Caw

One year out, Zachary held his head in his hands. How have I become so cliche?

The disaster rolled out like a cheap carpet, retaining its curled lip, sneering at every tripped-up foot. A giant organization. Unavailable authorities. Unanswerable imperatives. What is it that I do here?

Suffer, at least. Uncertainty did not survive beyond a few minutes on the pedagogically rigorous previous road. Now, on reality road, Zachary’s entire outlook has been unformed by the unknowable responses of unknown faces. It didn’t help that all of his shirts were too short at the arms, too small at the shoulders, enormous at the waist.

The shirts could have told the whole story, but Zachary’s face held the rest of it. He learned a resting inquisitive face at the cost of sincere insomnia. Exhaustion without tiredness, weakness without effort.

Zachary’s only friends were the crows in the unkempt southwest courtyard. Generally a place too hot for normal normality after noon, this two foot wide fifteen foot long stretch of crabby grass held court to a murder after the breakfast sandwich losses piled up. Zachary added vestigial half-chips. These creatures seem to survive happily in the midst of all this banal powerlessness; they can fly and eat garbage.

Zachary had built a complicated alternative to his contemporary civilization between his head and his notebooks. The crows were the model. 1) Consider all other creatures friends or foes in food-getting and physical compassion. 2) Refine survival and escape capacities in a small area that can be abandoned as needed. 3) Reject all authority through avoidance, not spite. Never challenge authority, only take what it leaves behind.

He had developed a nomadic ethic and aesthetic from within the bile duct of a late-stage agrarian silo. Impractical? Possibly. Probably not a universalist philosophy. Difference would need to constantly refresh. All crows are not crow. They are specific crows. And they sure do not need giant piles of anything. Small piles of shiny left behind items, small piles of food immediately dispatched, a few secret piles for later.

Civilized people fear crows for their uncivilized existence. Give the civilized a beehive and they will feel satisfied. As eaters of death and evaders of order, crows must be bringers of death and disorder. An unfortunate assumption.