One for Sorrow

Art by Michelle Geoga

My wife is twenty-nine the year the crows take her.

They descend upon our little house before we even know she’s sick. Waking on a cold and rainy Tuesday morning, we find our garden blanketed in black feathers. As I spread jam and butter on charred toast, hundreds of beady eyes watch me through the kitchen window.

We consult a wildlife expert, who is interested but unhelpful, and then an ornithologist at the community college. Scraping her frazzled curls back into a plastic clip, the ornithologist tells us that relationships with corvids are typically established over months to years. She asks if we’ve been feeding them. We don’t even have a compost heap, and I tell her so. She has no other guidance to offer.

We thank her for her expert advice and drive home. As I idle the truck in the street, Claire hops out and charges the writhing mass of crows in the driveway, flapping her arms and squawking. They part for her like the Red Sea.

I try to read omens in their numbers while I wait, the way my grandmother taught me to when I was a child. The old rhyme comes back to me in a blaze of heat, steeped in the smell of the wood stove she kept burning in her sunroom even in July. Her mountains of crochet afghans, burnt orange and soft peach and pea green, the framed jigsaw puzzles with painted beeswax filling in for missing pieces. Her house is long gone, but the memory of drinking iced tea with her on the faded couch as sweat soaked into my overalls is comfort enough on this most disconcerting of days. I recite the words in my head in a sing-song rhythm, but the rhyme has nothing to say about a murder of this size. I settle for the single crow that alights on the hood as I cut the engine, peering at me through the windshield. One for sorrow.

Claire makes wedding soup for dinner, and I busy myself hanging aluminum pie tins from the eaves to fend off the birds. When I return to kiss her in front of the simmering pot, she turns her head away. I press my lips to her neck instead, and her pulse jumps uneasily against my cheek. There is a rustling at the window; sharp beaks peck at the glass.

We find the lump in her breast two weeks later.

■■■

We purchase a decoy owl at the garden center and install it on the roof. I brave the rusted ladder with its clubbed left foot, climbing with our plastic protector tucked under my arm. The crows seem even less convinced than I am of its authenticity, and before I even finish descending two of them have alighted on its back. I watch them from the ground in dismay, wondering if I’ll be laughed out of town if I try to hire an exterminator.

Our champion is slain in the night. We find its hollow corpse on the doormat, peck marks stippling its skin. It looks strangely nude, as if its feathers have been plucked. I wonder how it could have lost something it never had in the first place as two of the flock’s enforcers hop around on the corners of the mat, watching us inquisitively. Although all the crows look alike, I cannot shake the feeling that these are the same ones from yesterday. Unease grips the base of my skull as I realize they are staring–not at me, just at Claire. Their heads bob and their gazes flit around, but they never let her out of their sight. I am seized by the sudden and irrational fear that they have come to collect her as carrion.

I’m contemplating retrieving the bat we keep behind the bedroom door for emergencies and playing crow baseball with it when she begins to laugh.

The sound of it shocks me out of my anger. We’re under siege by winged assassins and Claire is laughing, until her face is mottled crimson and the breath comes out of her in little squeaks. I fail to find the humor in the situation and leave her there, wheezing and gripping the door frame for support.

Later, when she thinks I’m in the shower, I catch her feeding them cat treats.

■■■

I tape butcher paper over our bedroom window because I can’t sleep with the crows looking in. Three of them are silhouetted through it like shadow puppets. I understand that the wing-flapping is because they’re trying to keep their balance on the narrow sill, but the movement still looks threatening in my periphery.

Claire is resplendent in her pink terrycloth robe. I’ve made a nest of our bed, crowding our already-cluttered room with everything I can think of to keep her comfortable and happy. There is a mountain of quilts in case she gets cold, and a high-powered, bladeless fan in case she gets hot. There is a basket of chocolate almonds and cracker sleeves on the bedside table in case she feels like eating, and a small wastebasket lined with a shopping bag in case she throws up. A tiny plastic humidifier vaporizes peppermint essential oil day and night to help with the nausea. I’ve moved our little TV from its niche downstairs to the top of our dresser, where it plays constant reruns of NCIS and holds court over the dozen or so pill bottles that are supposed to be saving her.

She is reading Byron while the murder investigation plays out in the background. Careful not to crowd her, I lie on the bed and let out a sigh. She puts the book down and caresses my cheek, but she is still watching the shadow birds in the window.

Shifting closer, I press a kiss behind her ear, and when she doesn’t flinch away, I explore further. The hollow of her throat, the curve of her breast, the soft expanse of her stomach. I cherish the warmth of her against my skin, the taste of her on my tongue. These treasured sensations, nearly forgotten as the invaders gain ground.

I am only satisfied when she is looking at me.

■■■

I dream that I am giving birth, lying on my back in a forest clearing on the bank of a stream, my feet resting in the shallows. A hooded midwife kneels between them, the fabric of her dress sodden with cold water.

I wail when she pulls the child free of me, and again when it does not cry, dark blood dripping from me into the current. She bundles my issue in white cloth and stands, water streaming down her legs. I reach out for it with weak arms, choking back sobs. I know that if I can just keep hold of it, the child can be saved. 

Crows hang from the branches of the trees like fruit. The midwife approaches the largest of them and offers up the bundle.

Dragging myself to my feet, I stumble after her, but I am too slow. The crow takes the cloth in its beak, and the murder takes flight as one. The flapping of their wings blows the hood from the midwife’s head, and a scream forces its way up my throat as I recognize my betrayer. Claire’s face is sharp and angular, its features all wrong. Pin feathers push through her skin like needles.

I claw a fist-sized stone from the ground, breaking my nails in the soil, and throw it with all my might at the crow that has taken our child. 

My aim is true. It drops the bundle and I run to catch it–

–but the cloth opens, and there is nothing inside. 

The world tilts sideways, and I wake up sobbing. Four crows are pecking at the skylight, peering down at my pitiful form curled up on the couch as I wipe tears from my eyes with shaking hands. 

I grab a book from the coffee table and hurl it at the glass, where it lands with a satisfying thunk and sends the crows scattering before falling earthward and striking me square in the nose. I am blinded with pain and maddened with grief. The sound that bubbles out of me is not recognizable as human.

From upstairs, Claire yells for me to be quiet. 

■■■

The crows and I are engaging in siege warfare. 

I buy a computer speaker for four dollars at Goodwill and use it to play crow distress calls at high volume from the window of our guest bedroom. This does briefly drive them off, but then our neighbors threaten to call the police, and Claire forces me to take it down. The crows return.

I add a mile of reflective tape to the trees and bushes around our house. The world is wrapped in tinsel, as if Christmas has come several months early. Every sunrise is blinding–we keep the windows shaded to make it bearable. Claire is too sick by this point to stop me, although she does think me ridiculous. She tells me that it’s only a matter of time before the city declares our home a hazard to passing drivers. I can’t bring myself to care. 

Unfortunately, the crows don’t seem to care much, either. Eventually, autumn pulls the leaves from the trees, and the detritus renders the world dull and brown once more. 

So I begin hanging crows in effigy. My internet research has taught me that they are intelligent creatures, and also that they avoid their dead brethren at all costs. I find my feathered warnings at the bottom of a clearance bin of Halloween decorations, and spend an entire afternoon staging them around our property so they look convincingly deceased. The next morning, I watch from the porch with my coffee as a group of five agitated crows hop around one of the styrofoam ones. I am delighted to see them in anguish. 

They stay away for almost an entire week after that.

On the day they return, something unfamiliar glints at me from the kitchen windowsill. I pull open the sash to retrieve it, snatching my hand back when I realize it’s a tooth. A human one, a molar, with a large silver filling in its center. I gag with revulsion as I imagine a mass of black wings descending on a wizened old man as he waits at the bus stop, sharp talons pulling his mouth wide, cruel beaks prying the tooth from his jaw. I understand that this is a threat.

When I help Claire downstairs so she can sit in the rocking chair on the porch before it gets too cold, she is delighted to discover the tooth on the kitchen counter. I haven’t been able to dispose of it yet. It seems wrong to throw it in the trash with the coffee grounds and orange peels, but burying it feels like overkill. Claire declares it a gift, and when I try to take it from her becomes so upset that I am frightened for her health. I allow her to keep it only because I am at a complete loss. She slips it into the pocket of her robe, keeping her hand there as if she is afraid it will disappear.

Later, when she has fallen asleep from her evening meds, I go to retrieve it and find it missing. She has hidden it, I’m sure, to keep it from me. 

I come downstairs the next morning and find another one.

■■■

An escort of six crows delivers a gold ring. The band is unadorned and marred with scratches from years of wear. It bears no stone. I’m stumped as to its significance. The teeth I understood, but this?

The ring vanishes soon afterward, leading me to wonder if I imagined it for almost two full days before it reappears on Claire’s finger, sandwiched between the slim band I placed on her at our wedding and her engagement ring, which once belonged to her grandmother. The seventy years of blissful marriage its diamond symbolizes were meant to bless us with just as many. In our current state, I think we’ll be lucky to make it to seven. Everything is trying to take her from me–the cancer, the crows, the catatonia she lapses into whenever I leave the room. So much of her has already been consumed. Soon there may be nothing left, and I am both terrified of losing her and braced for the hammer to fall.

I corner her in the upstairs hallway and demand she take it off.

She refuses.

We have never fought like this before. Accusations are flung like knives across the threshold of our little bedroom, and although both of us know that words like these can never be unspoken, neither of us can swallow them any longer. She screams that I’m a controlling piece of shit. I call her a burden, accuse her of hating me. She yells back that maybe she does.

The basket of almonds and crackers and nausea tablets tumbles to the floor, spilling its contents all over the rug. Claire hurls the remote at me, but her aim is poor, and it shatters against the doorframe. For the first time in months, the NCIS reruns stop.

Neither of us can stomach each other that night. Claire locks herself in the bedroom, sequestered with that cursed ring on her finger, hating me through the closed door. I can feel her anger poisoning me as I lie on the couch, staining the upholstery with my tears. 

Through chemo and PET scans and good days and bad ones, she never takes the ring off. It remains, an impenetrable barrier between us, in sickness and in health.

■■■

Claire’s hair is starting to grow back, and a fine dusting of strawberry blonde glitters on her scalp in the morning sunlight. It looks strange on her. I expected to see the old Claire again with the weight of her illness no longer bearing down on us, but I barely know the person sitting across the table from me. Even her eyes seem different; their color is unchanged, but someone else is behind them.

I cook her favorite breakfast: French toast with berries, bacon on the side. A touch of orange liqueur in the whipped cream. A cinnamon latte, brewed with the espresso machine I bought her two birthdays ago. It’s the kind of meal I used to prepare for special occasions—birthdays, anniversaries, New Year’s Day. I would plate the food like a chef, arrange the dishes on a tray, creep up the stairs as silently as possible, and surprise her in bed. She would pretend to have been sleeping the entire time, and kiss my neck as I leaned down to place the tray in her lap. The scent of vanilla and cinnamon would linger in our bedroom through the next morning.

Claire does not eat. She stares at the food, which I have served on her favorite of our mismatched plates, as if I mean to poison her. Picking up her fork, she prods at it for a moment, and then breaks down in tears.

I am alarmed. Claire has been so catatonic over the last few weeks that this display of emotion is frightening. I can’t tell if I’ve done something wrong. I can’t tell if I’ve done something right. I’m frightened that she might shatter if I touch her. Kneeling beside her chair, I beg her to tell me what’s wrong, and it takes several wet, shuddering minutes for her to calm herself enough to even speak.

As it turns out, I am the problem. We are the problem. This house is the problem, this town is the problem, the world is the problem. All this time, she has apparently been expecting that the cancer would kill her, and that thought somehow granted her a perverse sort of peace. Now that the executioner is departing, she says that she finds herself in a world that she is unprepared to face, and has not planned to exist in. She tells me that she goes to bed every night hoping that she won’t wake up in the morning, but then she does, and she drifts directionless, unable to move forward. The continued presence of something where there should have been nothing is eating her alive.

There is treatment, I say, attempting to reason with her. There is medication, and therapy, and watercolor painting, and our cat Thomas, and walks through the neighborhood with me by her side. We are winning against the cancer. We can win against this, too. In a way, I am relieved. These thoughts, however alarming, seem to me to be far less of a threat than the tangible omen of that first lump under my fingertips, harbinger of a poisonous year. I harbor hope that antidepressants will be the key, the magic cure that returns my wife to me. 

She shakes her head. 

Seven crows peer in at us from their perch on the clothesline in the garden. We both weep. I don’t know how to convince her to stay.

■■■

Although the weather remains bitterly cold for spring, we travel to the coast to celebrate the end of chemo with a vanguard of eight crows escorting our car. They look so elegant in flight that for once, I almost don’t resent their presence. One perches on the passenger side mirror, cocking its head at me, and allows the wind to lift its wings as I drive along the one-lane road. Rolling hills pass by above us, and frothing sea below. Claire sleeps, curled in on herself, in the passenger seat.

We stay in a rental cottage that was once a small chapel for the weekend. I’m torn between finding the hundreds of starfish suspended from the vaulted ceiling with fishing line charming or repulsive. I strain to touch one of them with my finger and set it swinging, realizing as I touch that peculiar porous lightness that they are real. This many could never have washed up on shore by chance. They were killed for this purpose.

An ocean of desiccated stars spreads out above me as I succumb to sleep, protected from prying avian eyes by the stained glass that fills the windows. Here, they cannot reach us. Here, I can almost forget.

I wonder what it would take to make the walls of our own house feel this secure. For the first time in months, I allow myself to relax. 

In her sleep, Claire reaches out for me. I pull her close, relishing the proximity. The sensation of her body next to me, heavy against the mattress. We haven’t shared a bed in months.

The respite, of course, is temporary.

■■■

And then I am in hell. I know that I am in hell because if I were living in any sort of just, karmic world, these godforsaken birds would drop dead, and Claire would shake off whatever spell they’ve cast on her, and she would come back to me. We would pull on our mucky boots, the ones we use when it’s muddy outside from weeks of rain, and walk the yard together, wrapping feathered bodies in old newspaper and dropping them one by one into the garbage bin. Claire would be squeamish, afraid to touch the dead little things, and insist on wearing the mint-green rubber gloves I use when scrubbing the toilets to protect her hands. I would grasp their corpses bare-handed, squeezing their necks too tightly, just to make sure that they were really dead. Eventually, the bin would be filled with dead crows wrapped in paper like meat from the butcher shop, and I would crack a joke—what’s black and white and dead all over?–and Claire would snort and swat at me, and then we would throw away the rubber gloves and strip our clothes off directly into the washing machine, and we would squeeze into the shower together, and I would wash her back the way she used to love, pressing my lips against her shoulder blades, inhaling the subtle perfume of the cherry chia soap that’s always been her favorite. 

For a moment, the fantasy feels tangible enough that if I can just lean into it, hold onto it tightly enough, it might solidify into reality. But then I glance out the window to check on her in her rocking chair, and where my wife should be I see a mass of black feathers, an amorphous creature made of wings and eyes like a biblical angel. 

The bottom falls out of my stomach, and I run to the door, which bangs against the boot scraper on the porch as it flies open. Startled, the greater mass of crows takes off, revealing Claire’s mercifully human form in the rocking chair, exactly where I left her. A handful remain, either settling on the porch railing or the arms of the chair, one even nestling into her lap, unfazed by my presence. I count them out of habit–nine–and suppress the delayed urge to vomit. 

I warn her, not for the first time, about mites and West Nile Virus and bird flu. She strokes the back of the crow in her lap absently while I admonish her, as if she has forgotten it isn’t Thomas. I say her name, ask her if she’s even listening to me, and she fails to react. 

I anger quickly these days, stretched like wire by constant worry. Before I can stop myself, I am grabbing her shoulders to shake her.

The crow in her lap is no longer content to be stroked. It lashes out like an adder, beak flashing, and I recoil as pain sears through my hand. It has carved a chunk of meat from the fleshy part of my palm, and even as scarlet wells up from the wound and spills down my wrist, Claire does not react. The crow spreads its wings, its eyes never leaving mine, warning me away from her. 

Pinching my torn skin together, I retreat. I wash my wound, wrap my hand in a dish towel, and leave through the back door, dodging pie plates and styrofoam crows and knotted tinsel on my way to the truck. Claire is still sitting on the porch as I drive away.

When I return hours later, head and hand both throbbing with pain, she has finally gone inside. At first I think the crows have gone, but then the roof ripples, and I realize it is fully blanketed with them. 

I am in hell, confined to the circle reserved for avian punishment. Prometheus and I are strange bedfellows, both of us unable to sleep at night, dreading wings on the horizon at dawn.

■■■

On the day Claire attains remission, I open the front door to retrieve the weekend paper and find ten crows standing on the front step like solicitors. They blink up at me, preening their feathers, prim and smug in their little black suits. I can feel more eyes on me, further away, although when I cast my gaze around the yard and street outside I cannot find their owners. One of the crows hops closer and caws, tilting its head as if expecting something of me.

Ten beware, it’s the devil himself. My grandmother’s raspy twang surges out of the past, and I argue with her inside my head. You also used to say the devil would be charming when I met him. Care to reconcile those images? 

The crow caws again. I’m seized with the urge to kick it, which I suppress solely because the self-help book I’ve been reading says that indulging violent tendencies will only make them worse. But god, do I want to kick it. I want to slam my foot into its little crow body so hard that it explodes into a cloud of red mist and black feathers. 

It occurs to me for the first time that I could simply ask them what they want from us. I have offered no food, brokered no deal. The devil has no right to stand on my doorstep. There isn’t anything here that belongs to him. On the other hand, I worry that extending any kind of olive branch to the crows will be interpreted as an invitation. 

No–I am not my wife. They will exercise no control over me.

I slam the door in their faces.

■■■

I awake to no crows, and the fear that permeates me eclipses any small relief at their absence. Taking the stairs three at a time, I burst into the bedroom that has become hers alone and find it empty. All her things are there: the TV still plays softly in the corner, her half-finished glass of wine from the night before remains on the nightstand collecting fruit flies, the depression in the mattress that precisely fits her curled-up form has yet to fill in, but I know that she’s gone. Her essence is missing. Her possessions are orphaned, no longer beloved treasures collected over a lifetime but a scattered mess of objects without purpose. The room feels like one left uninhabited for years, or one with a corpse in it. The absolute lack of an occupant carries an oppressive weight.

The curtain of pie tins twists on its twine as I run out the back door, but I already know that I am too late. Claire’s footprints remain in the pea gravel, but she is already long gone. Her trail terminates in the center of the garden, and where the prints cease I find her dew-damp bathrobe puddled on the ground. 

Glinting within its folds is a pearl–large, ovoid, with a faint blue luster. From its smaller end dangles a clasp, which is secured to the thin gold band I begged her so many times to take off. 

Today, I’d give anything to see it on her finger again. I’d take it all back: the crows, the cancer, the fighting, the distance. Swallowing against the rising lump in my throat, I pick up the pearl and roll it between my fingers, questioning its purpose. Is it a dowry, or a consolation prize?

I slide the ring onto my own finger and wait for the crows to return.

I watch for wings on the horizon.



RJ Aurand is a southern Appalachian writer of strange and unsettling fiction and poetry whose work has appeared in Solstitia and Small Wonders. Connect on Bluesky @rjaurand.bsky.social.

Visual Art
Michelle Geoga is a writer and artist originally from Chicago, living in Southwest Michigan. Her writing has appeared in Little Patuxent Review, Five on The Fifth, Bridge Eight, Cleaver, Longleaf and elsewhere. Her visual work has been featured in New American Paintings, the Center for Fine Art Photography, Woman Made Gallery and elsewhere. She has an MFA in Writing and a BFA in Studio Art from the School of the Art Institute in Chicago and was granted a residency at Yaddo. She can be found at michellegeoga.com.


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