Thursday, November 1, 2018

The Sunset Crow

i.
For as long as Mary could remember her father had an obsessive interest in sunsets. Her earliest memory was of cresting a western-facing ridge to watch the sun sink, fat and bloody, behind the mountains on the other side of the valley. She was four years old. She still had the photograph of that sunset. It was the sunset with which she and her father compared all others. Her bones ached, spine tingled whenever she looked at this photograph-- long after she grew bored of the whole sunset affair.

When Mary was six or seven she asked, "Why do we watch sunsets Daddy?" Her father's eyes went opaque, consciousness scattering like fossils of light to the edges of his inner world. Minutes passed, and the little girl had assumed her father didn't know the answer, but then as they came upon a rocky promontory on their hike, the sun exploding violets and robin reds behind horizon clouds, he said, "When I was a boy a crow visited me in my mother's garden. I was picking blackberries for one of your grandmother's famous pies. But this was no ordinary crow. It perched there on Simious, the Scarecrow, on its straw-filled burlap arm and then spoke to me. I was twelve. This crow said, 'The night is your mistress. You will try to fight your desires, your dark inheritance, and follow the sun in vain hope of a neverending day. But you will fail. Mother night will have you then. All that is yours will go to our mother's eye.' These words of course confused me. And I eventually forgot all about them. But then when I was a young man of twenty-one, the crow returned. My mother was buried by then, her plot on a small hill facing west. On her deathbed, your grandmother said to me, 'My grave must face west, toward the setting sun. I cannot hold back what may happen to you and your line if you do not honor my simple and humble request.' And so of course I honored this. But three years after she was buried, while I visited her gravesite, the crow found me there. It said, 'I was born from your mother's vileness as were you. We are brothers. This woman below is not your mother. You must have only sons; if you have a daughter she must die by your hand.' Then the crow flew off and I never saw it again. Then you came along and I felt nothing but rapturous sunsets, neverending dusk thoughts, and vowed to never honor the horrible crow's murderous decree. You and I are against the crow forever, locked in an eternity of sunsets." Her father never again told her this story.

ii.
Mary felt the presence of the crow long before it ever made a physical visit. Whether in dreams, or some hypnotized state of reverie that came after watching a sunset with her father, as was their custom. At twelve, beyond menarche, she became bored with the sunset watching routine, and even spiteful toward both her father and the sun, growing pale of skin and distant of emotion. But she still kept the rite alive, as she had no intention of upsetting her father, or destroying his sense of accomplishment and pride. This father had raised her all alone; she never knew her mother. All father would say about her was, she was a wicked woman, nameless, whom he had never known to be pregnant but came to him a year after her birth, and left the daughter for him to assume sole parenthood. She had no name for the child, and so he called her Mary.

She walked the night streets after her father went to bed. The moon became her secret love. The sun brought to the world light, density and green life, but this moon gave these shadowscapes mystery, formlessness and danger, muted everything green to smoke and black etchings on an dim orange sky. Somehow it opened the veins of all that was living and spilled out blackest blood, hardening like shellac on death trees. She could move about these demiurgic scenes and not be noticed by anyone. Only the raccoons and cats and possums paid her any mind. Anonymous red-eyed night, colors that mocked the sun.

When she was fourteen she slipped into a house through an open basement window, and creeped about the place for hours, eating food from their kitchen, watching the children sleep, looking at the family's many photo albums, masturbating on their sofa. The small housedog at first was scared and hid behind a laundry basket, but eventually it became comfortable enough with her to sniff at her hand, and allow Mary to scratch it behind the ears. Inside this house-- which she visited in the dead of night many times-- there was a ceramic crow on the mantle, gleaming black eyes her. On her last night inside she took it for her own.

When she was sixteen the crow came to her one night while she idled in a pale yellow-lit school playground. The crow landed on the raised seat of a see-saw. At first startled, then an overwhelming calm bathed her. She expected it to speak, like it did for her father, but it never did. She knew already what it had to say. She'd known for a long time now.

iii.
The sunset was amazing. It was her eighteenth birthday. And reluctantly she had agreed to spend it with her father, deep in the mountains, rather than with her friends drinking and partying all night. She would be leaving soon for college, what was one more sunset to humor the old man. But she was dead-set on this being the last, even if she had to be blunt and cruel with her father.

But she had to admit, after all these years of sunsets piling up on sunsets, a massive bloated corpsepile of suns, this one was extraordinary. Special. Fire reds bled into clouds streaked with surprising crow black feathers. There was something terrifying there along with its beauty. A truly unforgettable last sunset to be shared between daughter and father.

"You grow tired of these outings, Mary, my daughter." It was not a question; most certainly a statement. She remained quiet, entranced by the horizon's performance. For it surely was a performance, murder as art, a mutilation of the sun by the sharpened black steel of clouds, crow-devised. It made her quiver all over, but especially deep within her womanhood. As if she had swallowed the sun there.

She placed her hand on her father's face and stroked it gently, like never before, like the woman of the night who was her mother.

iv.
Joseph was deeply shamed by what he allowed to happen on his daughter's eighteenth birthday. But he kept his shame to himself. Three other times that last summer his strangely smirking and alluring daughter came to him, and three times he acquiesced. Gave in to her black electric touches. The words they exchanged during these dark couplings were few and far between.

"You've seen the crow then?"

"No daddy. I am the crow." But she giggled to show she was just joking.

In August Mary left to attend college. But he had not seen her for a week. She spent that last week with friends in a remote cabin high in the mountains. Communing with the crows, bathing naked under the moonlight. He should have listened to that crow so many years ago, and killed his daughter, the very day that magdelene brought her to his doorstep. The woman's words came back to haunt him: "This is your contract. This is your spawn and seal."

In September, after weeks of following a flock of crows through cove-haunts, endless undulations of tree-teethed ridges, he found their roost and poisoned hundreds of birds. Then there in the forest, naked, covered in filth, he ate a hundred dead and dying crows and fell dead himself into an anonymous puddle of pine dreck and limestone slurry.

v.
Mary went out for a late night stroll, well beyond her dorm at Black Mountain College, past the campus and into the small town of Black Mountain itself, a hamlet nestled high in the mountains. It was chill, foggy and blacker than any night she'd ever seen in her life. The few streetlamps gave light only for a few steps before she was plunged back into blackness, moonless and ripe with an unsavory secret. She had never before been afraid on any night time outing, but this night fear came to her in compounding waves.

Night was no longer night, but a chasm calling to her. On the edge of town she came to the Museum of Stained Glass, but the doors were locked. Looking behind her she saw nothing of the town anymore, but only ripplings of black on black, as if the town was a miasma of crows. She felt her only refuge was to break into the Museum. She found a large rock and hammered at the padlock and chain on the huge oaken double doors of the stone building.

On about the tenth try the rusty old padlock finally gave way and she threw away the heavy chain with a ringing thud. Behind her a cacophony of crows pressed like a gravitational field, like an overprotective father against a cruel unfeeling world. She was certain then it would consume her, shred her to bits.

She slammed the double doors shut and slid the iron rod brace across the width of the doors. Perhaps only a false comfort, but for now she felt safe. Inside, it was not dark. Votive candles in chandeliers hanging low lit the hallway all the way through to the main exhibit, a massive thirty foot high stained glass window. It took her a moment, breathless, heart thumping like a frenzied meth murderer in her chest, for her brain to stitch together the pattern of a crow, in brilliant varied shades of black and smoke-gray glass. It looked to her as if the massive bird was quaking into life..

Then an explosion of glass rained thousands of crows upon her, slashing her each time in their finite death dives. Glass crows slashing at her cheeks and eyes, sliced off one ear, stuck dagger beaks deep into her breasts. Then by bastard physics one flew up her skirt and lodged deep within her dripping dark blossom. Her mind went pure static then, pleasure and pain turned up to their highest human levels. She fell unconscious there inside the Museum of Stained Glass, amid the shattered pieces of a lost work of art.

Outside, our Mary of the Moon-- Mother of Crows-- slipped out of the clouds like a strutting streetwalker and a solitary crow nibbled at the earth, yanked out a ripe juicy worm and ate it whole.