I saw the crow again the next morning.
Dylan’s bus was swallowed by the fog. Our street had never been a busy one; cold mornings like this would come and go without noise, no traffic but a mail truck and, once Dylan had turned six, the bus. Today was one of those days Phil left early for work, off to some meeting he never brought up and that I had stopped caring to ask about. I enjoyed the peace of an empty house, empty street—it was like there was no one else in the world but me.
Me, and the bird.
It was perched atop our street sign, toothy-smile wide. It had been silent until I met its gaze, squawking once—“ha!”—like a laugh. I tried briefly to convince myself that its teeth were just a trick of the light. It hadn’t worked yesterday, and it didn’t work now.
“Biologically impossible,” I said. “You can’t exist. It’s biologically impossible.”
Its feathers—just how could I do them justice? They looked like they’d be satin to the touch, the way they glistened matte in a day still unstruck by sun. I reached out to touch it (as if I could ever know such bliss), arm drawn up with the magnetism of two lovers embracing for the first time. It seemed to contemplate, with some vein of intelligence, bridging the gap.
But a trash truck barrelled by. A groaning, gnashing wall of metal—it sent the crow into flight. A flurry of black and it was gone, reduced to cawing in the treetops.
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