Crow

Kris Tsujikawa

For weeks afterwards, Faolán feels like nothing. Not like a Buddhist nothing, which is everything and bullshit and wonderful, but like an American nothing, like the holes in Wonderbread nothing, different and empty and invisible and absent. Hollowed out and left behind, like the shell of a cicada, papery and delicate. A burnt thing, consumed and ashen and scorched. As though he would disintegrate if someone even blew on him.

One morning he wakes and goes to the bathroom and rinses his mouth, spitting several times. He looks at himself in the mirror. He feels shaky. Weak. He feels like a fool.

He makes this accusation as he looks at himself.

“Fool. Idiot,” he says, calmly.

Then the words came in a rush. His voice rises by degrees with each word until he is shouting, and keeps rising until he is screaming.

“Idiot! Fool! Weakling! Coward! You are so fucking stupid, you know that?! Do you get that, you fucking brainless asshole?”

He heaps abuse upon his reflection.

“Trash! Moron! Man, FUCK you! FUCK YOU! I fucking HATE you, you know that? I fucking hate you.”  

The last sentence comes out like a sob and now he’s weeping, the tears running down his cheeks even as he clenches his jaw and growls through his gritted teeth. “You set yourself up for this! You realize that? You did this to yourself! Of COURSE this is how it was going to go. You KNEW it would go this way. You fucking KNEW IT. And you STILL did it, you fucking ASSHOLE!”

He flings the medicine cabinet open and starts pulling things out, hurling shaving cream and ibuprofen and toothpaste around the bathroom until his hand finds the small box of razors. Fingers shaking, he fumbles with it and gets one of them out. Even in the dim light of the bathroom, the edge of it gleams, bright with promise.

There is a sudden tapping at the textured glass of the bathroom window. Faolán registers it but it seems distant. He ignores it and turns the razor back and forth in his hand, watches the light dance across the blade, hypnotized by the idea of the blood against the white porcelain of the bathroom sink, the pale mint tiles.

The tapping sounds again, frantic this time.

“What the FUCK?!” Faolán shouts and, furious at the interruption, he slams the window open.

A sleek black Crow is perched on the outside sill. It releases a bright red berry from its beak and barks out a call, a cackling caw that sounds suspiciously like a laugh to Faolán.

Apoplectic, he eyes it incredulously.

“What the FUCK do you WANT?” he shrieks at it.

“Remember the dream,” Crow says calmly.

The razor falls from his nerveless fingers as Faolán gapes at it. It just talked, he thinks. I don’t think it’s me. I know I’m fucked in the head, but I don’t think it’s me. Suddenly, he cannot make his voice louder than a whisper.

“Who are you?” he asks.

“I am Crow,” croaks Crow, “Keeper of the Law.”

“What do you want?” he asks again, fascinated.

“Remember the dream,” Crow repeats.

Faolán’s mind races to match his heart as he casts desperately through the wreckage of his memory. What dream? he wonders, which one?

And then he knows.

“I was a bird,” says Faolán, “I flew and flew.” The words come out almost like a sigh.

Crow inclines its head slightly.

“I soared over the world,” Faolán continues, his countenance calm, “I caught the wind and rose. I could glide for a time, coasting carelessly on the currents, banking with the breath of the breeze. And I looked down at the world and saw how beautiful it was. How fragile and how beautiful. And I flew. I flew and flew.”

Then anger creases Faolán’s brow. “But I woke up.”

“Such is the way of dreams,” says Crow.

“What did it mean?” asks Faolán, “What do you mean?”

But Crow does not answer. He picks the shiny crimson berry up with his beak, cocks his head at Faolán and fixes a quizzical stare on him with one eye for a moment and then, with no further prelude, takes to the air and flies away.