for a moment, with the birds
hayli mcclain
I knew Sasha was in trouble when the crows all took to the sky, screeching fury and pinwheeling wild, tumultuous storm-shapes against the darkening clouds. I whispered, “Oh, shit,” and texted her, Are you good? When she didn’t answer within the minute, I grabbed my coat and ran.
She fed the birds. All of them, but especially those big clever ones glossed in black. The crows and the ravens. She read that they could recognize faces—would hold grudges, would build love—and she decided to get a few of them on her side. “For domination,” she’d laughed. She started carrying trail mix and berries, holding onto apple cores, and whenever she came across a stately corvid on campus, she knelt with her hand out, gently placing offerings on neutral ground. I knew it wasn’t for domination. It was for whatever the opposite of domination is: charity, supplication, maybe loneliness.
On the night the birds went wild, I ran across campus to their center-point. I found whole dozens of them crowded, cawing, hunched with angry, inky eyes. They took off when they saw me. They recognized my face, too, I suppose. Friend. Or, at least, Friend of friend.
Sasha was in a ditch. Dazed, but—thank God—all right. I helped her out, and she explained what happened. Lori fuckin’ Holt! If ever there’d been a faker friend, a fiend with more faces. I’d warned Sasha as much. But she never listens. She’d bake bread for the Devil if she heard he might be coming ’round.
“She hip-checked me,” Sasha said. “We were walking, and I was sorta tight-roping the edge of the sidewalk, and she hip-checked me into oblivion and laughed and left.”
“That bitch.”
“Well, it was kinda funny, actually. I mean, she hip-checked me. Hip-checked. Who does that?”
“Well, that bitch better watch herself,” I said, “if it’s true that ravens remember faces.”
I shuddered, then, imagining the vengeance of the ghoulish maelstrom still churning overhead. Imagining them hunting Lori from her dorm. Imagining their diving warfare, their beaks open for eyes. Maybe it wasn’t funny. Maybe I shouldn’t have joked.
Sasha only shrugged. She dug her hands into her pockets and came up with fistfuls of peanuts and mushed blueberries that stained her fingers. She tossed them into the grass, and the fury of birds descended like silence over a queen’s court, regal and wrathful and gracious.
“It doesn’t matter,” Sasha told me. “You came, didn’t you? Because the birds had my back.”
She raised her head to the gloomy night sky spelling rain and the stray birds still swooping across its cumulous curtains. They pedaled and wheeled. They screamed coarse symphony into the shadows, and it sounded beautiful.
“When I fell, it knocked the wind outta me,” Sasha said, “and that was scary. Makes you feel like you’re dead or about to die. Then the birds came, and I caught my breath and just laid there without moving, and one came and landed on my chest. Right—on—my chest. And looked me in the eye. I think it wanted to see if I was alive. Then it took off shouting to the others, and they went on and on like wild, and I knew you’d come—I knew that was why they were calling—and for a moment, with the birds, I got to be a goddess.”
She closed her eyes. Smiled. It began to sprinkle.
“I was a goddess,” Sasha repeated, “and they were my worshippers.”
The birds flew away for shelter.
I earned my BA from Susquehanna University and am pursuing my MA Lit from Stirling University in Scotland. I’ve been previously published in places such as Flash Fiction Magazine, White Wall Review, and The Molotov Cocktail.