Crow
For @wriightworth for the 2023 AJ:AA Secret Santa!
I have no clue what this is. I hope you can derive some enjoyment from it anyhow?
The sky is the brownish grey of cheap paper, and the dry stalks inside the fence and the dry grasses outside it abrade one another quietly in the weak, warm, suspirant breeze that has breathed unceasingly on him for the long afternoon of three months.
Apollo doesn’t really care whether the birds are scared or not. It’s been one long day / a week / three withering summer months, and the sky hasn’t changed, and he can’t close his eyes.
He can’t move. He can’t make a sound. He has not always been a scarecrow, but he is. He is one now.
Apollo has almost never spoken about growing up in another country, wedged in the mountains east of Nepal and Bhutan, and he has spoken even less about growing up in two different countries, because his childish, snowblind memories of the faraway supported him during his foundling years in Los Angeles the way a bangle bracelet and a broken promise never did.
His foster father in the Himalayas had had little enough choice to bring Apollo and his own son along on those expeditions. Children were obviously at risk in the faraway, but at least at more easily disregarded risk than if left to themselves in a bungalow in the snow for an overnight hike that might take three years on the other end. But Apollo’s gratitude for the trips had extended beyond the simply practical, because -
Because a fugitive in the reported world could wield wonders away. A person could feed promises to the wind and to the steep planes of sunlight and have them kept, in words written on the clapper of a chime hung in the air or drawn in powdered pigment on the snow.
Because a runaway could have promises kept, and beauty with them. And when he was homesick, it was the faraway he was homesick for.
He had spent years scrabbling at the walls of the world. Very literally, as a child, and then via research and rumors in the internet’s dirty puddles as a teenager, in libraries as a student, and at last, as an adult, by reading between the lines of every job listing tangentially related to Law. His foster father had told him the truth about this, as much as he hated to admit it. Gates to the faraway have irregular locations and subtle locks, and lucky discoveries are children’s stories; everyone who has learned one has found someone to show it to them.
Two years and seven months out of law school, a job making transcripts overnight, before he had finally seen the advertisement whose in-between-the-lines he had read correctly and whose demands he had been able to meet. A little old-fashioned, the skills required, the wording.
Kristoph Gavin, Esq. A little old-fashioned, the man’s clothes. (Though handsome, striking even, the man who wore them.) A little strange, the quiet pools of tension in the conversation.
And at last, after a probation with the mail and the filing cabinets and the little tests in every detail, he had followed his new boss up a narrow flight of stairs in the strange office building - a fading blue piece of 1980s Los Angeles frivolity with circular windows and half-stories and a wraparound balcony - and into a parlor left over from an earlier time than that, one full of dark wooden furniture and glass-fronted cabinets and a grandfather clock whose silver pendulum only wriggled once in its case, and whose windows looked out not on a wide intersection full of Mercedes-Benzes and box trucks but on this Kansas that would never know Technicolor.
And his new boss had smiled at him across a desk and a cup of milk with barely a splash enough of coffee to deserve the name before taking his left arm in a blacksmith’s grip, pulling his bracelet off his wrist, and hauling him out of the room over his shoulder as if he were a sack of dry leaves. He was.
The breeze rattles the brown stems, the sun never moves, there’s a pole along his shoulders and one at his back, and he’s forgetting the lines of Auden’s Roman Wall Blues.
In the mountains north and east of Ojai, there is a tiny community started by long-ago immigrants from the same Himalayas, and their spot in the faraway had been a vague goal. Somewhere the rules might be similar enough to what he remembers, where he could conceivably reacclimate or acclimate at all. But he had anticipated something entirely else for faraway Los Angeles - tomols pulling up onto golden beaches, turquoise Hockney poolwater, willow/tule domes alongside silver screen diners where a girl could be discovered on that lucky afternoon. Colors that would suit Kristoph Gavin, blond and blue and white.
Here there are crows sometimes, circling and yelling above the prarie brown beyond the fence, but they don’t approach. Neither does the man who hired him, fooled him, brought him here, robbed him and planted him in this grim faraway grass.
Over the heather / I don’t know why / I shall do nothing but look at the sky.
A crow lands on him.
Perhaps the wind has become infinitesimally stronger or the haze infinitesimally darker, but it may just be that this crow LOOKS storm-tossed, tumbling out of the air exhausted with feathers in all directions. The oily sheen on it is purplish and its beak hangs open as it heaves to breathe.
Apollo can do nothing for it. Not a movement, not a sound - but his paralysis, in the smallest of comforts, prevents him from doing anything that will agitate it further. If Kristoph wants him to frighten birds, then his own small comfort will be in letting this one rest, if it decides to.
He waits. The crow moves up to his shoulder, under the brim of the stranger’s hat that Kristoph had dropped on top of his head, hunches itself into a ball, and sleeps.
Time brushes past, warm and weak and irregular as the breeze.
When the crow at last rouses itself, sorts its feathers halfway, and hops and glides down to the ground, Apollo realizes that he will miss it when it goes. But it doesn’t. It stalks and pecks in a circle around the base of the pole, finding a few bits of dry seed, and something like a worm - likelier a centipede, since his peripheral vision suggests that it has hair-fine legs along it. After it seems satisfied - though how can it be? - it smoothes its feathers a little more and flies back to his shoulder, to rest again.
The pattern repeats another three times. It provides a sense of a day and night cycle, however feeble.
It is his crow now.
Kristoph never makes an appearance from the still, sullen house behind him, or at least not one that he can perceive. There is never the sound of the door, or of footsteps, or clinking pans or anything of the kind. He worries for the bird even more than for himself, should Kristoph spot it, but it seems to understand circumspection and doesn’t fly closer to the structure than an acre-wide circle will bring it, both ends of which Apollo can see.
His crow has never cawed at him, either, or at anything else. It is a surprise when at last it says: “ba.” It’s not a crowy noise; it sounds more like a pet raven in a video clip, making something still a few lengths from music.
His crow bounces sideways down his arm and back. “Ba-ba ba-ba ba ba?” He wishes, partially, that he could respond, but is selfishly glad that it has stayed close and unafraid of him. “Ba ba ba-ba ba ba.” Something Annie Lennox about it.
Day/night/what passes for them.
The circles his crow flies become tighter, keeping it closer to him. When it comes back, it wedges itself between the hat and Apollo’s straw shoulder in the remnants of his own shirt. Its feathered-over heartbeat feels fast, but its heartbeat always does.
At the end of one particular circle, then, the bird skims past him and keeps going, in the direction of the blank, disapproving house. It can’t be more than a few minutes that he feels its absence, and minutes are a concept he has lost most of his use for, but he doesn’t like it. It makes him nervous.
His crow has lost its mind when it comes back. It doesn’t caw or scream or ba-ba, but it lands hard on the end of the shoulder pole, where his wrist might be, and flaps hard enough that the beats sound like flags in the wind or a person falling down a flight of stairs. It grips and rustles in its panic, then takes off and repeats its actions at the end of his other arm, hitting the pole and buffeting the air again.
What are you doing?, he thinks. The agitated bird stretches its wings up like blades and strains at the pole. Again. Stop. He worries how long it can continue before it -
His vision becomes a dizzy brown swoop as the pole that holds him upright spins at his crow’s last assault and tips sideways, leaving him at a thirty-degree angle and facing the house the other way. The bird is drinking air on his left wrist, shaking, gathering itself.
A small brass bell that he had not had time to notice hangs on a string by the door, straight toward the ground, entirely unmoved by the breeze. The rest of the yard fidgets in it, brown leaves insinuating against their neighbors, dry sticks dragging themselves an inch in the dust, cloth in bundles on the ground by the fences almost shrugging, then wrinkling down empty.
The nearest bundle has a pair of glasses. Another is topped by a hooded sweatshirt, bleached grey on top and its original grey showing when the wind lifts it.
As that understanding hits him, his crow caws for the first time and continues, loud, scraping the air and echoing off the dirty clouds. Other birds, the ones that have never dared to come close to the fenced plot of land, scream back and start to gather. One approaches him, lands nervously three feet away, then ignites its courage and joins his crow further along his arm. They all begin to gather along his arms, all facing the house, staring, yelling. Challenging.
The little brass bell on the porch starts to swing in the air, emits a sour little chime. Two more. Then louder.
Kristoph, taller than Apollo remembers him, opens the door, one hand raised.
The crows dive at him, surge at him, in a zigzagging clawed cacophony. One tangles itself in his hair, others snap and stab at his eyes, draw blood from his palms and the bony peaks of his knuckles, though a few of these he knocks out of the air with savage swipes of his arms. Apollo’s and some of the others evade him completely, though, and vanish into the shadows of the house. Kristoph shifts his attention from the birds attacking him and pelts after the interlopers. After Apollo’s crow.
The door hangs open and a few battered crows lie in the doorway or just inside it. Apollo can do nothing but stare and listen as the crashes diminish, the shouts and the wild calls diminish, until the scraping leaves are once again the only sounds half-submerged in the silence.
It could be an hour/a day/five skipped heartbeats before there is movement from the house. Two crows, each carrying something shining in its beak, hopping out into the brighter dimness and soaring away over the roof for the horizon. Neither has a purple sheen to its feathers. Nor do the next half a dozen that come.
Minutes and eras.
A scraping sound, not dead stalk on dead stem but something wooden and something that isn’t.
Apollo’s crow hobbles from the door, dragging a broken claw, a cluster of flight feathers, and Apollo’s bronze bracelet. Its scuffling steps are painful to watch, have to be so much more so to execute, but it hauls the bangle to the foot of the scarecrow pole and waits, chest fluttering. Then it catches its breath and hops flapping at him, falls back to the ground with a sound more like a shaken piece of paper than a caw.
It tries again, can’t lift the bracelet with one leg. Tries and fails with its beak. Puts its head through and manages a flailing glide to one ruined knee of Apollo’s suit trousers, claws its way up to his shoulder, sidesteps, so tired, along the length of his left arm, and deliberately maneuvers the bracelet onto the end of the beam.
Apollo collapses face-first into the dead leaves and comes up with dirt on his human face. His arms are shaking from their own weakness, not from the sickly breeze. He blinks for the first time in weeks, months, yellow crud in the corners of his eyes. When he sits up all the way, he sees his crow hunched in the plants, staring at him.
He picks it up and it lets him, and he carries it wobbling on weak legs into what may no longer be Kristoph’s house. He can come back for the wounded birds, but first -
At the foot of the stairs that lead back down to Los Angeles is a scarecrow in a blue suit, its head bent to one side and a tear in its fabric neck from which straw has started to slide to the floor. He steps back, carefully.
The room he had sat in is thrown apart, jewelry and pocketknives and keys and things spilling out of drawers angled downwards from their caves, across the desk, everywhere on the floor. Black feathers here and there.
“Is something yours?”
“Ba ba.” His crow nods its head several times, but shakes it again when he starts to paw through the shiny mess.
“No?”
The bird in the crook of his arm becomes agitated again when he moves for the doorway, unfolds out a wing to one side and then grumbles in pain.
Apollo turns to look and catches sight of his reflection in the case of the grandfather clock. The strange pendulum isn’t a solid rod, is it, but a chain with a jagged silver pendant as a bob. The case is locked when he tries it.
He places the bird as gently as he can on the cushion of a velveteen sofa in the corner of the parkor, despite its bas of concern, then all but charges down the stairs and wrenches the pale blue coat off of Kristoph’s scarecrow, leaves the thing limp against the baseboard and wraps the coat around his left hand and arm as he stomps back up on ever more steady legs.
He closes his eyes in front of the clock and swings his swaddled fist through the glass of the case. It is a satisfying thing to do.
He pulls the pendant and its chain carefully from the hook in the mechanism, and carries it back to his crow, which is watching him with an intensity that is certainly hope, but apprehension too.
“This?”
A long pause. “Ba.”
He sits on the floor and his crow edges forward and lands gracelessly on his knee.
“You’re on my lap.”
“Ba ba ba? ba -“
“Fine -“
His hands shake only a little as he holds up the chain and lets it settle around the sleek black neck.
An instant later he has another young man collapsing ragged against him, beautiful in black and purple with bruises purpling his fingers, a man who could be the mirror of Kristoph and who, beyond all clarity, is not in any way like him at all.
There are so many things they will need to do, soon. But for now, Apollo’s crow embraces him and buries his face against the crook of his neck, and Apollo tilts his head toward him, and holds him close, and loves him, loves him back.