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

by DeAnna Knippling

  The door had been shattered, bent and twisted inward, and the room splattered with something old and green, like the algae off the surface of a pond. It was still wet. The faint light of dawn glistened from it.

  The bed had been crushed, the plaster on the walls broken off the drywall and fallen in chunks. The glass vanity mirror had been driven into the wall in shards, and covered with more of the greenish fluid.

  There was no blood, no bones, no flesh. In the middle of the crushed, stinking bed, a small, shimmering spot. A bead.

  The priest brought me down the ladder, once again praying to himself, and laid me in the car on an old towel. He folded the towel over my body, then laid a piece of embroidered cloth over the towel. The inside of the car was warm but smelled strongly of gasoline. My skin seemed to burn, but not unpleasantly so.

  When he returned, he smelled slightly of smoke.

  —

  It has been a long winter, a long wait until spring.

  The Crouga’s bead is nowhere to be seen; the house is a shell falling in on itself. The priest holds the girl firmly by her wrist, even though she is standing perfectly still. Her hair is in ponytails. She is taller.

  I flutter through the ruins, looking for my dead, but they are gone, gone like everything else is gone, which, all things considered, is a mercy. In a few moments, I will fly back to my flock’s old haunts, to see who is left alive and hear the gossip.

  Your daughter looks like you, a little. Her eyes are dark and hard and they stare at me as though they will stab into me. Then they shift and catch the sky. She looks up, and watches the sparrows swooping irrepressibly through the air. They are pretending to hunt, but really they are only flying, happy to escape their chicks for a moment. They will catch insects—almost by accident—and return back to the nest to feed their young, who will grow, and fly, and leave the nest, and feed themselves, and repeat the cycle.

  And she smiles.

  Not all cycles will be repeated; not all stories will carry themselves out in our young. Your daughter learns subtler magics, plays with dolls and friends, heals.

  And, by all that is holy, forgets.

  Additional Copyrights

  All material copyright by the author.

  “Be Good,” copyright © 2011

  “The Vengeance Quilt,” copyright © 2010.

  “Abominable,” copyright © 2010.

  “Winter Fruit,” copyright © 2010.

  “Family Gods,” copyright © 2010.

  “A Ghost Unseen,” copyright © 2010.

  “The Haunted Room,” copyright © 2011.

  “Inside Out,” copyright © 2010, first published in Big Pulp, Winter 2012.

  “Treif,” copyright © 2011.

  “Inappropriate Gifts,” copyright © 2011, first published in Penumbra Magazine, 2012.

  “Clutter,” copyright © 2010.

  “Lord of Pigs,” copyright © 2012, first published in Horror Without Victims, 2013.

  “The Edge of the World,” copyright © 2010, first published in Three-Lobed Burning Eye, 2010.

  “The Strongest Thing About Me is Hate,” copyright © 2013, first published in Black Static, Nov-Dec 2013.

  “The Rock that Takes Off Your Skin,” copyright © 2012, first published in New Realm, 2013.

  “Things You Don’t Want But You Have to Take,” copyright © 2009.

  All other material copyright © 2014 by the author.

  About the Author

  DeAnna Knippling is a freelance writer, editor, and designer living in Colorado Springs, Colorado, USA. She grew up on a farm in the middle of South Dakota and attended a country school with two outhouses and no running water. She and her brother ran loose on the prairie, often spending entire days in the back of a pickup truck playing with prairie dog holes and waiting for the adults to come back. She is the author or numerous SF, Fantasy, and Horror short stories, and has been published in Crossed Genres, Penumbra Magazine, Black Static, Big Pulp and more. Her short story “The Third Portal” took first place in the 2012 Parsec Ink. Short Story contest. She received an honorary mention in Ellen Datlow’sBest Horror of the Year, Volume 2 for “The Edge of the World.” She is a member of the Pikes Peak Writers and blogs for them regularly. She runs her own small press, Wonderland Press (www.WonderlandPress.com).

  If you finished this work, please leave a review: there is nothing that helps an author better than an honest review on your blog, Goodreads, or other sites. Thank you!

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  As always, this story is dedicated to Lee and Ray,

  without whose love none of this would be possible.