crows

by Jonas David

Earlier today seventeen crows perched on the powerline above the green townhouse across the street, which of course indicated that Mrs Darling, the occupant of said townhouse, would exit the front door in the afternoon and walk down the sidewalk to the east and out of my view around the bend, only to return several hours later in the evening carrying one, two, or rarely three shopping bags from the nearby supermarket. How her activity related to the number of crows was (and is) not entirely clear to me but nonetheless has proven entirely and completely accurate, so accurate in fact that were I to be told that a certain pistol would be loaded or unloaded based solely on the accuracy of my predictions, I would not hesitate to point said pistol at my own head and pull the trigger--it absolutely never has failed to be true that when an odd number of crows perches on the powerline above Mrs Darling’s house in the morning, she always without fail exits the house in the afternoon at some time between the hours of 1 and 4PM and goes east down the street and around the corner. It should also be noted that, though I have spent considerable time and attention and considerable effort searching, I have found no other such patterns relating to crows perched in other locations around the neighborhood. Only Mrs Darling and the crows above Mrs Darling’s green townhouse share this connection, a connection which, I might add, were I of a mindset not entirely averse to the idea, could appear to be supernatural, especially considering that the late Mr Darling had been until his recent and (I struggle to put it any other way) horrifying death, a very competent and renowned taxidermist known for his large collection of blackbirds ravens and crows which, placed on custom-installed perches all about the interior of the house, numbered no less than six in every room hallway and alcove with the only exception (at Mrs Darling’s insistence) of the bedroom and were (or had been) emphatically not for sale at any price. For the past six weeks I have documented the number of crows perched on the powerline above Mrs Darling’s townhouse at exactly 8AM when I open the curtains and look out my office window. Their numbers over the previous fifty days including today are as follows: 9, 7, 6, 15, 3, 10, 16, 9, 8, 0, 21, 10, 9, 2, 17, 15, 17, 17, 8, 0, 14, 1, 14, 17, 13, 14, 0, 12, 14, 3, 15, 15, 15, 9, 18, 21, 21, 14, 17, 19, 3, 11, 10, 4, 2, 5, 12, 7, 17 and in each and every instance in which the number was odd, as I’ve mentioned, Mrs Darling left the house in the afternoon that day, every time without exception (in the case of 0 crows: one might consider 0 to be an odd number since it cannot be divided evenly by 2, but also one might consider it to be an even number because it precedes an odd number, however, due to one instance in which Mrs Darling did not leave the house after I counted 0 crows perched on the powerline it must logically follow that 0 is an even number, and I have noted it as such) without exception, as I said, when the number of crows was odd, Mrs Darling, as I said, was absolutely guaranteed to leave the house that afternoon between 1 and 4PM (at the very latest 4:06 PM) and walk around the bend to the east. So you can imagine my confusion and consternation and complete bafflement when 4PM arrived and Mrs Darling had failed to exit the house even though I had clearly and carefully counted and recorded seventeen (odd) crows perched on the powerline above her house in the morning. The minutes passed inexorably one after the other, up to and including 4:06, and then, impossibly, beyond, all without any motion in the Darling windows or around the Darling door, tens of minutes passed in this way, and then entire hours, and only at 6:10PM did I put down my binoculars and begin to pace back and forth in my office and contemplate the meaning of this aberration in the otherwise exactly and perfectly repeating pattern. Certainly, I thought, something is wrong. Obviously, I told myself, some crisis has befallen Mrs Darling. Clearly, I said aloud to myself in my office, something terrible has prevented her from exiting the house. At this time of year the sun had already gone completely, and due to the general lack of street lamps in the area (the only one within 100 yards having been broken for some time) the road between my and Mrs Darling’s house, as well as Mrs Darling’s yard and house, were completely cloaked in impenetrable darkness, including all the windows which were perfectly black and without the slightest pinprick of light. This absolute, perfect, and, it seemed to me, final darkness unsettled me to a degree I had not experienced in many years. Something has happened, I said aloud to myself, and, looking out the window at Mrs Darling’s dark and immobile house which was utterly still and quiet without the least sign of life, I felt the heavy weight of responsibility settle down on my shoulders, and I knew that my realization and understanding of the pattern of the crows had set me in the terrible position of being the only one who could possibly know that something was amiss at Mrs Darling’s. At 6:25PM I went down the stairs and took my jacket from the closet and put it on and opened the front door and went out into the cool and silent night. I stepped into the street and my steps produced the only sounds in the still air, and ahead there seemed to be an unearthly glow surrounding the edges of Mrs Darling’s perfectly black and silent house. I crossed through her front gate and over the short cobblestone path through her lawn and I knocked on the faded green paint of her darkened front door to which I had never in all the thirty years I’ve lived across from her been so close. There was no answer, and not a sound from within. I went around the side of the house and an acrid smell wafted over me and a flickering light wavered in the darkness. I reached the back corner of her green townhouse and behind the house was a small patio and a fire burned within a circle of rocks inside a larger circle of gravel in the grass, and sitting in a chair some feet from the fire was Mrs Darling. Her head was tilted back against the seat and her long hair was hanging down, and next to her, on a small decorative metal table of the kind meant to be left out in the rain, a single crow stood watching her with black eyes that glinted in the flames. Her stillness was, of course, troubling. I took three hurried steps toward her before I noticed the soft sound of her snores beneath the crackling flames. The faintly toxic smell, the afterbreath of burning chemicals, was clearly emanating from the fire, and I noticed then the scattering of black feathers on the circle of rocks and in the gravel just outside the fire. The crow on the table, which had not moved an inch in all this time was, I realized then, one of the many dozens of taxidermied crows from inside the Darling house, and I also realized, then, the answer to the puzzling conundrum of the seventeen crows perched on the powerline. The answer, of course, was the extra crow which must have been present in the Darling yard that morning, perhaps even this same crow that now watched over Mrs Darling, and because seventeen plus one is eighteen, and eighteen is, as everyone knows, an even number, this meant that the pattern had held all along and I had been entirely correct in my predictions, and there was nothing amiss at all, and everything was completely correct and well. I looked down on Mrs Darling’s sleeping face which was quite ruddy from the heat of the flames and I pushed aside a strand of hair that had caught in the corner of her mouth. Then I carefully exited her yard the way I’d come and returned across the darkened street to my own house and back up the stairs into my office to write these words, after which I will retire for the night. 

Photo of Jonas David

BIO: Jonas David is a writer and editor at Lucent Dreaming magazine, and lives in the Seattle area with his wife and their two cats.