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

by DeAnna Knippling

  The girl looked down at Old Loyolo. There was grief in her eyes, and I knew, all of us knew, those of us who were paying attention to anything beyond the wingspreads of our own feathers, that she understood what such a revelation must have meant.

  I said, “I have another story.”

  Now, normally, when I come up with a story, what I start with is a seed that I pick up. Or a piece of shit, or a feather, or a straggling length of squirrel-tail, bodiless, abandoned on a wire fence. What have you. Or I steal the story whole, from someone else. It all depends.

  This one, I picked out of the girl’s sad eyes. It came to me all of a piece, from beginning to end; I told it just as I am about to tell it to you, like this:

  11. Clutter

  I could see Mom watching Days of Our Lives through the door as I knocked the snow off my boots. I pressed the bell and heard it ring.

  Mom twisted around in her recliner but didn’t put the feet down. “It’s unlocked,” she called.

  I came in, closed the door behind me, and took off my boots. The smell of dust and rotten cushion batting crept up my nose, and I sneezed. I took another breath and inhaled Icy Hot. Her walker was next to the dining room table, a good ten feet away from the recliner. She wasn’t using it.

  “Hey, Mom,” I said.

  “Danny,” she said. Normally, she said things like, “It’s good to see you” and “It’s been so long.” I put the box of trash bags on the table beside me, walked over, and gave her an awkward hug.

  “Why don’t you have a seat?” she said. Testing the waters.

  “Nah, too much to do,” I said. “I better get started.” I picked up the trash bags. “I’m going to start in your bathroom, all right? Did you set aside the medicine like I asked?”

  “Not yet,” she said, and put down the footrest of her recliner.

  I picked up the walker and set it in front of her.

  “I don’t need that, Danny. Not for just walking around the house.” She set the walker aside, took two steps, her hips refusing to unbend enough for her to stand up straight, and nearly fell. I caught her and gave her the walker. She glared at me. “I must have sat still for too long. Just let me sort out that medicine for you.”

  “Thanks, Mom,” I said. “I’ll make some coffee while I’m waiting.”

  I made sure she made it into the bathroom safely. She’d filled up the shower with stacks of blankets and rugs; shirts hung from the shower rod, packed in so tight they bulged around the end of the shower. She left her walker outside the door; there wasn’t room. She could barely walk from the door to the sink on her own, but there were half a dozen grab bars in the room, and I’d hear her if she fell.

  I went into the kitchen and started a pot of coffee in the cleanest carafe I could find.

  Then I started packing trash bags. I’d had the trash company leave us a big take-away container that was going to cost me $250 to have them pick up. I figured I could get most of it in the container and haul the rest in my pickup. I’d have to see how it went.

  I started with the garbage under the sink. For some reason, she’d decided to sort everything into compostable and non-compostable trash and leave the compostable stuff to rot. On the way out the back door, I noticed she’d been leaving the non-compostable trash in the laundry room. Fortunately, I was able to toss most of it directly into the container without tracking through the snow; the bags weren’t too heavy. I got the compostable trash out from under the sink—the worst of it, anyway—and started on the fridge.

  “How’s that coffee coming?” she called.

  “I was just waiting for you to come out,” I said.

  “What’s that noise?”

  “Just taking the trash out from the laundry room. It’s pretty slippery outside the back door, and I don’t want you to fall.”

  There was a pause. “I’m not done in here yet. Why don’t you bring me a cup of coffee? Make sure you don’t throw anything good out.”

  “Okay, Mom.” Damn it, I couldn’t find any dish soap, and I hadn’t thought to bring any. I’d have to pick some up tonight. I rinsed out a cup with plain water and filled it with coffee. I knew from my earlier peek in the fridge that looking for cream was a lost cause.

  When I brought it into the bathroom, she was sitting on the closed toilet seat, panting. The door of the medicine cabinet was open. The entire thing was stuffed with bottles, most of which probably had one or two pills left and had been expired for twenty years. I didn’t dare look too closely; she was watching me.

  “Here you go.”

  “Thanks.”

  I promised myself, yet again, that when it was time for my kids to pack me up and send me to the nursing home, I’d let it go without a fuss. Mom took a sip of coffee and said, “It’s too hot.”

  “Do you want me to put an ice cube in it?”

  She shook her head. “I’ll just sit a minute and wait for it to cool down.”

  “Oh, shoot,” I said. “I forgot to turn the warmer off. I’ll be right back.” I went back into the kitchen, turned off the warmer, and started cleaning out the fridge. Later, I’d come back and start scraping off the spilled milk and grime, but for now, all I wanted to was to get the garbage out of the house. I had to get Mom’s collection of possessions down to a couple of cardboard boxes inside of a month—I was driving her over on January second. A new start. The beginning of the end.

  Mom came out of the bathroom, using her walker, and said, “Why don’t you leave the bathroom for later? I’m feeling a bit tired, and I want to take a nap. You don’t mind waiting around until I get this all sorted out, do you?”

  “No, Mom,” I said. “I like being here. This place has a lot of memories.”

  She smiled and got settled in her recliner. I put her feet up and helped her get comfortable. After a few minutes, she was snoring softly, like a cat.

  I went into the bathroom and took out the trash, my first priority being to throw away anything in the process of actually rotting. In the case of the bathroom, this meant the entire space between the sink cabinet and the shower stall, which had been packed tight with tissue, paper towels, dental flossers, empty toothpaste tubes, and a few pairs of stained underwear. I broke down and retrieved the heavy rubber gloves out of my truck at that point.

  For a minute, I thought I had all of the trash trash, but then I remembered she’d always kept a small can in their bedroom, so I went in with another bag. After Dad died, the whole house had started to stink, and their bedroom was the worst. I’d nosed around any number of times through the years. The room had filled up with more and more junk, but I’d never been able to figure out where the smell was coming from. I’d thought it was a dead mouse in a vent somewhere, but the smell never got any better.

  I edged sideways into the room past ceiling-high boxes marked “quilting fabric” and “Montgomery-Ward Catalogs 1960–1979,” etc. Maybe she’d feel better about getting rid of some of this stuff if I gave it to Goodwill or something. Dad’s side of the bed was stacked with more boxes, and the blankets were all rucked up. I sat on the edge of the bed and reached between the bed and dresser for the trash can, which was only about half full. She probably hadn’t used it for years—

  Something on the bed shifted, and for a second, I thought a stack of boxes was going to topple and kill me. I put up my arms to cover my head, hitting myself in the face with the trash bag. After a second, I realized that something heavy had been under the blankets, and it had rolled into me.

  I pulled back the blankets and nearly shit myself.

  Under the blankets was a dead woman that looked a hell of a lot like my mother. Recently dead. The room suddenly smelled like pee, and I felt a wet spot on my pants. It was on the leg of my pants where it had rested on the bed, though, and damned cold: not mine.

  “Holy shit,” I said. “Holy shit.” My mother had woken up from her nap, come past the bathroom and into the bedroom without me hearing her, and died. Holeeee shit.

  I stumbled ou
t of the bedroom and into the kitchen, poured myself a cup of tepid coffee, and sucked it down.

  I went into the living room to use the phone, and there she was. My mother. In her recliner. Asleep. Alive and asleep, still making those faint snoring sounds. Fast asleep. Holy shit.

  I went back into the bedroom. Dead Mom. Living room. Living Mom. A couple more times of this, and I was going to make myself dizzy.

  If it wasn’t my Mom, then who was it?

  I checked the body again. I wish I could say that I knew where my Mom’s birthmarks were, but I didn’t. I mean, who wants to see your mother naked? But as far as I could tell, two things were true: one, I couldn’t find any difference between the corpse and my Mom. They were even wearing the same clothes with the same stains on them. Two, one of them was dead, and the other one wasn’t.

  Beyond that, questions of whether I’d lost it or my mother had a twin sister, I couldn’t tell you.

  I can tell you this, though: I rolled up the body in a couple of blankets from the shower stall (the ones on the bed were wedged tight under the boxes, and I didn’t have room to move them off) and put it in the back of the truck, under a tarp. I was pretty sure that the trash company would have found the body, even as surrounded by garbage as it would have been, had I put it in the container.

  I went back in the house and watched Mom snore for a while. Then I got back to work. I finally had all the trash out; I started bagging up extra dishes from the kitchen, throwing away used paper plates and plastic forks as I went. At first I told myself I was going to take the dishes to Goodwill, but when I took them out to the truck and saw the tarp with Mom’s body in it, I threw them in the trash container instead.

  —

  That night, I drove out to the reservoir and hid the body in a drainage tunnel. I figured the body would freeze until spring, then get either washed away or disfigured so badly there was no way they’d track her back to my mother.

  Unless the dental records matched.

  But that was just stupid; they’d know my mother was alive when they saw her.

  —

  When I came back the next afternoon (with dish soap), the big trash container was empty. Mostly empty. The trash was still there; the bags and bags of extra dishes and pans were gone. I knocked on the door. The same ritual followed: Mom was watching the soaps; I egged her on until she went into the bathroom to sort out her meds; I made a pot of coffee. The dishes (still dirty) were all back in their cupboards; the garbage bags were folded up under the sink.

  Fine. I washed the dishes and repacked them in clean garbage bags. Then I carried them carefully out to the truck and put them under the tarp. She didn’t want her stuff thrown away. Fine. Fine. I filled up the back of the truck and looked around the kitchen. The cupboards were covered in grease; the ceiling tiles were stained over the oven; the wallpaper was peeling; the gold-and-orange carpet had a black streak down the center from decades of footprints and wear.

  I wanted to pull everything apart and make it habitable again. Do something nice for Mom. Peel off the paper and paint the walls sky blue, pull up the carpet and refinish the floor with some tile. You shouldn’t have carpet in your kitchen. I don’t know why they hadn’t let me do it years ago, instead of now, a month before I had to kiss the house goodbye.

  I walked into the bathroom. Mom was asleep on the toilet. I should have checked her hours ago, but I’d lost track of time. It was ten o’clock, and she hadn’t eaten a thing since I’d come in.

  I shook her shoulder. “Mom.”

  She twitched but didn’t wake. I’d just have to get her to bed and make sure I brought food tomorrow. I should have packed her up a year ago. Two years ago. Nobody should live like this. I’d let her put me off for too long. I couldn’t stand the thought of what she’d been doing to herself, here alone. What the hell was wrong with me, that I let her—

  I sighed and went into the bedroom to push back the covers, so I could put her in bed and cover her up without jostling her too much. She’d carried me to bed many times when I was a boy; I could still remember the warmth of her arms.

  There was already an old woman in the bed.

  I leaned back against the closet door and almost tipped a box of photos onto my head. After shoving the box back and wiping my eyes to clear out the dust, I had almost talked myself out of it, thinking that it was just a lump in the covers. Then I pulled the blanket back.

  My mother’s dead twin lay in the bed again. The sheets were even dirtier than they had been yesterday, covered with wet leaves and slime. It was as if my mother had followed me out to the reservoir, picked up her body, and brought it back with her. Tucked it into bed. Not that she had a driver’s license anymore. And surely Dad’s old junkers wouldn’t start.

  I put the footrest up on the recliner and laid my mom there instead. No wonder old people slept in their recliners, I thought, if this is what was hogging their beds.

  I’m not one to keep doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results, so I didn’t wrap the corpse up in a blanket and shove it in the back of the truck again. This time, I took it out to Dad’s old shop. I looked around; the old shed he’d been using was falling down. I should have started out here; it needed to be done anyway, and it would have meant less time trying to deal with Mom in the house. Maybe I’d start out here tomorrow.

  There was no power in the shed, and I didn’t feel like trying to start the generator, so I got a flashlight out of the truck and hunted around until I found a hacksaw. It was dull as shit, so I went into the house and got a kitchen knife, which was even worse.

  I ended up pulling the body apart like a raw chicken with a utility knife from the truck. It wasn’t messy; the blood was more like dish soap than ink, and the longer I was outside with it, the colder and thicker it got. It was midnight before I was done, so I stuffed everything in a bag and shoved it underneath some bags of trash in the big container. The truck was full up, and I’d be back tomorrow anyway.

  —

  I dropped off the kitchen stuff at Goodwill, picked up some fried chicken, and drove out to Mom’s.

  “Hi, Mom. Brought you some chicken,” I said. But she already had a plate in front of her. “What’s that?”

  “Roast,” she said.

  “Someone brought you roast beef? From the church? Nice. I’ll just put this in the fridge for tomorrow, then.” I carried the chicken into the kitchen, half-expecting the dishes to be back again. I checked a few cupboards, but they were empty. The one skillet that I’d left mom was in the sink, soaking in cold, brown water. I reached in and pulled out the drain plug.

  Mom muttered from the living room, the way she did when she was about to lay into you. “Someone shouldn’t throw perfectly good things away.”

  My stomach went as cold as the water in that sink. I dropped the stopper, shook my hand off, and ran back into the bedroom.

  The body was there again, laid out in pieces under the covers. A chunk had been cut out of one thigh; the old skin sagged around the hole.

  I went back into the living room. Mom was still eating.

  She stared at me, daring me so say something.

  Hell. What’s one more month of living in squalor?

  “I’m going out to the shop while you finish sorting out your medicine cabinet,” I said. “It’s not too cold today.”

  Mom nodded. “Your father never would get rid of anything. I’m sure there’s a lot of crap out there, pardon my French.”

  I nodded and left.

  With a little gasoline, the generator started just fine.

  God help me, I don’t think it’s going to take me a month to clean up Dad’s shop. And I don’t know how much longer I can wait.

  * * * * *

  When I had finished, I ruffled my feathers. I will not lie to you, I felt naked under the stares of the other crows. If there was ever a time that I might have been pecked down for a bad story—although it wasn’t—it was then, I was so nervous afterwards.

>   But I swallowed my fear, and the others settled.

  The girl said, “I don’t need to keep the bead, do I? It’s mine, but I don’t need to keep it.”

  I bowed in front of her. When we crows tell stories, we always tell them to entertain—it would be blood and dead storytellers if we did not—but often we tell them to sway the course of some event, some mood. Instead of making laws or casting spells, we tell stories. It is a subtle magic—not even magic at all, it is so subtle.

  I had been the first to talk to the girl, your daughter. She was swinging on the swingset in the front yard. It was just after the dog had accidentally—or so you claimed—eaten poison, the first time her heart had been broken. Two years ago, before the babe was even a thought in your mind.

  She was telling herself a story about the dog, about how it had eaten poison and lived, for a short while longer at least, and had attacked the rats who hid in the barn, because they were the ones who had put the poison in his food. Her dog killed the rats, killed them until they lead him to their king, crying, “Save us! Save us!”

  The dog killed the rat king, then dragged himself back to the house, where he lay on the ground by the door and panted, dying. A crow, curious, landed next to the dog, and asked it what was wrong. “I am about to die,” the dog said. “And while I have killed the rats who murdered me, and I will leave the farm free of rats for a time, there will always be more rats.” And then he begged the crow to watch the farm, to protect it from the rats, to guard his humans.

  I had been listening this whole time, perched on the branch above her head as she was swinging. It was a bad perch, smooth and wide and prone to lurch back and forth under my feet, but I did not wish to interrupt her.

  Until then.

  I flew down and landed in the dirt under the swing next to her.

  I said:

  “No,” the crow told the dog. “I will not guard against the rats, who are not evil and only wish to live their lives, and who suffer enough already. Nor will I guard the humans, who put out the poison that murders you, and whom you would never blame for what has happened to you, although it is undeniably their fault.”