Strange Animals

Chapter 0 Crow Business

Green died and then he didn’t.

He twisted his ankle and toppled off the curb. Pain flashed as his cheekbone hit the blacktop. Twenty feet away, the crushing mass of a city bus rolled toward him.

Cheek on the pavement, he watched the zigzag tread of a bus tire, ten, nine, eight feet off and closing.

Brakes squealed. Too late.

At the office, ad copy for a new psoriasis medication sat half written next to a wilting pothos plant.

At home, a shadow box diorama of an old Model T car made from salvaged clock parts sat unfinished next to a sewing box full of tiny gears, springs, and minute hands.

He was less than a breath away from the lesson that lives are not finished, they are concluded.

That lesson was arriving at thirty-five miles per hour.

The black tire filled his vision. No time to scream.

One final thought.

No, this isn’t how it happens.

Then, he was back, standing on the sidewalk as if someone else’s life had been roughly spliced atop his own.

It was a crude edit, his death overwritten. The bus roared past, stinging his eyes with grit and a wall of warm, displaced air.

He might have wept or collapsed, but before he could a sound sucker punched him like a thunderclap. It was a caw that sent him stumbling backward, knocking a rolling suitcase from an elderly man’s grasp.

Time moved sluggishly.

The man shouldered Green aside and retrieved his luggage, muttering something vicious that Green didn’t catch. A bystander with graying dreadlocks looked up from his phone, then back down.

Green saw the crow.

On a nearby No Parking sign, a black bird the size of a golden retriever was croaking and chittering, punctuated by caws loud enough to rattle storefront windows. The sounds kicked over something inside Green’s guts. The looming creature paused and looked at him as if waiting for an answer.

No one else stopped. No one else looked at the crow.

A final corvid cry inexplicably sent Green’s hand to his pocket.

There was something new there. He pulled it out.

An acorn the color of coffee with cream sat on his open palm. It was a commonplace object that menaced him with its simple presence.

The crow was gone.

His old life was gone with it.

Not finished. Concluded.

Beyond Green’s awareness, somewhere in the Catskill Mountains, a peculiar patch of woods and the things that hunted there were waiting for him.

Already, the thread-thin roots of a place he had never visited were reaching for his future.

New pathways sprouted from the moment like mushrooms after sunset.

In the dark soil at the edge of his perception, dangerous ideas were growing.