1.
On my morning walk along the service road, I see through the chain-linked fence a man on his knees. He’s smashing his fist, the flesh of which is a bloody mush, into the pebbly shoulder of the highway. The sound of it is like the slapping of a paper bag full of wet sticks into concrete. He’s not an old man, but not young either. There’s a bouquet of flowers on the ground beside him. He’s weeping and cursing. I call through the fence, “Hey man, please don’t do that. Please . . .” He stops, turns. The look in his eyes changes my life, the way your life changes when, years later, a fire burns down your childhood home. The man pounds what’s left of his fist again and again into the shoulder of the highway. From the south, I hear the yelping siren of a police car, and as it approaches, flashing, I resume my walk, but now my bones are rattling.
2.
In the late evening, my older sister calls from Montana. One of her horses was stolen last night, she reports, her voice short of breath, right out of the barn. The horse’s name is River. My sister can’t understand how she could’ve slept through the theft. “I barely sleep,” she tells me, “even on a good night.” She loves that animal.
When we were kids, our parents got us our first dog; a big, drooling, love-starved mixed breed named Spirit. My sister and I would take him for long walks in the woods behind our house every day after school. I don’t know how it works, but Spirit bound us in a way that nothing else ever did.
I hear her crying on the other end.
“I’ll bet you get him back,” I say. “I’ll bet they find him.”
I wonder why she doesn’t sleep, even on good nights.
3.
Next day, in the liquor store in the late morning, I see a priest I recognize because he baptized my brother’s kids a few years back. He’s buying a bottle of high-end vodka. I’m buying a hard-to-find Portuguese port called Aguia Voando that my friend Doug likes and that this place sometimes carries. Doug is going through a divorce he never saw coming: an old boyfriend showed back up and she couldn’t resist. I want to help him through it, at least in some small way.
The priest pays for his spirits with a Mastercard. I try to remember his name but can’t. “Have a good one, Father,” I say.
He looks back at me as he heads for the door. “You, too,” he says.
I’m pretty sure he doesn’t know my name either. Why should he?
4.
A few months after my wife died, age thirty-eight, ovarian cancer, which is nine years ago now, I took up bird watching. I was fanatical about it for a year or so, spent hours in the woods, in the fields. I was particularly fond of Carolina Wrens. They were like cartoon birds, and sometimes when I watched them I couldn’t help but laugh. Now, when I do notice a bird, I try not to identify the genus or type. I prefer to observe it as if it is a creature brand new to earth and I’m the first human being ever to see it.
5.
Confession: the town I live in looks so much like so many other places in America that I sometimes feel the urge to mar storefronts and statuary with giant ugly words spray-painted in purple. Words like consume, or vacate, or obliterate. Or I imagine making big, strange, ominous sculptures, like thin, mouthless figures stretching out their long fingers or ten-foot piles of jagged shapes, and cementing them into people’s front lawns. Not to worry. I’m a small-business owner (Luke’s Books and Records) whom most people are acquainted with, so my dark little fantasy will remain just that.
6.
Doug and I sip port. We’re halfway through the bottle but we haven’t said much. It’s fine. Neither one of us is big on small talk. I will have to tell him soon that I’ve got to go—it’s almost midnight—and I feel bad about that.
“I don’t know who I am,” Doug says after a longish sip. The skin under his eyes is puffy, the color of a bruise. “Remove half of who you are, you know, then who are you? Kind of excruciating.”
“I remember that feeling,” I say softly, maybe too quickly. Although, my wife left life altogether, not me for another man. So it is different. “Or anyway something like it.”
“That’s right. Yes. Selfish of me. Sorry.”
“No, no,” I say. “Not selfish at all. Come on. Don’t say that.” I can’t think of anything to add.
Doug lowers his head and shakes it, then pours more port into each of our glasses. The color of the port reminds me of the highway guy’s hand. I should say no to more, but I don’t. “Anyway,” he says. “Anyway, how’s the business going?”
I shrug. “No real complaints.” The simple line-drawn image on the bottle looks like a nest in late autumn, exposed and vulnerable high in a leafless tree, and I say, “I just got in a book about crows that seems pretty interesting.”
Doug nods. If he heard what I said, it probably doesn’t much matter.
“But, really, not much changes day to day in a bookstore. The weather outside changes. Inside, the dust gets thicker.”
My friend smiles sadly and says, “No, I imagine not much does. Which isn’t so bad, is it?”
“I guess not. I guess it isn’t.”
Lifting his glass but not sipping, Doug says, “Crows, huh? I’ve always had a soft spot for crows. Since I was a kid, really.”
“Really?”
He looks at me, almost smiles. “Yeah. It was like they were my secret friends.”
7.
To get home, I drive alongside the dark river. It’s there, but there’s no moon and I can’t see it. I feel overwhelmed with sadness for Doug, and for everyone else alive on earth. I don’t know if I’ll sleep.
Tomorrow I’ll bring the crow book to him.
I think of my sister’s stolen horse and wonder where it is tonight. What must that animal think of us? Us human beings, I mean.
Steven Ostrowski is a fiction writer, poet, songwriter, painter, and teacher. He has published five chapbooks of poems and stories. He and his son, Ben Ostrowski, are the authors of a full-length collaboration of poems called Penultimate Human Constellation (Tolsun Books, 2018.) His first novel, The Highway of Spirit and Bone, is forthcoming from Lefora Publishing. He teaches at Central Connecticut State University.