The crows began increasing in
number, and at first, I gave it no thought. I had been reading in a park on my
days off for a while, when there were nice days, enjoying the mellow late
summer air, which then became a crisp fall air. I would always go in
mid-morning, read for a couple of hours, and then return home for lunch. I held
to a kind of ritual: my three block walk, sitting down on my favorite bench,
sipping my tea, looking at the trees, listening to the bird songs, then diving
into my book, which at this time was Virginia Woolf's The Waves. I didn't
notice the crows, at least not apart from the other birds, until my ritual was
well established, perhaps 50 pages into The Waves (I was taking my time with
it). One day, however, there were about six or seven crows that I suddenly
heard, then looked up and saw, a few on a nearby power line, and a few more in
the tree roughly above my bench. They were quite noisy that day, cawing loudly
as if in intense crow conversation. It actually sounded a lot like an argument.
I fixated on them, already being distracted from Woolf, and found their traded
banter fascinating.
Over the next couple of weeks,
their numbers grew, and I eventually would leave my book at home, deciding to study
the "text" of the crows instead. I would listen intently to different
groups, and occasionally two individuals would dominate my attention. One day,
I arrived at the park at my usual time, initiated my ritual, and within seconds
dozens of crows arrived, and kept arriving, and I watched them pour in, feeling
more than slightly concerned in an "Alfred Hitchcock" sort of way. As they struck
up their conversations, I estimated that there may have been hundreds in the
vicinity, not merely dotting, but lining the power lines, and filling several
trees, too. Their voices blended in an indistinguishable cacophony, and I sat
taking it all in as best I could. I was entranced by it, if also a bit
frightened. After several minutes, I began to hear familiar sounds. I could
have sworn I heard consonants and vowels occurring in between the bedlam of
noise. I tried to mark when I heard one: "there's a distinct P sound; now
an S; there's a T...an R...a long O." At first I tried to understand
whether it was spelling something - a foolish notion, I thought. After dismissing this,
realizing that there were likely far more of these sounds happening than I was
able to perceive, I suddenly thought I heard a word amidst the din. I could
swear I heard the word "why." I listened even more intently, and
heard it again, then again, and it kept popping up, not seemingly in rhythm,
but none-the-less more and more distinctly enunciated.
It was clear as a bell by the
time I noticed another word: "you." It occurred not long after
"why," and that's when I began to discern a rhythm. I started
counting the seconds, or beats, between the end of "you" and the
beginning of "why." I made it as about 6 beats, as if it was a line
from a song. I was sure this had to be some kind of aural hallucination, but
then I heard another one. The word "this" came as an offbeat in
comparison with the rhythm of the other two words. I was so freaked out at this
point that I felt like leaving the bench, but couldn't bring myself to do so.
As I tuned my concentration more intensely on what I was sure was a message of
some kind, and fully believing that I must be completely mad to think so, I
heard the word "are" between the first two words. "Why are
you.....this....?" Holy shit, there was a sentence forming: a question.
The fragment kept spinning within the aural tornado that I was unable to stop
myself from hearing. My senses began to turn to pure emotion, to a kind of
manic feeling, yet one so dripping with dread and revulsion that I began to
cry, tears streaming down my face while the last few words came suddenly,
within seconds of each other. I finally heard the entire revolving question,
like a vinyl record skipping, or a looped audio file, and I sat in horror, glad
that I was alone in the park so that no one could witness the agonized look on
my face, and my limbs folding up to my torso, and no one would call 911 to have
medical professionals cart me off to the loony bin. The hundreds of crows had
crowded around me, had chosen me, to ask, "Why are you fucking destroying
this mother-fucking planet?"
All rights reserved. ©2018, 2020 Todd
Franklin Osborn
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