Photo by Clay LeConey on UnsplashCorvus Corax
When I first begin feeding the crows, I am amused to discover they deliver me tokens. Bits of glass for seeds and nuts; screws, nails, pebbles and stones for cheese. Crows deal in reciprocity. They are scrupulous about their debts.
It begins during a summer of heartbreak, when I am lonely, despondent, and languishing by the window. I spend long nights waiting by the windowpane and bartering with the crows.
The trades begin small. From cheese for pebbles, we work up to insects and mice for broken jewelry and animal bones.
“Bring me my heart back,” I tell them one day and I offer raw beef as a bounty. The crows’ eyes dart between me and the meat but they hesitate to take the trade. They are intelligent creatures. They grasp human words, but maybe not metaphors. I don’t think that they center the heart at the core of emotional life.
They belong to the creation myth of some lost civilization, the world formed in the eyes of sister ravens. The sky that yawns above is the concave shield of black birds’ sight.
“Fine then,” I say, “Bring me his eye.” They take the meat in their beaks and fly into the night.
The next morning the green grey of his iris stares up from the disembodied eyeball that sits, bloody and crow-picked, on the ledge of the windowsill.
I keep my daily vigil, but the crows do not return. They are practical creatures, and they balk at the logic of this exchange—something as crucial and world-building as vision for something as trifling as sorrow.
The Sisters of Saint Milburg
The corner lot at the busiest intersection of our small, suburban town is shielded from the public by a formidable stone wall. Everyone knows that it belongs to the Carmelite sisters of Saint Milburg, a cloistered convent that has remained placid and undisturbed since the beginning of the last century. The trappings of suburbia rear around it—strip malls with nail salons, pizza parlors, tanning studios—and the neo-gothic stone building abides.
From the Starbucks facing the convent, you can see the crown of an ancient oak reach high above the ledge of the wall; in the winter, crowds of ravens sit perched on its gnarled, leafless branches.
Pedestrians avoid the sidewalk by the convent. Not only are the concrete pavers torn up by the tree roots—treacherous, uneven, inviting a fall—legend has it that the ravens swoop down, wrestling buttons from coats, stealing beads and pearls from bracelets, plucking precious stones from the settings of jewelry.
I have never seen anyone enter or leave the convent, not until the day of my novitiate, when I cross the threshold of the heavy oak door. The nun who receives me is thin, pale, and silent; her silence is amplified by the long, black robes that rustle noisily behind her.
She leads me to the office of the Mother Superior. I sit before her desk, legs crossed at the ankles, hands in my lap awaiting examination, but the older nun is absorbed in her task of inspecting the coins spread before her.
“Numismatics?” I venture after a long silence. She looks up sharply, as though surprised to see me there.
“Tell me, is this a genuine metal?” She smiles, wily, extending a coin. “Copper? Iron? Nickel?” I take hold of the coin, which is in fact a simple scrap. I bite into it with my canine and the medallion bends pleasingly.
“It’s an alloy,” I say. “Part metalloid. Not pure.”
The Mother Superior seems satisfied. She hails a nun to escort me to my room, where I don a black habit and the white veil of a novice.
I spend the mornings and evenings in silent prayer. When winter comes, I join the sisters in the courtyard, where we gather among the ancient oak. We fold our long, black robes around our waists and let the glitter on the wrists and necks of passersby tempt us. But we rarely live up to our reputation for avarice, violence.
We chatter, we caw, we sing songs that resound off the convent walls. Our calls hang for a moment in the cold air: a reprieve from those thundering months of silence.
