that 3 year old...

 I don't know why. He just froze up.

 He was different after that. He was always perky before, but after that he began brooded and spoke abruptly. No good mornings, always grumpy, and quick to anger with the new guys. Until an accident happened. Then he wouldn't stop laughing.

 Even in the face of death itself. 

Like he knew it would happen.

The stress, you know. He did a lot for the county. We figured something weird would occur sometimes but not to this guy. I went to his home for dinner. Met his family. A farm with a small orchard of peaches and chickens. 

He wanted to show me something. 

He took me into the lounge he had been working on. It smelled stale. The ground was still dirt. He had it laid out on the workbench. 

    "Here's how the next wreck should happen." He had it all drawn out on a big map. Like he was planning construction. 

I finally had enough. I couldn't keep watching this man go on. I said to him, "It's over, Rob. She died." 

He stopped what he was doing.

It looked like he was listening so I kept talking.

"You can't control accidents." 

“The next crash will be a seven car pile up on the interstate. No fatalities.” 

After that he never laughed again. He did his job perfectly, then forgot to tighten a wheel on the stretcher. They strapped an old woman to it and it rolled into the blackened river. The old woman vanished. Search teams from several states converged on the river. They found nothing.

So they took away his liscense and he lost his job.

Rob didn't finish the work on his lounge. It remained walls of aluminum panels and foam. His orchard failed. The peaches became fuzzy. He told me they weren't fruit at all, but body parts that pumped blood and reacted to the heat from his hand when he touched them. 

Then the farm itself changed.

It rained that day. Just a little bit to soak up the dry layer of dust. Not enough to rinse the cars off. The demon king's tree always leaned over the road. It's trunk was so gnarled that it looked like a monster took a bite out of it. It was a scar from a fight that happened over 1000 years ago

The corn grew itself that year. Rob didn't step foot on that field. Or his house. He kept playing with model cars and dead crows. 

Then it happened. Just off the interstate. One car tried to shift lanes but didn’t see the vehicle speeding into the blindspot. It was on a congested lane that squeezed cars onto a bridge. Six cars destroyed. No fatalities.

The crashes kept getting worse. People suffered some bruising, but most of the time they were protected. We found them in the wreckage, or on the side of the road. Unscathed. Crows rested peacefully on their bodies.

“Rob, what did you do?” I asked him. 

“The next crash will send a car flying into the air. No collision. It will just lift.”

 It wouldn't be the normal tragic experience. It was more like the wind blew a car 50 feet into the air. No one was harmed. But crows. Always one. They appeared in the sky and rested on the emergency vehicles. They rode along to the hospital, then back to the garage. 

When the crows saw Rob, they flocked to him. So next time I saw him on Social Media, I asked to see his project once again. 

He didn't want to at first, so I told that I saw the crows and believed him. 

He showed me everything. The maps, the computer simulator, stacks of statistics. Diagrams so detailed with legends, arrows, labeled connections, final nodes.

I didn't look at them.

"Bullshit. There’s too many variables. How can you be certain?" 

Then he showed me. A model car and a dead crow. He wrote names on a leaf, then buried them all together in the cornfield. He made a short prayer. But not to any God I knew. 

“A semi will run a big truck coming in from Texas off the road and into the river.”

The next day I got called to an accident. It was where he told me it would be. It was the same model of car as the one he buried. We found the driver in the water and retrieved her. The semi driver was alright too. Just more crows. 

I saw Rob standing on a post overlooking the incident. Crows followed him home. I called him that night. He ignored me. I called his wife, she gave the phone to him. 

I skipped to the point.

“Why are you doing this?” 

“I’m making predictions.”

“No, Rob. Whatever you’re doing is CAUSING the accidents.”

Click. Rob hung up.

I screamed at the dial tone for answers.

Multiple crows followed me home that day. 

Scarecrow

Rob woke up. The smell of must blew in from the window. The corn discharged a bitter aroma. It made his mouth water. 

Up in the morning. Routine. Dress, walk the land, check the water lines, the traps, and the pits that he dug. He smoked a cigarette and watched the animals trapped within. He jumped down with a thick wool glove. The animal scratched and bit his face but with a strong thrust he tossed the animals back into the woods. 

Rob stamped into the house. Doors blown open. Windows shattered. A crow on the sill. 

 He smelled no coffee. He didn't hear anyone in the kitchen. The school bus would arrive at any minute.

 Rob checked in the girl's bedroom. One girl stood frozen with the brush in her hair. The other was in the bathroom, one sock on, a toothbrush in her mouth. Mid spit. 

His wife hung there almost suspended over the bed with sheets in her hands.

KAW! A crow shrieked from the compost bin. 

Rob looked at the crops from the broken window. The rattle of thousands of crows lingered from outside. Hefty breasted cawing filled the air along with dander. They picked at carcusses on the ground and tore the corn to pieces. 

Rob called for help but the phone kept cutting out. The signal it picked up was the hoarse coo of a crow. He fired a gun but it didn't scare them. Nor did the distant thunder. He had this problem before. He turned on a high frequency buzzer. A few flew away but most remained circling the sky, landing in other openings, forming circles around a food source. 

The old fashioned way. He built a cross, then hung an old flannel stuff with grass over it. He put a Halloween mask on its shoulders and old jeans on its hips. He strapped its limbs to the cross. 

Rob walked out into the mud with it over his shoulder. The sweat from the corn put a bitter taste in his mouth. Loose ears sliced his cheeks. The crowds had eaten entire pathways  and uncovered bones beneath the soil. 

Rob had seen worse on the farm. Memories came back of the foxes. How they dug under the chicken coop. He heard the animals bleating in the wind.

He placed the scarecrow on a rise in the earth. Turned it so the Halloween mask faced the crows. Hammered it down. Watched from the porch. The crows avoided the scarecrow. He sat there and drank an entire box of wine. He sat there until it got chilly. Then he put on his sweater. He sat there, and for the first time in days he fell asleep. 

In the morning, the crows had vacated that entire end of the field. So he built a second one and placed it on the other side of the field. The crows lifted into the sky and flew over the trees. The sky turned white. The stormclouds blew away. 

Rob checked on his family. They changed positions. They now lay on the floor, their heads tilted against hard surfaces, or pressed into tight angles. Rob dragged them to their beds. He could hear faint voices from the depth of their throats. He apologized over and over. Black shadows scratched the glass. 

In the morning he saw them in bed. Clothed, but withered away. Dried up to corn husks. A cross around their necks. Rob ran to the bathroom, vomited, then swallowed every pill he had left. And he heard the caws. Not in a string of noise. All at once. Pause. Caw. Pause. Caw.

 Rob saw them on the porch swing. On the head of a cow. On great grandmother's tombstone. They all faced his home. He didn't see the scarecrows now. Only his crosses and crows perched on top of them. The scarecrows were upside down and dismembered. The masks hung from the heads of happy goats. Pieces of their bodies led to a parting in the field.

In the middle of the field was something that was not there before. Two dark wings like shields against the white of the sky. They rose over the blonde of the corn. 

Rob grabbed a baton and stepped out barefooted. The crows stepped aside. The corn stalks leaned over for him. He found pieces of the scarecrows spaced out in a trail. He held a cross in his hands. But when he came under the shadow of the wings it melted in his palm. 

Its wings blocked the light.  It's snarl absorbed the warmth from the wind. The dirt it sat on turned to charcoal. Its fist balled up on the ground emitted a low pounding sound. Its wings outstretched like the blades of a scythe. 

The white of the sky turned to a black dot as the shadows of the demon king rose over his head. 

Rob was an ant. Then he was a dot in the cornfield. Then he was a speck from the clouds. Like lighting, a leaden blur, with ferocious grace that created a rainbow, the dot expanded its shadow over the county and fell over Rob.

The next day the field caught fire. The fire spread across the county and covered the villages in smoke so thick that it suffocated the chickens.

Gargoyle 

Last time I noticed it. Rob's funeral.

The paramedics whispered amongst each other about how Rob drank and then strangled his family after mixing medication with beer. 

The fire fighters thought it was fumes he breathed in during a chemical fire at the factory.

The people he had been friends with outside of his job murmured about a time when a baseball hit him hard in the head.

I tried to talk quietly about it with one other person.. It all started with this crow… and a toy car. They walked away from me.

 No one believed what had happened. How could they? We all wanted an explanation. A rational one. Then…

The wind shifted. Red lights appeared from the hazy fields. The priest stopped his eulogy to look. Others covered their eyes and told their children that it wasn’t real even when it was looking at them. But one by one the heads turned. A pair of eyes squinted. Some people  laughed. One person froze. The distant family refused to look. Everyone saw it.  

It was there against the last row of cornstalks. Tall and hushed. Its wings opened to catch the air. 

No one said a thing. We all stared, a dread tying us together, that maybe if we looked away we’d see it someplace else. One person finally looked away.

Out on the highway, something hit hard enough that we all heard it.