The Murders of a Crow, A True (Horror) Story

Maybe the world really has gone mad. 

I’m sitting on the first level of a health clinic waiting for a nurse to come out and call me into the room. I’m getting a blood test. For all sorts of things really; I make out ‘iron works’ amongst the slurry of acronyms I don’t understand. I’m tentatively supported by a blue armchair, unsure how much of my body surface area should be touching the chair surface area. 

It’s covid times. Touching things has become undesirable.

I stare out of the window while I wait and a commotion in the park catches my eye: a flock of birds, one large black one amongst them, aggressive movements. Two males chasing the birds away until there is but one pigeon left on the grass thrashing around. Is it having a seizure? The two humans wanting to help but uncertain of how.

How do you help a bird out?

A nurse comes out of the room and calls for the next patient. It’s me. I tear my eyes away from the park view (bird now unmoving) and walk towards the woman beckoning me. 

Inside, the nurse chats happily, kindly, about how the Pfizer vaccine did not sit well with her. Six days she was sick, she said. “But don’t you worry, dear, it’s different for everyone. Are you afraid of needles?” She asks as she pokes one in my arm.

“Yes,” I reply resolutely and breathe through it.

After the deed is done and my blood has been shared, I walk out, lightheaded, to my locked bicycle. A crow is eating something out of a McDonald’s paper bag in the middle of the road. As I fiddle with my lock, I notice little white feathers blowing down the road with the wind. There are a lot of them and now I see they’re covered in blood. 

I look up towards the crow and with a renewed, horrific sense of clarity watch as it pokes its beak deep into the entrails of a bird carcass. Unrecognizable remnants in a soft bed of feathers. Shockingly, I realize there is another pigeon lying dead five meters up the road. One of its wings broken, sticking up like a white flag upon defeat. Too late.

I connect up the dots that it was this crow that the two men were trying to chase away earlier. Three dead birds, a massacre.

Can crows go insane?

The rogue animal seems to have had enough. It jumps out of the pigeon’s involuntary offering, its claws coated in socks made of white feathers.

I sit on my bike and unsettled, ride away. As I ride home, I ponder the realities or cruelties of natural life and wonder if crows can become apathetic to life. They are highly intelligent creatures after all - can they have enough consciousness as species to undergo a psychotic breakdown?

I shake my head as if shooing flies but really am trying to shake the image out of my head. The image of the murders of a crow.