Member-only story
A Murder of Crows
Short story first published in Dunes Review, republished by FreshInk app
My daughter had an affinity with animals. As an infant, Francie rarely cried when she woke but lay quietly in her crib taking in the antics of our old hound as he tracked smells, real and imagined, through the nursery. She was only a toddler when the dog started to fade. I can still picture her sitting beside him on the floor, gently patting his back with chubby, dimpled, hands. She understood animals. A baby Jane Goodall, I joked, but Francie took interest in all species. Most recently, it was birds. She loved birds.
Our new neighbor hated them. Francie and I were filling one of the bird feeders in the backyard when he knocked on our fence. It wasn’t a privacy fence, just a few horizontal boards at waist height to delineate property lines but he rapped his knuckles on the wood to get my attention. I suppose that was polite but didn’t feel it. He was short and muscular, the kind of body built at gyms. He wore jeans and a tight black t-shirt to show off what he had obviously worked hard to achieve. He introduced himself.
“Howard Johnsen, with an e,” he said as though I might mix up the man with the motel chain. “I see you like birds.”
“Yes, well, my daughter is the real ornithologist,” I said walking over to the fence. “I’m just the birdseed buyer.”
