Eating Crow
I’m standing on the windowsill outside her hospital room, three floors up. The eastern wing. I’m don’t need to be here. I shouldn’t be here. But I want to know how she did it. How she saw me. I’m not supposed to be seen, only felt. Ghosts and whispers and echoes of influence.
Her hair is dark, as black as my feathers. It hangs over her face like plant roots pulled from the ground, twisting each way and that. It half-hides the white gauze that sticks to her cheek. I lean forward to get a closer look, but my beak taps against the glass.
They have her leg elevated. Held up by ropes, bound in plaster. She’d taken a tumble after the … incident, mangled her leg falling off the roof of her house. She’d laid there for a while, bleeding from the hole beneath her eye. Waiting for someone to find her. Crying.
Now, she sleeps.
There is a woman sitting nearby in a stiff-backed chair. She has the same dark hair, the same round face. It is her mother. She watches the soft rise and fall of girl’s chest with eyes dull, like a broken light bulb in a streetlamp.
A pigeon lands beside me and starts pecking around the window frame. It hungers. There is some termite damage in the wood, so it might get lucky. I’d rather it gets lost. It becomes flustered, annoyed by its failures, flapping its wings. Its feathers scrape across the window and mother glares at it.
Girl stirs.
My eyes narrow. Idiot pigeon is going to wake girl up. I feel hotness surge through my body. Girl needs to rest. Pigeon needs to shut up. With a quick stab of my beak, I pierce through its wing and snap the fine, hollow bone that keeps it together. Startled, pained, pigeon tries to escape. It flaps backward, but it doesn’t know, it doesn’t understand that it is broken now. When it pulls away from the window, one wing dangles limply by its side, and it begins to fall in a tight spiral towards the ground.
A man is walking by beneath me. He bellows out some curse words as the pigeon lands on his head. He looks up towards me, his old face crinkled like a burger wrapper. His eyes track the building wall, searching for understanding; how did pigeon fall? Why did it fall?
Mother has come to the window.
“Let’s get some air in here, Farah,” she says as the opens it.
Farah? Is that girl’s name? Yes. I look to see if she’s awake. She is. Pigeon didn’t wake her, but maybe man did. I hop back and to the side, out of mother’s way, as man fixes his eyes on her.
“What is your problem?” he shouts.
“What?” mother asks.
“You threw a mangled pigeon at me!”
“I assure you sir, I did not!”
“What is your name, lady?”
I leave them to their argument and slip past mother into the room. She doesn’t notice. She can’t notice. She can’t see me. No one can. Not normally. But Farah does. She watches me as I perch up on the metal bar at the foot of her bed. I shouldn’t be doing this. I shouldn’t be getting this close. But I am.
I tilt my head this way and that, trying to make sense of her face. Soft, round. And this strip of white, almost glowing white, gauze across her face. I know that underneath it is a deep, narrow hole that travels all the way through to her teeth. I know that because I felt them when it happened. When I did what I did.
She stares back at me. I know she can see me. She knows it, too. She should hate me. She should scream ‘there is a bird in here! Kill it! It attacked me!’, but she doesn’t. She speaks, barely above a whisper. I’m not sure if it’s because of pain, or if she is worried mother might hear her. But it isn’t from fear. I know the sound of fear, and her voice carries none of it.
“It’s you,” she says. “Are you real?”
I nod.
“You attacked me.”
I nod again, slower.
Her next word drills through me like a barbed spear. “Why?”
I can’t smile. My body isn’t designed for it. But if I could, I would offer up the most mirthless smile I could. That’s what I want to do. I want to reassure her. That’s why I am here. That’s why I followed her. It’s not curiosity at all. It’s guilt. It’s penance.
My beak draws open, my breath tickles upwards over my nostrils.
“Because you saw me,” I say. “You’re not supposed to. No one is.”
She doesn’t startle at my reply. She doesn’t frown, doesn’t even blink. Perhaps it’s the pain medication, perhaps she thinks this is just a dream. “I’ve read stories about you, black bird,” she says. “People say they are messengers of death. Are you a messenger? Are you Death?”
Am I Death?
“… no.”
“Then why are you here?”
Another painful question. I could be honest. I could tell her everything. Or I could say only what I am here to say. I choose brevity and swallow. “To say sorry,” I reply. “So … sorry.”
“Mmm. Okay then,” she mumbles, as her eyelids droop.
She turns her head and after a moment, her breath softens and she’s asleep again. I should go. I’ve said my peace. I hop off the metal bar. I hear the plastic tapping of my talons across the hospital floor. I smell the discomforting cleanliness of it. I flap up to the windowsill and take to the sky.