A Murder of Crows: Seventeen Tales of Monsters and the Macabre

by DeAnna Knippling

  “If I’d take her on.”

  He nodded. His hair had long since fallen out, all except the stuff in his ears and nose.

  “I’ll talk to her,” Nitzaniya said. “I need to take on an apprentice sometime. I’m not getting any younger, and I would like to die at some point.”

  Caleb shrugged and spread his hands. They’d had that discussion already.

  She was going to have to change some of those stories around when she told them to the girl. But that was all right. None of them were, strictly speaking, true to begin with.

  * * * * *

  “How is that story supposed to help get rid of the Crouga?” Facunde demanded from the girl’s other shoulder. “That makes no sense whatsoever. You’re just making this all up.”

  Ibarrazzo ignored her and looked at Old Loyolo, who sat on the girl’s knee, and then at me. Both of us, she looked at with her bad eye.

  Why she called it that, and how she had got it, I have never heard. I had assumed that it wasn’t a story worth telling—a sickness, old age. The same kind of thing that happens to all of us, eventually, if we are lucky, and doesn’t need to be dwelled upon. But now I think that she hid the true story of her bad eye under a few shrugs of her wings, as though she had always had one bad eye, and one good one, and that’s all there was to it.

  And now I will never know the real story.

  Old Loyolo cleared his throat and said, “Eating is important. What you take in.”

  I wish he had not reminded me. It was a hungry time, and it was still a long way off until dawn. I glared at him. The top of his head was almost bald, his feathers were so thin. And his twisted leg was oozing blood.

  Ibarrazzo clicked her beak and made a little nod that I think that I was not meant to see. “It is,” she said.

  Then I thought to myself, there is something between them that you don’t know. Lovers? But now I know. We couldn’t fight the monster with stories, not the way she suggested. She was using the story instead to tell him what needed to be done.

  “It has been a long time since you have told that story. You should tell it more often.”

  She watched him, this time not nodding. “No,” she cawed softly. “I shouldn’t. Every time I do…” she shrugged, this time without that little flip to the ends of her wings. Her feathers were spread wider, with gaps between them. Hollow wings.

  “It’s not because you tell the story, my dear,” Loyolo said. She lowered her head, and he hopped over to her—there were so few elders on the girl’s lap that it wasn’t difficult—and rubbed her beak with his own. When he had finished, she buried her head in the girl’s shoulder, pushing the pink blanket closer to the girl’s neck, and held her head there for a long time.

  As though she were hiding her one bad eye.

  The snow began to come down more thickly, turning the light over us a swirling gray that reminded me of bugs in the summer and made me feel even more hungry than before. The girl was shivering constantly and the elders began ordering the younger chicks to come up and huddle with them, both to keep warm together and to help cover the girl with a blanket of crows. She had pulled her hand back inside the blanket. As for myself, I was able to get back on my feet and stand, somewhat woozily, among the crush. Other crows’ feathers held me upright; other crows’ breaths kept me warm.

  The girl covered her nose with the blanket and hunched deeper into the box. The walls on the inside were made of shiny tin, and seemed to reflect our breaths, keeping us a little warmer.

  She said, “I…have another story.” Her eyes looked over at Ibarrazzo, who was still hiding her head in her shoulder. “It is not a true story. And it is all finished up.”

  Old Loyolo watched her, twisting his head over his shoulder. He had been looking out into the open space in the center of the pit, toward the old truck cab, which was, either fortunately or unfortunately, out of sight. “All right,” he said. “You may tell it.”

  “It’s for—”

  He shook his head. “It is a story. Never say what a story is for. Or who. Just tell it. Otherwise you take out some of the magic.”

  “Going to save us from the monster in the truck? From the Crouga?” Facunde snarled. “What crap.”

  “Sss!” Old Loyolo hissed at her, his tongue protruding out of his beak. But the girl said, “I wasn’t thinking of that at all. Just a story.”

  “Fine,” Facunde said. “Just fine. So I have no heart. Tell your story. It doesn’t matter.”

  “All right…”

  10. Inappropriate Gifts

  I knew what the package for my daughter was before I even opened the box: my grandmother’s apron. It was muslin, thick and heavy as an old-fashioned flour sack. For all I know, that’s what she’d made it from. She was always giving people inappropriate gifts, crafts she’d made out of things other people threw away. Potholders crocheted over plastic soda-can rings (they melted). Homemade soap bars made out of the stub-ends of Grandpa’s Irish Spring bars, with a crocheted yarn holder over it, a redneck soap-on-a-rope. Except Grandma wasn’t a redneck, she was a survivor of the Great Depression. One of the things that you never get over, that define you for the rest of your life.

  I didn’t have to open the box to see it. The apron had roses on it, big, wide-open faded red roses with their petals almost falling off. The paint was the same kind of fabric paint that Grandma used to paint on everything, from dish towels to pillow covers. As a little kid, I’d used the same kinds of paints to paint towels too, carefully brushing the paint onto fabric stretched across a wooden hoop. The lines on the roses weren’t as neat as the ones you usually saw on things Grandma made; the black outlining was a little crazed, a little shaky, like she’d been upset when she’d made it. The paint of the rose petals was a little blotchy, too.

  She tried to give me the apron the last time I saw her before she died, which was when I was about thirteen. I was young and terrified that boys would never like me. For some reason, I was convinced that my nose was too big and my arms were too thin (they weren’t), and thus, I would never find love.

  Mom had taken me to the nursing home to see Grandma; she wasn’t doing very well, and her mind would wander. One minute she’d be talking about her new house in Springfield; the next, she’d be weepy over being trapped in a nursing home. It was hard to say which was worse.

  So there I was, walking on eggshells. I loved her the way you love anyone who’s willing to spend time with you when you’re little, who has the time to do crafts and bake cookies and listen to your made-up stories and babble. They’re nice to you, and that’s all you care about at the time. Whether that feeling is too naïve to be love, I really can’t say. Since I’ve become a parent, my ideas of love have changed. You have to do a lot of painful things when you’re a parent, but you don’t do them out of hate. Ignorance, maybe.

  Grandma had scooted herself around in the seat of her recliner, which had a crocheted doily across the back so her head wouldn’t rub directly on the fabric, until she had turned toward her side table, where an old, yellowed box was sitting. She picked it up in her hands, which had giant knuckles and twisted fingers—my mother always warned me against cracking my knuckles, or my hands would turn out like Grandma’s—and held it hovering over her lap.

  “You leish to cookh,” she said. On bad days, her Bell’s palsy made her words mushy and hard to understand. It embarrassed her, which made her even harder to understand, and less likely to speak. You like to cook. “I want shoo to shake gish.” I want you to take this.

  The top of the box was cracked cellophane. It was an old cake box.

  I could see the painted cloth through the opening on the top. “What is it?” I leaned forward out of Grandpa’s recliner, where I was sitting, and took the box but didn’t open it. It wasn’t just the gift, with Grandma. It was the story. Often, the story had nothing to do with the gift, like the time she told me about the blizzard that buried the barn—they had to dig air holes for the cows—and gave me a giant can
dle in a canning jar with a picture of the Virgin Mary cut from a color newspaper ad and taped to the side.

  “Ish an aprah,” she said. “Opah itch.” It’s an apron. Open it.

  I looked at her. Where was the story? I’d come here to do this ritual one last time—with her, back then, everything was done in anticipation of one last time—and she was shaking things up. Doing things that weren’t the way she was supposed to. I didn’t know what to think. It hurt, a little.

  I tried to make out what she was thinking. Her hairdo looked a little crushed from where she’d had her head against the back of the chair all day, and her lipstick went off her lips on the left side. Everything on the left side of her face drooped from the palsy; today was a pretty bad day. Maybe she was too embarrassed to tell a long story, afraid that I’d keep interrupting her to get her to say the same word over and over.

  But I always understood what she said. It was Mom that had to ask her to repeat herself.

  I started to feel self-conscious about staring at her and opened the box. The cellophane broke in pieces, leaving shards of half-sticky yellowed flakes all over my hands and lap.

  I pulled out the apron. I was pretty mature for my age, but I was, nonetheless, thirteen and insulted that my grandmother would give me such a thing. I didn’t want to be a housewife or a cook. I was the kind of girl who hissed when people tried to open doors for me or called me a young lady. That kind of thing. I liked my grandmother, but I couldn’t imagine growing up to be her.

  Then it started to creep up on me, the sense that someone was shoving a hand into my guts and squeezing.

  “Push ish ah,” she said.

  I shook my head. “I don’t feel good.” I stood up to hand the apron back to her and run to the toilet down the hall. I refused to use their bathroom. Too creepy.

  “Push ish ah!” Grandma yelled.

  Mom was out with Grandpa—he spent all his time in the wood shop at the home—and there was nobody to hear her yell, but I looked back at the door to their room anyhow, expecting a nurse’s aide to come bursting in or something. My hands popped that apron over my head faster than I could think to stop them. I didn’t want to get in trouble.

  It ripped through me then. Pain so bad I went down on my knees, still trying to turn towards the door. I ended up in a pile at the bottom of Grandpa’s tan, threadbare recliner, looking at his footrest, which was so worn it was shiny. I felt like my insides were puking themselves out or like I’d eaten something bad and I was about to soil myself. I wondered whether I already had, at the time, but when I checked later in the public toilet, the only result was a brown spatter of blood in the front of my panties.

  “Zeh,” Grandma said. “Nah yah zhafe.” There. Now you’re safe.

  I put my hands on the linoleum tiles and the green bathrug in front of the TV. The room was so small that my grandparents, with their walkers, had to take turns standing up from their motorized recliners, to go to bed. If they bothered to get up at all.

  I breathed hard, grunting every time I breathed out, until the pain stopped. That is, it didn’t stop, but the pushing and squeezing stopped, and what was left of the pain was so much less that it wasn’t like pain at all, at the time. A reminder.

  I pushed the apron back over my head, folded it, and put it back in the box while still on my knees, then hefted myself up to the seat of Grandpa’s recliner. Tears were running down my face.

  Grandma said, “Keepsh you fwa meh. Zheh hash off you. Zhafe.” Keeps you from men. Their hands off you. Safe. She leaned between the two chairs and patted me on my shaking hand.

  I ran out of the room and locked myself in the public toilet. When it was time to go, Mom had to yell at me through the door to get me to come out. I refused to say goodbye to my grandparents, and my mother yelled at me for that, too.

  Aside from that spot of blood, I wouldn’t get my first period until I was twenty-three.

  By then, my grandparents were dead. Grandma had died within the week, and Grandpa died a few days after her, causing no end of trouble with funeral arrangements. He didn’t waste away or anything—there wasn’t enough time—he sliced open an artery on a scroll saw while making a pair of angels holding a heart with Grandma’s name under it. The aides didn’t notice he was bleeding until it was too late. His last words, according to the aide I talked to, years later, were “Don’t feel bad, son, it was my own damned fault.”

  I had left the apron there with my grandmother, but I didn’t escape it. I never thought about kissing a boy or touching myself between my legs without a twist of nausea. The harder I thought about it, the worse it got, until I ended up in a twist on the floor and spots of blood in my panties.

  But that didn’t mean the apron worked. It didn’t keep men’s hands off me, no. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t leading them on—I couldn’t.

  It was after the first time that I’d been attacked, while going to a movie with some girlfriends, that the package showed up in front of my bedroom door. Grandma had been dead for six months by then, and I wasn’t talking to anybody. God knows what they thought was wrong with me.

  I was coming home after school, half an hour late and a nervous wreck, trying to avoid certain people, and Mom was yelling at me. She broke off when she saw the box. “What’s that?”

  “Grandma’s apron,” I said. I hadn’t talked to Mom about the apron, either. I couldn’t. Every time I tried, the same sick feeling—ugh. I unwrapped the box, opened it, and showed her the apron, trying not to touch it. I had to have been as white as a sheet, with two black holes cut out for eyes.

  I knew there was no getting away from it, so I pulled it out of the box and shook it out so it fell straight. It was creased hard from years and years of being folded up like that, and some of the paint flaked off from the creases.

  “Be careful with that,” Mom said, reaching her hand out for it. I wanted to jerk it away from her. “What on Earth did she send it to you for? She knew I wanted it.” Her hand stopped just short of touching the thing.

  “Do you want it?” I asked. “I like to cook, but you know I never—wear—aprons.” The last words were so hard to say that they hurt my throat coming out, but I pushed them out anyway and closed my mouth before the thing could make me take them back.

  “Yes,” Mom said. She let her fingers brush the thing; flecks of paint stuck to her fingertips. “She sent me a potholder.”

  “May I have that instead? To remember her by?”

  Mom nodded, and I handed her the apron, holding it like it was as fragile as a baby or the Mona Lisa or something. “Thank you.” She sounded surprised that I could be so considerate. Not undeservedly so, considering the way I had acted over the last six months, constantly fighting pain and shame and everything else. But Mom didn’t look like she was in the least amount of pain. Whether that was because the thing didn’t hurt her or because she was always in that amount of pain and didn’t notice it, I don’t know. “I never got to touch it, when I was your age. I always thought—” she stopped talking. I think she’d stopped noticing that the words were only in her head. I felt like she didn’t need me anymore, so I put the brown paper in the box and stuffed it all in the recycling bin. When I came back, she’d wandered off.

  I’m sure Grandma had good intentions. When it came to me, at least.

  My daughter’s thirteen. My guts clenching and my legs dripping with blood, I took a serving dish out in to the back yard, doused the apron with lighter fluid, and watched it burn away. She’ll never know it was here. And if it shows up at my daughter’s doorstep again, it won’t be me who gives it to her. At least, that’s what I hope.

  * * * * *

  When the girl was done, she looked at Ibarrazzo again. In fact, she had been sneaking the old crow looks throughout the story. And not without cause: Ibarrazzo had moaned and crowed into the girl’s shoulder, her feathers shaking as if she were reliving some memory, being haunted by a ghost.

  After several moments, the old crow burst
cried out, with her head still buried in the girl’s shoulder. “I didn’t mean to, all right? I didn’t mean to!”

  Old Loyolo picked between the claws of one foot, worrying at a patch of dead skin. “Didn’t mean to what?”

  “To bring it.”

  “The bead,” Facunde said. “You brought the bead.”

  “I picked it up out by the girl’s house. In the trash. It was part of a necklace…buried under some old meat…it was on a gold chain and I took it. The chain rotted and turned brown, but the bead was so shiny, I had to keep it. I snapped the chain across a rock and picked the bead up…I spat it out as soon as it started to move, and it stopped. Then I buried it and dragged a rock on top of it…”

  “What about the Crouga, then?” I asked, but Old Loyolo raised a claw.

  “When?” he said. When she didn’t answer, he asked again: “When did you pick up the necklace?”

  “A long time ago.”

  “How long?”

  “A long time! Years and years. The babe hadn’t been born yet, the girl-child was barely able to talk. A long time ago.”

  “From the woman’s house.”

  “It was hers, I tell you.”

  “What about the other beads?”

  “There was only this one, dangling on a gold chain that wasn’t gold.”

  Loyolo stopped picking at the dead skin between his claws. “How long was the chain?”

  “How long—?”

  “How long.”

  Ibarrazzo shook her head, the feathers fluffing over her neck. “How long? How long? Long enough to snap over a small rock. Long enough that I held one end of the chain in my beak and it did not tangle in my claws. A small chain.”

  Old Loyolo looked over his shoulder at the girl. There was pity in the slump of his shoulders: when she was a babe, her mother had tried giving her a necklace that would kill her. Oh, we might argue, you and I, about whether the gift was given by someone else, or whether it was meant to harm her. Whether, perhaps, it was a kind of initiation into knowledge: a souvenir from your mother, passed down in good faith.