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

by DeAnna Knippling

  “But they didn’t mean to,” the dog whimpered.

  “They meant something,” the crow said. “They meant to kill. And they will be saddened that that they have killed you—but it will not stop them from doing it again. Not in the slightest. They will say that now that the dog is gone, they will have to set out even more poison and traps, and bring in the cats. And I can never countenance anyone who supposes that the correct answer is to increase the number of cats sauntering about.”

  And then I waited for the girl’s response.

  She stared at me consideringly, not seeing me as a crow as much as she saw the story, and happened to be staring in my direction. “Papa wants me to think it was poison because that is what he thinks. But it was not poison, it was a spell. Mama says that Mr. Dog was old, and needed to rest, but that was another lie, too. Grandmother on the phone said that Mr. Dog was in Heaven, but I’m not sure how she would know, so that must be a lie, too.”

  “A spell,” I said. “How do you know that?”

  “Mama does cooking magic. Sometimes it smells like pumpkin pie, and those are the good spells. Sometimes it smells like chemicals, and those are the bad ones. The whole house smelled bad yesterday. And now Mr. Dog is dead, and his breath smells just like the bad spell.”

  “Hm,” I said. “That is suspicious.”

  “What should I do, Mr. Crow?”

  I did not know what I know now, but that does not excuse what I said then: “Wait and see. Your mother may have cast the spell on purpose, or there may have been an accident. We all tell stories about the world, the way we wish it to be seen. Perhaps that’s all it is.”

  “We lie, you mean.”

  “No,” I said. “We tell stories. They are not true, yes, but they are not true for a reason that is not just not wanting to be punished. Spanked. They make us special, they tell us that some things are good and others are bad. They give us hope and ease from pain. They tell us that we are brave and noble. And those things benefit everybody, when they are believed. A lie is very selfish, and it makes everyone worse, whether it is found out or not. A story is generous, and keeps us from despair.”

  She looked into the distance toward the barn where the cows were, where her dog had died. “I think Grandma is telling a story about Heaven. And Mama is lying about Mr. Dog needing to rest.”

  I cleared my throat. Despite my noble words, I had my doubts about you, even then. “I think I agree with you.”

  “You are a crow.” The chains creaked incessantly. She often came there to think, and she was thinking then, traveling nowhere yet thinking so hard that she was leaving her childhood behind as she kicked up the dry dust.

  “I am.”

  “Can all crows talk?” Her eyes were following me now.

  I bowed. “No. But all crows speak the language of stories.”

  “Is that true? Or just a story?”

  “You shall have to come and visit us and find out, someday.”

  “Someday I will run away from home,” she said. “And then I will come visit you before I follow my destiny.” She frowned. “Destiny is a story, isn’t it?”

  I bowed again, and flew up over her head, and out of view. She had many things to think about, as did I; I had great many things to discuss with Old Loyolo and the other elders. Perhaps it was because Facunde loved another and I never took a mate; at any rate, I suddenly thought to myself then, if I had chicks, I would like them to be as cynical and as wise as that girl, as full of stories, as perceptive of lies.

  In the cold snow, then, I questioned her as though I were her sire: “If you aren’t going to keep it, what are you going to do with it?”

  The girl twisted her lips. It was deep night by then, the deepest kind of night, where the storms cover the sky and the snow stalks through the air, looking for prey. Between the cast of the light and the cold, her lips were turning a greenish-orangish blue. We needed to find her better shelter, now that the terror of fleeing the Crouga had passed. The trunk of a junked-out car, an inside-out tractor tire covered with plywood and held down with rope.

  “I want—” the girl said, but then Facunde interrupted her, pinching on her ear until it turned pink.

  “I want to tell you a story first,” Facunde said. “Before you make up your mind.”

  “Is it a long story?” the girl asked.

  “No,” Facunde said. “It is short. Very short.”

  “All right,” said the girl.

  12. Lord of Pigs

  It was the pigs that told me that Uncle Chuck was dead.

  I was just a kid, no more than seven or eight. Maybe ten. We were staying overnight and Grandma and Grandpa’s house for some reason. Mostly we drove there in the morning and drove back at night on the roller-coaster hills, Dad always driving too fast, the snake of dust from the gravel roads shouting out that we were coming, we were coming from miles away. By the time we’d go home, it was dark and I’d sleep.

  But like I said, we were staying overnight, Uncle Chuck in his room, Mom and Dad in the guest room, and my brother and I in the baby’s old room, which I guess would have made it Uncle Chuck’s, when he was little, anyway the one that was full from top to bottom with craft stuff, mostly paint-on dish towels, which you could smell all night long, the smell of those little tubes of paint with pen balls at the tip, so the paint would come out in a thin line, following a pattern that you ironed onto the towel in black ink. I wasn’t too good at following the lines.

  So, surrounded by all those stacks of you-can’t-do-it-right ghosts, with my brother sleeping up on the tiny, creaky bed and me on a stack of blankets on the floor, with the darkness under the bed staring me in the face all night long, I didn’t sleep too well. Smell of paint, smell of dust, smell of dusty paint, smell of pigs.

  You could smell pigs everywhere on Grandma and Grandpa’s farm, because Uncle Chuck raised them.

  When I was growing up, I was proud of being able to smell shit without pulling my shirt up over my nose: that was for town kids. So was being afraid of seeing animals being butchered, turned into meat. We knew where food came from. The garden, filling jar after jar of canned corn, applesauce, strawberry jam. Tomato sauce, ground up in a tin food grinder that you turned one way to make the sauce, the other way to scrape the screen clean.

  And the axe.

  The pigs talked all the time, in grunts. At night they were quieter, but they still talked.

  Grandma and Grandpa had the loudest damned clock, that chuffed when it ticked, and it chimed all night long. It was past two in the morning, and I was staring into the darkness under the bed. My brother was sleeping.

  I heard a clack from someone’s door, and I thought somebody must be getting up to go pee. This was after Grandma and Grandpa put in an indoor bathroom—I can remember having to bathe in a tin bathtub—but sometimes the boys went outside to pee anyway, so I wasn’t too surprised when the floor creaked all the way through the house, and the front door opened, and the screen door opened, then clattered shut.

  The geese honked, one at first, then all six of them. Those geese were better than guard dogs, but they knew Uncle Chuck, so it was just because they were annoyed to be bothered so early in the morning.

  I counted to five hundred, and he didn’t come back.

  I kept counting, but I lost track when I realized that the pigs had gone quiet.

  They’d been quiet a while by the time I figured out that they were the sound I was missing, and I suddenly got it in my head that they had eaten him.

  No lie. That’s the kind of mind I have. Once the thought got into my head, I couldn’t stop it from going around and around. I was always having horrible nightmares; when I was six I used to wet the bed, which was one of the reasons that I was on the floor on blankets (one of which was pink and wooly and scratched even through the old blue-flowered sheet on top), because they could be washed. And the thought was in my head that Uncle Chuck had gone out to go feed his pigs and had slipped into the pen, and the pigs had e
aten him, and that idea wasn’t going to come out.

  I didn’t want to get up, but I did. I rolled the blankets off me, one inch at a time, and snaked my foot onto the bare, painted floor. The floor was white, chipped, and cold, and felt tacky under my bare feet. Every time I picked up a foot, it sounded like ripping off a bandaid, no matter how slowly I did it.

  The great secret of my childhood was that I knew how to open doors quietly. It doesn’t seem like a big deal now, but it was then: I knew that I’d mastered something special. I leaned on the door in the frame, then turned the handle, which was just as thickly covered in paint as everything else in that room. Noplace else in the house had been painted that much; noplace else had paint directly on the floor. But that room did.

  The handle turned with just the barest, secretest scrape, which I was sure was covered up by the sound of that damned clock. I pulled the door open a crack. I had intended to just listen for a few seconds, but the clock was so loud I was scared of it waking up my brother, so I opened the door just enough to go out, and slid around the corner so fast that my nightgown got caught on the latch plate, and I had to let go of the handle in a hurry, and it clacked anyway.

  I froze, and the phrase is, “My heart was in my mouth,” but I didn’t know it then, and that’s not how it felt. It felt like my heart was going to explode in my chest. When you’re afraid as an adult, there’s a flash of coldness that goes starts on the backs of your hands, that squeezes and freezes you all at the same time, but as a kid, it’s your heart. It feels like you’re going to die, when you’re that scared. We never feel that scared again, but we never forget what it’s like. I think we’re convinced that that’s what death is like, like being as scared as you were as a kid, convinced over the stupidest little things that you are, no shit, going to die.

  The clock kept chuffing, and, from inside Grandma and Grandpa’s room, their little white fat dog, Radar, wheezed loudly twice, then went back to sleep. Or it could have been that he died of a heart attack, which is what I thought for just a moment, then dismissed: I could only be afraid of so many things at a time, and my heart just wouldn’t take any more dread then. I had to know about Uncle Chuck; therefore, I couldn’t know about Radar. In my heart, I wanted to believe that everyone was dead, everyone in the whole house, or even in the whole world. How was I supposed to know? Where were these people? Maybe it was all a dream: I was asleep, having a nightmare about wondering whether Uncle Chuck had been eaten by the pigs. Or else I was having a nightmare that I was somebody else entirely, and I had never been myself; my whole life was a nightmare leading up to that point; or else I was in a horror movie, just some stupid extra little kid, a horror movie about the pigs eating people, bursting out of their cages and slaughtering our whole family, one after the other, in revenge for having their families eaten every year. It would have been justice.

  I could have tried to go back to bed. I could have tried to talk myself out of it. In horror movies, the characters look, they always look where they shouldn’t look, they know it, but they have to look anyway. They do it because that’s what we’re really like. Stupid.

  That was me, turning the handle all the way, pulling the door tight, then slowly releasing the handle so it didn’t clack. That was me, shifting my weight carefully from foot to foot on the bare-nubbins carpet that was all colors of the rainbow but mostly black, onto the linoleum tiles, into the rag-rug entryway past the bathroom.

  The light was bright enough to see everything, because there was moonlight everywhere. Not just coming through the windows. I remember it as being everywhere, bright, without shadows. That’s probably just my imagination, but that’s how it was: light so bright and thick that it bounced off the white, gold-flecked kitchen table and filled up the room. That was it. It wasn’t bright in the living room, but it was, in the kitchen. It must have been the white tile, the white walls, the white table. Just a bunch of moonlight bouncing around.

  The entryway was bright, too, because the door was open. The screen door, being on springs, was shut, but the winter door was wide open.

  I shivered. There wasn’t a breeze that I can remember, but the air had leaked in through the door, thick like the moonlight, and it was chilly out there. If anybody else had been awake, they would have yelled at Uncle Chuck for leaving the door open, letting out the heat. They wouldn’t start up the furnace until the end of October, no matter what weather came before them—at least, that’s what Grandma would say, and Grandpa would just grunt with a smile on his face. If it got cold enough, she would complain that he wasn’t listening to her, when she’d told him to light the furnace early this year, and he’d light it when she wasn’t looking.

  I slipped into somebody’s boots, probably Grandpa’s. They were too big for me but too small for him. The leather had been stretched tight. You could see every bulge of his foot in the shape of the boot. There were patches where flakes of mud had fallen off: cleaner in the middle of each patch, lines to show where the edge of the mud had dried. The mud on Grandpa’s farm was dark, but weak. When you stirred that mud into water, it didn’t look like coffee, and it didn’t look like chocolate. It looked like a blackboard that hadn’t been washed in a while. Not the best land for farming, but it was what they had. I think Uncle Chuck did better with the pigs than Grandpa ever did with the farm.

  I also put on a coat, my coat, which was pink and stuffed in squares, and dirty, and had worn places just under my wrists from me leaning on things, and never felt warm enough, but I had to wear it, damn it, because it was the one I’d wanted, begged for, and Mom wouldn’t let me get a different one. It didn’t matter that the one I’d wanted had been purple with paisley on it, and that she’d told me we couldn’t get it (it was probably too expensive). What was important was that it was the story that would make her feel like I deserved to be cold and miserable, and that it wasn’t her fault, for marrying a farmer and living her dream to be a farm wife. We all change the story to fit what we think what should have been, but it was the way she did it, and the way it hurt me, that I noticed first. Grandma’s shifting stories, I didn’t notice until later, and they never really hit home the same way, so I never resented her for what I saw as Mom’s pure, self-serving lies.

  Now I know better. Now I know that Mom couldn’t have faced the idea that she’d failed everyone, that it was her dream that was holding us all in place, that it was her insistence that Dad stayed farming when he didn’t really love it as much as anything else that kept him there. I doubt she’ll ever drink from that cup, and I doubt that she ever should. Me, I’m not like that. That cup full of fear and self-loathing and horror, I go looking for that cup. I feel baptized by it. I crave being able to tear myself apart, from time to time, like some people like to go to the chiropractor, just to hear their bones snap.

  I thought about putting on a hat, but I didn’t see one, except for Grandpa’s greasy cap, so greasy I couldn’t tell you whether it was a sports team or a tractor brand on it. I remember my dad running around with John Deere caps all summer long, riding tractors. But Grandpa, I’m not so sure. I can still smell it, though: the sourness of bearing grease, that came in long tubes like caulk (so you had to check to make sure that you handed Dad the right tube), sweat, and the sweetness of engine oil, like grape jelly mixed with cough syrup. It’s a smell that I knew and loved, but I also knew that I didn’t want to put that hat on, because it would stick to my hair. Disgusting.

  I opened the screen door as narrowly as I could and slipped out sideways onto the concrete front step. The moonlight was even brighter outside, of course, but at the time it shocked me. It was impossible that I wasn’t dreaming.

  I went past the iron boot scraper, down the four stairs, past the long, bare planks of the cellar door, and towards the pig barn.

  The geese were waiting for me, wide awake. They were moon-geese. I was terrified of those geese. They didn’t honk then, thank God. They hissed at me, and two big, fat tears rolled down my cheeks. I wanted to run
away. All the advice that people had given me about those geese welled up in my mouth. I wanted to spit from fear and anger at all that stupid advice that didn’t work. Don’t run. Don’t act like you’re afraid, or they’ll bite you.

  I had no bravery for that kind of thing, to calmly walk through a bunch of shining white geese that were after my blood, to attack anyone who tried to get onto their parts of the farm. You could go out in the shelterbelt of trees, out into the mazes of long, rustling, sword-sharp grass across the road, but the hell if you tried to go close to the pig barns. You had to run past them as fast as you could and climb up onto the hay bales and swing a stick at the geese until someone yelled at them to knock it off, and even then they would stand back and hiss at you when they thought nobody else was looking.

  I was some other kind of kid, not the brave kind, so I said, “Please let me go. I have to see what happened to Uncle Chuck.” Like they were moon-geese for real, and all I had to do was ask.

  Here was the first miracle: they did.

  I walked straight toward the pig barns with three on one side and three on the other, and they hissed at me. I was shaking, with my fingers curled up around the sleeves of my coat and my nightgown swishing around my legs, my legs swishing as the dry skin on my knees scraped against each other. I regretted putting on those boots. I wouldn’t ever be able to run, not in those boots. They thumped every time I took a step on the bare, dry ground, because they would start to fall off every time. The air was cold in my mouth, and my breath steamed.

  I walked across the yard, following the dirt path that led from the house to the fence that marked the edge of the pig pens. I didn’t look back, but I felt like the geese were following me, step by step, ready to bite me the second I hesitated. I could hear them behind me, getting further and further away, but I didn’t actually believe it. I got to the gate, which was red-painted wood, and climbed over it. I had trouble at the top, trying to sort out my nightgown and the loose boots, but I eventually got down the other side. The geese were all in a group again, right where I’d left them.