Hayston Crews and The Carrion Birds

♦ Thomas Beard ♦

For as long as he could remember, Hayston had always seen the birds. They followed him like a cloud of flies, a thick black swarm that covered the open sky like smoke. They were crows, always crows.

And no one else had ever seen them.

As a younger man, Hayston feared the birds, his own personal flock, but by college he had grown used to them. He told no one, of course. They would have thought him mad. So time passed. And Hayston’s birds became a waking sort of dream.

Sometimes there were only a couple, a few black-winged forms that sat outside the windows of his tall, dark house in Maine. But there were days - more frequent days, as Hayston approached middle age - where the birds blocked the sun, where they orbited him like a distant star. On those days, even though he told himself he wasn’t scared of the birds, hadn’t been for a long time, he kept inside his house, and he made sure each door and window was locked.

Hayston’s house, like his birds, was a dream. A yellowed, musty dream that smelled like the pages of an old book. Perhaps it was the age or size of the house, a luxuriously sized thing he had bought following moderate financial success. Perhaps it was all the small, wooden corners of the old boy. Perhaps it was the massive bookshelf in the center of the first floor, or maybe it was Hayston’s large and grim collection of killed, nailed and framed old birds.

Like butterflies.

Maybe he intended it to be a kind of ward, but Hayston wasn’t sure. They were just there, staring back with cold stuffed eyes. Hayston couldn’t tell you why he’d done it, why he’d nailed those birds like he nailed-

He stopped at the end of the hallway he affectionately called The Bird Cage, where his kitchen sat. There was something there. Something small and dark and almost cute, except for the situation. 

Hayston laughed with a powerful humor when he saw the bird perched on his kitchen table. Then he walked closer to the small crow, and his laughing and his heart abruptly stopped. In its beak, the crow held a small hand woven with baby-soft skin. The hand of a child.

The hand of his four year old son, nailed to the walls of The Bird Cage like the rest of his collection was, like his wife was. Hayston felt acid come raw and hungry in his throat. He walked back slowly, leaving the crow and the child’s hand in his kitchen, passing backwards by the wings and feathers, the skulls and woven veins, the bodies on his wall.

To this day, he couldn’t have told you why he did it. It was just that the birds got hungry.

Or maybe he had.

And it looked like the birds were getting hungry again.

He rushed back, tripping over the threadbare corpse of the family dog. Ol’ Sparky had always been a fat one, but the crows picked him clean. He considered checking the upstairs windows, to see if they were locked, but he knew they weren’t. The one day I let down my guard… maybe they’d been waiting.

He barrelled into the living room - the family room - but he found it nested already, twigs and eggs and open sky finding macabre shapes. As he stepped back, it was not twigs that crunched under his footfalls, but bones. He screamed as a crowd of crows landed on him, only for a moment. It was the first time any of them had touched Hayston, and they were so, so cold.

The breath left his lungs.

He screamed louder and crashed and opened and plowed through his front door, a tall oak thing that shattered as it hit the asphalt outside. Hayston lived near an open road. Rolling through a whirlwind of black wings breaking out, Hayston looked up, and saw a murder of them - no, a massacre, a slaughter, a violence of crows, all gathered on the ground and the power lines and the dry, twisted trees. 

Hayston looked, and saw, truly saw, and fell to his knees on the raw tarmac.

The crows descended and ate. Hayston screamed again, louder, and got up, tired to run, his arms outstretched, reaching like a thin scarecrow towards the open sky.

A passerby would have only seen a man scream, and cry, and slowly fall apart.