A crows life -- Chapter 1

He used to be a Brontosaurus. It was a long time ago, but he remembers the days when he would go tramping through the rain forest, his head towering above the thick green canopy, his elephantlike toes crushing underneath: lizards, tarantulas. He remembers when his stomach was as big as the foothills. He remembers throwing his head back and trumpeting to the big open sky, making a sound that would resonate for miles. It is the same gesture with which he gives a little body jerk, now, perched on the telephone wire, and rearranges his wings so the bottom one, dry and warm, gets wet now, and blinks in the rain.
Beads of water sit on his slick back. Underneath, his feathers, underneath that, his skin, and underneath that, his warm beating heart, stuffed in there with blood and other organs and little hollow bones. He curses to himself. Curses the rain. He thinks, if only it would stop raining, he could get around to thinking. And then maybe language, maybe words to put to his misery. But then, what are words anyway? It's a difficult question. Because he can't answer it with his spleen, he can't answer it with his pancreas, he can't answer it with the memory of being born, high in an oak tree, in a nest with a clutch of four other siblings, the dark featherless memory of pounding on the roof of that speckled green sphere, the cracking, and then the light, the light of life. His mother had been concerned from the start. He was too small. But he was also determined, and that is as important as anything. He fought with his sisters over the worms she would bring to the nest, poking his little beak into a tender side, receiving a high-pitched squeal in return. Like all crows, he was born without an organ for understanding his suffering. Like all crows, as he grew, he would learn better and better ways to mitigate his own suffering, and then spend the rest of his life doing just that.
Even brontosauruses suffer, though. And that was 65 million years ago, and the bones of brontosauruses have already fossilized, after their flesh had rotted, and fed the plants that his mother ate, which made up the protein that formed a shell in her body, in which he was forced out her backside, destined to hatch, and be a crow. His sisters had been destined to die. He knew that now. He knew that there was something inescapable about death. Or perhaps not inescapable-- this was the wrong word –but implicit, implied in the very act of living, so that he could not blink or even rustle his wings without ushering it in further, inviting it into the empty spaces. It was not the crane of his sister's naked neck as she forced her head upward for the last time, letting out a little sigh, but the way space-time was bending around her neck as it fell, and the empty space that was left, and the cold air that was allowed to rush in, in the early morning, and accost his face.
The early morning rain eases into a soft drizzle, and then disappears completely. The crow hears a small sound coming from far below. He looks down, and sees a woman running through the field towards him, her face contorted with anger, one angry fist clutching the hem of her skirt in a bunch, and the other arm waving wildly above her head. She is yelling something. Then suddenly she stops and picks up something from the ground, and hurls it at him with her free hand, with all her might. The something, which is a small rock, whizzes past the crow about 3 feet away. He looks down and sees that the woman in stooping down to pick up another one. Almost reluctantly, he opens his wings wide, and with a deliberate flap lifts himself off the telephone wire, and begins to fly east, toward the sunrise. This was the third morning that the woman had greeted him at dawn with her angry face and her rocks. He always flew, but usually returned in the afternoon to raid her chicken coop. He would enter the coop with his feathers fluffed out menacingly, let out a deep caw, and watch as the hens fluttered nervously up from their nests. They would gather on the dirt floor in a clucking horde, bewildered and desperate, as he helped himself to the warm delicate eggs in their abandoned nests. Sometimes he would nudge an unfortunate egg out of its nest just to watch the hens jump and flutter their wings as it splattered on the ground. Then he would leave as morosely as he came in, shuffling past the horde of chickens with his head bent and his belly full.
This morning, the crow flies towards the pale pink blotch in the gray sky. If he cannot spend his morning moping on the powerline, then he is going to make his way to a familiar red tailed hawk's nest. She won't be expecting him this early in the morning. He is flapping towards a line of telephone poles on the horizon when he sees her. Calm and stately, perched on one of the poles, the growing light accentuating the golden hues in her feathers. She must have already left her nest to her mate this morning, in search of the day's meal. Her back is turned to the approaching crow. He flies faster, sticking his neck out to split the sky with his black beak. She turns her head just as he is swooping down towards her. She does nothing. He pulls himself upward again to gain momentum, and then swoops down for another dive, and then up again, and then down again, cawing in a noisy figure eight above her head. Again and again, like a persistent rain. Then the hawk stirs. She leans forward and stretches her wings up to the sky, rising from the telephone pole in one elegant thrust.
The crow has won.
Crows are not normally solitary creatures. Most crows are highly social, traveling in feeding in large flocks. And, mobbing a red tailed hawk is usually not a job for a single crow, and is usually done for a purpose, to keep it away from a nest, for example. This morning, as the crow follows the red tailed hawk even after she has risen from her perch, swooping and cawing, there is a certain animosity in the air, a certain bitterness that seems to follow the crow wherever it goes. A darkness blacker and bigger than the crow itself. He gestures with the particular fierceness of one who has been wronged. His body is electric with desire; his eyes wild with the gleam of the sunrise. The red tailed hawk flies steadily and patiently, as if she knows, and does not care.
"People say that I am what I eat, but what if what I eat is eating me?"
"What?" replies the red tailed hawk.
"I want to die," says the crow.
"Say again?"
"I want to die, and rot," replies the crow.
The crow pulls his wings in for a short dive, narrowly missing the hawk's tail, and then swooping beneath her to come up on her left side. He caws loudly. The hawk keeps her beak pointed towards the horizon. "I want to die," the crow continues, "and rot, and fertilize a seed, which grows into a plant, which gets eaten by a primary consumer, and then a secondary, and then a tertiary, all of them producing energy, which is broken down into the more fundamental elements of energy, and which releases heat into the big wide world, making it bigger and wider, pushing molecules around on a whim."
"Death is inescapable. Someday, you will die, I promise."The crow flies up and then barrels down for one last dive. Then he banks and begins to fly eastward, leaving the hawk to continue her flight alone. He makes his way back to the powerline. About 300 yards east of the powerline is a medium-sized structure in a small field. This slaughterhouse is always where he eats his breakfast if the woman from the other farm succeeds in driving him away from her chicken coop. He continues in a downward direction to the large open door of the slaughterhouse, and at the last moment spreads his tail feathers out and forward towards his belly to slow his flight. He drops to the grass without making a sound, and then rests his wings, one underneath the other, on his back.The crow tucks his beak into the warm fold in between his wings. He draws his left foot up into his chest in a clutch, and the consciousness begins to seep out of his body. His breaths become long and deep in his willowy breast. He begins to dream.