This story is set in September. Early autumn. The migration of birds before winter.
But I suppose it’s apropos at springtime too. Both seasons—autumn and spring—are shifting seasons: the closing of the world into darkness or opening into light. Our lives tend to shift, down-gear or up, from one state of being to its opposite.
I did have a terrible back injury a few years ago, and I really did have a police officer pull me over for walking. The rest of the story is made up.
Except the birds. Crows, cranes, robins, geese, the occasional hawk: these are all companions when I go for my walks. I wish that there was something magical in the crows who caw at me most mornings. I suppose there is, in the ordinary way all of nature can be magical if we let it become so.
Since spring is here, now is a good time to go looking and listening for birds. I hope you get the chance.
I also hope you enjoy this story.
It was only me on the empty sidewalk and the police officer parked next to me in his squad car. Just your typical suburbs.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
Couldn’t he see I was walking?
“I was looking at the crow,” I said, but what I was thinking was, Nobody looks at crows anymore, do they?
“Hm.”
“The sky and the clouds are so beautiful,” I continued, heart starting to palpitate. “And then the crow cawed and I wanted to see him.”
The officer looked at me with that police officer look. Giving nothing away. Accusatory without claiming to be. Plausible deniability.
“Hm.”
“Can I go now?”
“We got a call about someone walking up and down this street.”
“Is that a crime?” I felt suddenly like a character in a Ray Bradbury story.
“No. But we got a call.”
One of my neighbors called the cops on me because I was walking down the street and looking at clouds?
The crow cawed again.
“Okay. You look fine. Go about your business.” He was done with me. Rolled up the window, turned the car around in a cul de sac, and left.
I looked up again just to be defiant.
Now there were three crows cawing.
***
That night I dreamt of a trio of sand-hill cranes flying over the middle school in my neighborhood. They were crulling out their clackety, undulating call. The three cranes seemed angry at me, but I hadn’t done anything. I was just standing there on the sidewalk, looking up.
When I awoke, the sound of the cranes was gone. All I could remember was mist. Mist everywhere. The baseball fields and the soccer fields and the wide lawn in front of the school: all of them smothered in fog. I tried to go back to sleep, but the pain wouldn’t let me.
***
Lie on my back. Slide feet closer to my butt so my knees are in the upright position. Now rotate knees side to side.
Side to side.
Over and over again until twenty-five reps are complete.
Now the flexer things. Cheerleader arch. Old man hunch. Cheerleader arch. Old man hunch.
Lying on my back, knees pointed toward the ceiling, I flex my spine up and down, arched and hunched, over and over.
Good little patient. Get those reps in. Bob the PT guy would be proud.
After the easy stuff: the press-ups. Mine are the modified kind. Gentle ones. For delicate, fragile backs with disks that bulge and pinch the nerves and make your right leg tingle and sometimes go numb.
It’s a strange feeling to lose so much sensation in your foot for so long that now your foot muscles have actually grown weaker.
Press up.
And relax. Arms extended in the front of you. Lie there for a bit and almost fall back to sleep.
Then press up.
Hold for thirty.
Relax.
***
My morning walk was slower than usual. Good days and bad-ish days, Bob had warned me. You never really heal.
This was one of the bad-ish days.
I definitely looked enfeebled, maybe a little drunk because the right leg’s muscles had decided they weren’t interested in walking or moving or even living. They were on strike.
As I tottered gingerly down the empty sidewalk, silent houses on either side kept watch. I braced for the cop to appear.
Officer, there’s a woman walking slowly. Lock her up.
There was no crime in walking. No crime in looking up. Still, I kept an eye out.
The crows were gone too.
Maybe it was the tilt of my head toward the trees, but I could feel the muscles in my back tightening. Twinging. I hated turning around after only a half a block, so I pressed on.
Idiot.
By the second block, I was shuffling only a few inches at a time and cursing my stupidity, longing to be home and in bed, the heat of the heating pad searing my back into blissful, hot oblivion.
The sidewalk seam caught my shuffling toe and I went down. Hard. For a moment, I dreamed of cranes flying off. Or were they crows? Three of them crackling across the sky.
When I pressed my palms into the cold sidewalk and bent my knees to get up, the pain that shot through my back made me cry out. Not a yelp; a savage scream. I wailed into the sky. The pain was so knife-sharp that I started to cry. My knees wobbled and my right leg had gone to pins and needles. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone called the cops now.
I stood there, spine all crookity, and felt my face.
A small scratch. Just above the eyebrow. A dozen razor-thin lines in a row like a supermarket barcode. And a little blood. Not much.
I looked down the street, but no one was watching. Or maybe the crows were, but at that particular moment, I wasn’t interested.
***
When I got back, the squad car was idling in my driveway. Same one as before: a dark, dark blue, like the color of a fresh bruise. I waited at the edge of the asphalt, the main street humming behind me with every speeding car that passed. I braced for the officer.
I wasn’t staring at the clouds, sir. I swear. I’ve learned my lesson.
But while I waited, the car just idled. No one emerged. I felt caught. My fingers brushed the scrape on my forehead. Do they give tickets for falling like an idiot?
The engine’s hum stopped and the door clicked open. The cop emerged and stood opposite from me.
“I think you should ask these neighbors why—” I began, but he stopped me with a traffic officer hand.
“I wasn’t sure,” he said. “I drove by a couple of times but didn’t see you walking.”
A police officer stalker?
“I—” he hesitated. His look was bewildered. Innocent. He didn’t even notice my cut.
“I have to walk for my back,” I explained, somewhat feebly. “That’s why I’m kinda slow and unsteady. I’m sorry if people think I’m on drugs or something.”
Technically, I was on drugs. Pain medication that sometimes made me lightheaded and drunkily happy. But at the moment, I was clearheaded. Only some Advil. God knows, I wanted to be on harder stuff.
“I thought about what you said,” he answered.
Huh?
“About it being a nice day and wanting to see the clouds and the sky. The crows.”
Maybe one of them cawed. Maybe it was a car horn honking.
“I’m glad we can agree,” I said slowly, still unsure where this was headed. “It’s nice to look up sometimes.” Either he was gearing up to ask me out or I was about to be kidnapped.
“I’ve always wanted to go bird-watching,” he said.
Huh. Did not have bird-watching on my bingo card.
“Crows?” I asked. I started to wonder if maybe I was high.
“Yeah, or maybe those long birds with the beaks and legs.”
Very specific. “Cranes?” I asked, hoping to nudge him to some coherence.
“Yes! Cranes!”
“They hang out in the school soccer field. Every morning.”
He looked up at the position of the sun and his face fell a little. “Too late.”
“Maybe. But sometimes they fly back in the evening.”
“Do they?“
“Sometimes.”
This seemed to satisfy him. He nodded resolutely then got back in his car. The engine started.
I figured it was safe to go.
As I hobbled past, he rolled down the window and spoke. “I wasn’t sure if you wanted some company. On the walks.”
Did I? I usually walked alone. I was too slow and unsteady for company—the cut above my eyebrow flamed with embarrassment—and if I was honest, I relished the solitude. Crows yes, but not cops.
I think he heard the answer in my hesitation.
“Sorry to bother you again, ma’am.” The window slid up.
My mouth hung open as I meant to speak but no words came out. Soon he was backing out of the driveway.
***
That night, in my dream, the parking lot of the school was covered in geese. A mob of them. I’ve always thought the Canada goose was a much-maligned bird that didn’t deserve so much ire. And it was beautiful too. We often forget its beauty because of its familiarity.
But that mob of birds was not beautiful. They were hostile. Honking and strutting around, moving slightly as I tried to walk.
***
The birds are migrating. That much I know about this time of year. But do crows migrate?
The three of them were perched in a triangular formation and jawing at me. Not the typical caws of a crow, but a rapid-fire squawking that denoted annoyance. Maybe anger. Definitely some “go away” vibes.
For a moment, I thought they might swoop down and drive me off. Were crows that aggressive?
Maybe at migration time.
I kept walking. I needed to. The pain in my back was deep and low and ached worse than ever.
I dreamed of my heating pad. My bed, from which I had stolen away just a little while ago, seemed more enticing than ever. The sun hadn’t quite come up, and the air was chill. I could feel all of September’s ending in that chillness.
The crows watched me from the rooftop of the school. I plowed ahead, one foot slowly in front of the other. Maybe if I didn’t acknowledge them, they’d lose interest.
Diving suddenly, one flew across my path to sit on the chain-link fence surrounding the soccer fields. It squawked at me. The others echoed it.
I kept walking. Just ignoring as best I could.
Off in the field, from out of the settled mist, I saw two cranes bobbing their sinuous necks up and down. Fueling up for the journey. Preparing for flight. Did cranes migrate?
Then, like an army awaiting orders, geese wobbled out from the white distance and dug in the wet grass too. I knew that geese migrated, but to where, I couldn’t say. They always seemed to be around, in spring, summer, fall, even winter.
I could still hear the squawking crows, but my ability to ignore things was at full strength. So they followed me.
I told myself I wasn’t threatened.
Every once in a while, they stopped and perched on trees or the peaks of the school’s roof or further stretches of the chain-linked fence. Taking stock of me. Of all of us. Or perhaps only the changing wind.
When the sun finally arrived, I was on the last leg of my regimen. The orange and red sky pushed back against the gray-white fog, and further ahead, a flock of robins’ bellies were aflame. A dozen of them hopped along the grass by the sidewalk, while a dozen more cascaded down from a treetop like falling embers.
They were gathering too. Like the geese and the sand-hill cranes.
And the crows. But I wasn’t sure what those three were gathering for.
When I got back home, my back felt a little better, but I mistrusted it, so I sank into the heating pad and drifted off.
***
“Look,” he said, “crows.”
Two of them eyed us silently. I’ve heard crows remember faces.
“And look,” he continued, pointing, “those ones!”
“Cranes,” I said.
“Cranes.”
Overhead, a v-line of geese.
“What’re those? Ducks?”
“Geese.” How can a person not know geese?
“Oh.” He was embarrassed. “I just never paid attention to the difference.”
We were walking around the school: me hobbling slowly, he keeping pace. I could tell he wanted to go faster.
“What’s that?” He nodded toward an object in the sky.
The thing was hurtling towards the school’s rooftop, toward the two crows. Its wings were black.
“Another crow?” he said.
Yes, but there was something else. Another bird, just as fast, racing after.
All three crows engaged, the two on the roof launching after their comrade, the third zipping to the west as the pursuer gained.
A dogfight.
“A hawk?” he asked.
I didn’t know. My knowledge ended with the flight of geese and the sand-hill crane’s call. I had never seen anything like this before. Corvids and birds of prey. A battle. A turf war. Who owned the sky?
We both were looking up, watching the curve of crows’ wings. His hand reached out and brushed against mine, but I jerked back and somehow shifted the muscles in my right leg. A sharp twinge rippled through my sciatic nerve.
The hawk had chased the crows off, and that’s when I woke up.
***
The heating pad is one of man’s greatest inventions. After only a few seconds—ten or twenty—it is suddenly a soothing lava flow beneath your muscles, a warm bath of electric heat that scalds away all the pain.
I wasn’t sure how many days I’d been on the heating pad, or maybe these days were only three or four hours, but whatever stretch of time it had been, it was sweet oblivion.
Dreams came in fits and starts. At one point my house was surrounded by fifty geese. A siege. They milled around on the driveway, shitting their caterpillar turds everywhere.
At others times I heard the red-winged blackbirds getting ready to migrate.
One time, I heard the doorbell.
“Just checking to see if everything’s alright.”
It was my cop, looking sheepish. This time, I noticed he had a dimple in his right cheek. He wasn’t exactly smiling, but the boyish and apologetic face revealed it.
“So you check when I walk, and now you check when I don’t walk?”
No good answer came to him.
“Did the neighbor call this time too?” I continued. My voice had a tang of annoyance: I wanted my heating pad.
He shook his head as eyes drifted down to watch a spider crawling just under the seam of my front door. I could see the legs curled up around the seam, and although I was annoyed, I couldn’t hate him for disturbing me. He looked too lost.
“If walking’s good for you,” he started, “I thought—”
That spider was really on the move. One of those big, disgusting wolf spiders. It had almost reached the other side of the door frame. I considered asking my cop to squish it for me.
“Maybe you should go for a walk,” he finished, quickly.
“Maybe you should.” It came out bitchy and I regretted it, but what could I do? I really ached for being back in bed.
He made a sound in the back of his throat, like someone had winded him with a blow. Then he nodded curtly and turned on his heels to go.
I sighed. “Fine.”
The storm door slammed shut, and if the wolf spider scurried out alive, I’ll never know, but the cop and I were halfway down the sidewalk before I remembered I’d left the heating pad on.
***
In the dream, we walked around the school, and the cranes were bobbing their necks up and down like marionettes on strings.
“Why are they always in pairs?” he asked.
“Sometimes there’s three.”
I didn’t mention that the third was their offspring.
“They’re strange,” he said.
“Aren’t we all.”
As I said it, he was already receding from me, heading into the field, into the pale yellow-blue morning.
I tried to call out, to warn him that the cranes get angry when you invade their turf, but the crows cawed, and I turned back to see them, and the electric heat from the heating pad woke me up.
And when I woke up in my bed and felt the sweat pooling through my t-shirt, all I could think was to check for the wolf spider to see what was real and what was not.
***
Stand in the grass. Listen to the others calling. Watch for the v-line. Wait for the fog to lift.
Up and down.
Over and over again. The ground and the sky. Walking and flying. Clouds in the shape of crows. Starlings flying in zig-zags, birds in the shape of clouds.
It’s a strange feeling, to be watching the migration. Alone but not alone.
Look up.
And relax.
Hold the thought for thirty seconds. For thirty years.
Forever.
Bob had warned me. Good days and bad-ish days.
“You never really heal,” I hear myself saying, but he doesn’t answer.
Maybe he’s ready to migrate.
Maybe he’s already flown.
Up and down. Sky and ground. Over and over and over again. Waiting. Watching.
A v-line descends.
The geese will never leave, I think. That’s my consolation.
He has already flown off into the horizon. Swallowed by the mist and the morning.
I have nothing left to do but resume my walking.
***
“What happened?” he said.
He’d been coming to walk with me for two weeks now. We were circling the school, as we always did. Our flight path.
“I don’t know,” I answered. “I coughed wrong and it all went to shit.”
His hair was dark brown. Almost black. I guess I hadn’t noticed before. Before, he had simply been the cop who pulled me over for walking. Now I could see his hair, and that dimple, and there was something in his expression that seemed lost, a way his eyes drifted into seeing what was behind the mist.
“When will it heal?” he asked.
“Never.”
He thought about that.
Our footfalls were quiet, steady. He walked in pace with my slow steps, and when I almost stumbled—another seam in the sidewalk—he caught my arm and steadied me. I wondered if the scrape above my eyebrow was even noticeable anymore.
When I had my bearings again, I felt the skin. Smooth.
“Never?” he said.
“It’s the kind of thing I have to live with. Manage as best I can. That’s why I walk.”
“It helps?”
“Yes.” God, yes.
This time, when his hand brushed against mine, I didn’t flinch.
“Look,” he said. “The cranes.”
I made a knowing sound in my throat. The cranes were doing their usual statuesque posing and occasional bobbing. They eyed us but didn’t seem to care.
A flash of black and my eyes moved upward.
“And crows,” I said.
The three of them took flight.
“I read somewhere that they remember faces,” I continued.
“Maybe they come for the walks.” His palm met mine. Fingers through fingers.
“No crime in that,” I said, holding on tight.
That’s it for now. As always, thank you for reading!
And if you are looking for Arthurian fantasy, consider my novel, The Thirteen Treasures of Britain, or if you want a dash of nostalgic coming-of-age, 1990s-style, there’s Avalon Summer and its companion fantasy, Gates to Illvelion. Or you can check out my short stories HERE.
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Love the internal monologue. “I wasn’t staring at the clouds, sir. I swear. I’ve learned my lesson.” LOL
I’ve been “pulled over” for walking too. In my case it was suspicious to be walking at night, apparently. But it really is a wonderful time to walk.