A Murder of Crows: Seventeen Tales of Monsters and the Macabre Read online

  A Murder of Crows

  Seventeen Tales of Monsters and the Macabre

  by

  DeAnna Knippling

  Table of Contents:

  Copyright Information

  In Case You Were Wondering

  1. Be Good

  2. Vengeance Quilt

  3. Abominable

  4. Winter Fruit

  5. Family Gods

  6. A Ghost Unseen

  7. Haunted Room

  8. Inside Out

  9. Treif

  10. Inappropriate Gifts

  11. Clutter

  12. Lord of Pigs

  13. The Edge of the World

  14. The Strongest Thing About Me is Hate

  15. The Rock that Takes off Your Skin

  16. Things You Don’t Want but Have to Take

  The End

  Additional Copyright Information

  About the Author

  Copyright Information

  A Murder of Crows: Seventeen Tales of Monsters and the Macabre

  Copyright © 2014 by DeAnna Knippling

  Cover images copyright Mur34 | Canstockphoto.com, AlexMax | Canstockphoto.com

  Cover and Interior Design © 2014 DeAnna Knippling

  Published by Wonderland Press, Colorado Springs, Colorado, USA.

  More information on Wonderland Press titles at www.WonderlandPress.com

  In Case You Were Wondering

  It was we crows who took your daughter, in case you were wondering. She didn’t run away. We had—I had—been watching her for some time, listening to her tell stories in the grass behind the house. She would sit near the chicken coop and watch the white chickens pick at the dirt, pulling up fat worms and clipping grasshoppers out of the air as they jumped toward the fields.

  Some of them were good stories. Some of them were bad. But that’s what decided it, even more than any issue of mercy or salvation or anything else. Crows are, for one thing, possessive of stories. And also by then I had pecked almost all the elders into coming to listen to her at least once, except Facunde, who was then mad and responded to nobody’s pecking, not that I had had the courage to exactly take my beak to her. “She is like a daughter to me,” I had pled with the others. “She listens.” They laughed at me, they rattled their beaks, they came and heard her and were convinced, or at least bullied into pretending they were convinced.

  We took her yesterday, on the same cold winter day that you traded your son to the fairies, the wind blowing in cold gray threads, ruffling our feathers. It had snowed a few days before that, a storm that had killed your husband, or so it was said. The wind had snatched the snow out onto the prairie, hiding it in crevices. It had been a dry year, and even though it was still too cold to melt the snow, the thirsty dirt still found places to tuck it away in case of a thaw.

  I stamped my feet on a sleeping branch while the others argued. Some argued that we should wait for spring. So many things are different, in the spring. But old Loyolo insisted: no, if we were to take the child, we would have to take her then and there: there had been at least one death already, and no one had heard the babe’s cry for hours.

  We covered the elm trees, thousands of us, so many that the branches creaked and swayed under our weight. I don’t know if you noticed us, before it was too late. You were, it is to be admitted, busy.

  The girl played on the swings, rocking herself back and forth in long, mournful creaks. She wore a too-small padded jacket and a dress decorated in small flowers. She was so clean that she still smelled of soap. Her feet were bare under their shoes, the skin of her legs scabbed and dry, almost scaly. Her wrists were pricked with gooseflesh, and her hair whipped in thin, colorless threads across her face as the wind caught it. The house had the smell of fresh death, under the peeling paint and the dusty windows, and seemed to murmur with forgotten languages, none of which were languages of love or tenderness. Afternoon was sinking into evening. The girl’s breath smelled like hunger.

  “Now!” called old Loyolo, at some signal that not even I could have told you. And thousands of birds swept out of the trees toward her. From the middle of it, I can tell you, it seemed a kind of nightmare. Wings in my face, claws in my feathers. The sun was temporarily snuffed out, it was a myriad of bright slices reflected off black wings. We were no flock of starlings, hatched in formations more intricate than any weaving, just a flock of crows. Some of us were old and fat, and none of us were graceful.

  We did not eat her. We did not even peck her to death, although of course there was blood. We each of us clutched her with our claws, in her hair, on her dress—and with a clack clack caw, we took her into the air.

  She did not scream. Her eyes were wide, and all the way around they were white, but she only pressed her lips together and swallowed over and over again, even as old Loyolo practically tore her hair from the roots.

  And then, as you chanted and strained over a small crib, as you hoped and prayed that your daughter would not interrupt you, we took her away so that she was no longer your problem. Although I would not be surprised if you begged me to return her, so that she could take your place, on the other side of the window, now that you realize what you have done.

  —

  We took her to a place hidden in a dumping ground for refrigerators and plows and empty beer cans and tangled wire. You had been there once a few years ago and shot .22s at us, hitting no one but making bright pinging sounds and leaving brass casings behind. We made her nest inside an overturned truck cab. We lined it with twigs and feathers and blankets and scraps of cloth and leather and tried not to shit in it. We brought her insects and mice and the last of the dried apples that hung from the branches on your apple tree. We stole for her, stole socks and jeans and too-large shirts and bright scarves with tinsel in them and rings made of pink plastic because, well, chicks will steal anything shiny.

  At first she only huddled and shivered and cried. Then, as the afternoon lengthened, she began to pick her way through the garbage, looking for treasures. She found a naked human doll and wrapped it in cloth and bits of string. She tied a serrated knife to a stick. She watched the moon rise.

  She did not speak.

  We asked old Loyolo what we should do about that. None of us had had chicks who had been silent, and human children, well, they were a mystery.

  Night fell. The snow began to come down so thick (and we had eaten so well on a dead coyote that day), that my part of the greater flock decided to spend the rest of the day with her in her nest. We pecked on her door and she opened it, and we swept in, oh, a hundred or so of us, and found places to roost before too much snow could follow us in.

  She sat in the nest we had made her under the upside-down seat of the truck, wrapped herself in her blankets with a pink wool one on top, and spread it out for us to sit on. We gathered on her shoulders and all over her legs and waited, but she did not speak.

  Old Loyolo coughed noisily and said, “It is time for stories.”

  We all looked at her expectantly, even though it’s not our way to make a storyteller say anything unwilling, and with good reason.

  She said nothing.

  And so, after a long moment that felt like a feather caught in the throat, old Loyolo said, “If you will not tell stories, than we will tell stories. Human stories,” he added. “So that she can remember how to be human.”

  It was a nice thing to say. A kind thought, for a crow. But mostly we were warm and full, and wanted to hear stories, whether they helped the girl or not.

  Old Loyolo groaned to himself, jumped off the girl’s knee, and
hopped onto the rear-view mirror, which formed a kind of podium. “Me first, then,” he croaked. “Once upon a time there was a girl who loved her father more than anything else…”

  1. Be Good

  “Tornado,” Pa said, the wind whipping his hair around his face. It needed cut. We already knew the tornado was coming—it was why we’d come outside—but some truths are so big that they have to be said out loud. “Hope it misses the Home.”

  “Headed straight for it,” Ma said beside me. I squinted, trying to keep the dust out of my eyes.

  When kids ain’t good, they go to the Home. My Aunt Janet tried to threaten me once when I was throwing rocks at her son Tim that I was going to get sent to the Home if I wasn’t good. Tim said I started it which was a lie, but I guess we’re all a little blind, and Aunt Janet was blind about her son, who had just picked up a kitten and threw it against the wall of the barn so hard that it threw up in my hands and purred and died.

  I wasn’t the only one trying to get him. The mother cat was attacking him, too.

  “You knock that off, Laurie Lee Jackson!” she’d said. “You piece of shit crazy thing! You’re going to kill my son! I’ll have you sent up to the Home for this!”

  And then Pa was there, and he grabbed Aunt Janet and shook her and said, “You stop threatening my girl and get your son inside. I saw what he did.”

  Tim just laughed.

  It’s good to have a father who will stand up for you, but I shouldn’t of been throwing rocks at him anyway. I shouted, “I see your crazy eyes and I will tell everybody about you and how you like to kill stuff and you ain’t never going to kill my baby brother!”

  For that’s what he had threatened to do, if I didn’t shut up about the kitten. But Ma and Pa didn’t raise no fool. So I threw rocks at him instead, because we both knew I’d get in more trouble for it than him killing that kitten, if his ma had her way, and I wanted him to know I didn’t give a shit.

  So Tim was the one who belonged at the Home. It was Tim who should have been inside those painted cinderblock walls when the tornado came.

  Some people say you got to get along and you got to be good. Pa says you got to watch out for those people. Those are the ones who want you to shut up when someone hurts you.

  Be good means be quiet to them.

  We stood outside our house, white on the sides and green on top, and Ma turned around in a circle every few minutes, jigging up Leonard on her hip, and watched the tornado dance back and forth. Everything looked brown. The clouds were black but it was almost as bright as a clear day. You couldn’t hear the tornado itself, not to pick it out, because of the wind all over and the clatter of sticks on the house. My hair got in my mouth and I resolved to cut it all off.

  I wished we had a basement for the cows, the milk cows at least.

  We couldn’t see the Home, exactly, just the trees where it was. Dirt in my eyes made it hard to see so I squinted them even tighter closed, like the camel I saw once at the zoo in the one time we went to the city.

  If they’d have let me, I would have watched the storm from the roof or from the big cottonwood tree in the garden, or from the tin barn up on the hill to get a better view, but they wouldn’t.

  Ma said, “Those poor kids.”

  The wind stopped howling for a second and we could hear the tornado grinding like teeth that never stopped, and I knew it could look over at us any second and see us watching us and come after us as easy as it was going after the Home. All it would take was one glance and it could come after us.

  It went over the front edge of the trees and didn’t look any different for a second, and then the bottom of it got fatter. I imagined all those kids hiding in the basement.

  It should have been Tim down there. The tornado should have sucked him up and turned him into tornado butter. But instead it was killing birds and cows and dogs and real people and kittens, instead of him. Couldn’t hear any screaming, but I knew there must be some. If that tornado had been that close to me, I would have been screaming. But maybe down in the Home’s basement they didn’t know.

  The dust at the bottom of the tornado turned from brown like everything else to green, from the leaves of the trees surrounding the Home. Or maybe that was just my imagination.

  The telephone was ringing in the house but Pa didn’t tell me to answer it so I didn’t. Probably someone from the church, but we’d stopped going after they wouldn’t do anything about Tim, not even make him go to Confession. What good’s somebody who’s always saying be good and when it comes time to punish someone for being bad, they don’t say nothing? When the priest says be good he means someone who doesn’t be good the way he likes and not be good in general, I guess, which means he’s probably saying be good about my folks and me a lot lately.

  The tornado ate trees as fast as a lawnmower, and behind it was only green-haze dirt.

  Then it hiccupped, an empty spot that travelled all the way from the bottom of the funnel to the top, shaking the whole middle of the tornado.

  I seen lots of tornadoes. I seen them starting in the clouds, just barely poking out, until they touched the ground. I seen them rise back up into the clouds like a big drip of water that pulls back into the faucet.

  But I ain’t never seen one just stop.

  One second it was there; the next, it wasn’t.

  Pa ran to his pickup truck and I ran with him, with Ma yelling both our names, but we were down the gravel road in the truck in a heartbeat. I looked back over my shoulder and there she was, standing with Leonard, who hadn’t made a sound the whole time, and then I looked forward and even the clouds at the top of the funnel had stopped spinning and stuff was falling out of the sky.

  We drove to the Home so fast I put my seatbelt on and still had to hang on with both hands and keep my feet up against the dashboard to keep from getting jerked around.

  Pa said, “You’re probably going to see some dead people, Laurie Lee.”

  “I know. But we got to save them before the tornado comes back.”

  “I should been down there,” he said. “I should have been down there.”

  I didn’t say nothing; I knew he was just trying to make the truck drive faster.

  We always feed them and hide the kids from the Home when they run away.

  There was a boy named Martin who we kept for six weeks so his ribs could heal; he was my friend. They knew we had him and we had no right to him, but Pa let them in and they searched the house and they couldn’t find him in the places Ma hid him, so that was all right. Martin said he was kidnapped from his house because he was in love with another boy and God said that wasn’t right. When he sucked in his stomach there was a hole under his ribs, a cave where you could put your hand in. I asked him what happened to the other boy but of course he didn’t know. We played cards and he cheated but he joked about it every time so I always caught him.

  “If you want to learn how to catch someone cheating, you got to play with a cheater,” he said. “That’s what my dad taught me. He was always cheating. Said it was so I would know it when I saw it.”

  I asked him if his parents had him kidnapped, but he didn’t know. I say it was his folks who did it. Anybody else, the cops would have been all over them. But when your parents do it, it’s okay, so be good and shut the hell up about it, all right?

  Martin’s my friend and Tim’s a shit. Shows you what I think about be good.

  I don’t know what happens to most kids when they leave my folks, but I knew about Martin. His folks sent a letter to our church, and the priest tacked it up on the cork board. I copied it down secretly and gave it to him.

  Please come home, it said, so my folks let him call his folks long distance, and they came and got him.

  Ma had taken Polaroids of him when he first came, and Martin’s ma had cried and cried over him and said no more.

  But his dad just nodded and got this tricky look on his face. Martin taught me how to see it, just like his dad had taught him. He was a cheat
er. Martin looked at me as he was leaving, and I knew he wasn’t blind about who kidnapped him no more. I know Ma made him memorize our phone number before they came to get him.

  “Anything happen, you call us,” she said.

  Only I knew that he wouldn’t be able to call, the next place his dad sent him. He might be back at the Home now, for all we knew.

  My Pa has never cheated at cards. Now that I know how to look, I look, and he don’t cheat. I kind of wish I didn’t know how to look, but then again I’m glad. I’m glad because Pa ain’t a cheat, but I’m sad about myself.

  Soon enough we were off our driveway and on the road to the Home. The road was all tore up. When we got to the highway it had chunks missing and signs ripped up and trees over the road, but we drove over and around everything. It started to hail and went from tiny pieces of white to large cracks on the roof and I was scared the windshield was going to bust in on us.

  Pa slowed down when we got to the edge of the trees, although with as much mess as the tornado had made, I don’t know that you could call them trees anymore. The trees were piled up in drifts, and the hail blew around in them and left white piles, and we couldn’t drive any further.

  Pa turned the truck around but we didn’t leave. I twisted around in my seat until I couldn’t stand it anymore and about the same second Pa turned off the truck because he couldn’t stand it anymore either. We got out and he said “Wait” and pulled a bright blue tarp out of the truck box and had me hold it over my head while he went running, over and under and around the ripped-up elm trees.

  I grabbed the first aid box out of the truck box that we have for while we’re cutting trees for firewood in case the chainsaw slips or something, and I went after him as fast as I could. I couldn’t barely see the road, but when I got off it I knew because I slipped in mud as the hail turned to buckets and buckets of rain.

  Other trucks were coming. I couldn’t hear nothing with the rain on the tarp, but I saw headlights coming down the road.

  I wanted to see what had happened before someone decided to chase me off, so I tried to run faster and almost brained myself on a stupid tree. But finally I made it, a lot before anyone else but Pa did.