Of smells and crows

The pervading stench slunk insipidly down the streets and alleys, turning the air sour. Breathing was the same as drinking milk that had begun to curdle, only just and you can’t place that off flavor, but come away from the glass with the vague feeling that something isn’t right.

It was the trash that had been collecting along the roadside. The landfills had been closed again, due to too much garbage. Plastic lawn chairs, cardboard boxes, fish guts, yard clippings, and a multitude of bags, ranging from white to tan to blue, that hid the nature of their contents.

The two meager trash cans had been filled up hours after the bulldozer came to heavy lift the previous heap of trash off the road. That incarnation of waste included an old toilet and some kitchen cabinets. The waste spilled into the road once again and buried the bus stop so that people had to stand amid the stench and strewn contents of discards with pinched faces, waiting for a bus that would get there when it got there.

People loaded up the leather back seats of their four-door sedans with enormous black plastic trash bags to drive the waste out to the new dump that the street had become. They stopped in the middle of the road and hefted the bag onto the pile with all the care of flicking a cigarette into the gutter or, for fun, flicking it off the side of a building to watch it bounce off, the last embers exploding into a tiny shower of sparks and glowing a dull death on the pavement.

There are dogs that live on the embankment above the trash, a mother and her toddling young navigate down the slope into the trash pile to scavenge for food. There are shards from broken bottles and plates that should be avoided, but it is unclear if the pups know that trick yet.

They tumble down and bound in their soft floppy bodies, nipping at each other and nipping at their mother, whose teats are as distended as her ribs beneath the loose hang of flesh. She warily picks her way through the heap and wears her sadness around her jowls and eyes, the puppies nipping, the enormous black flies nipping. Cars pass by without slowing to watch her scavenge for five stomachs, sustaining themselves on the things that are thrown away.

Attracted by the scent, a crow alights on top of the steel bin and watches the mother and her babies. He can taste her despair as the blackest feathers of his coat. He knows if he caws she won’t look up at him, they will never exchange personal narratives of bitterness and the slow steady weight of loneliness dragging on their bones, hollow or not.

He watches his fellow scavengers with a mixture of longing and disdain. They share the emptiness of the trash heap, a life lived among unwanted things. He feels, for a brief moment, that he is not alone. The feeling is a morsel of food given, not stolen, a satisfaction that spreads and warms him in ways that sitting on a telephone wire with the hot summer sun beating into his black feathers cannot.

She is passing and he bursts his wings into movement, hopping to another vantage point so he can continue to watch them, moving away from him. He caws hesitantly, a slow low question from the back of his throat. It surprises him, the sound of his own voice reminds him of a requiem he had heard, perched in the windows of a concert hall. Enthralled, he flew into the streets and witnessed a pigeon being flattened by a streetcar.

The exuberance wept out of him as the other bird wept its organs and scant drops of blood onto the street. Not a soul stopped to witness its passing besides the crow. He felt the requiem was a lie, a triumphant piece disguised as mourning because there was nothing beautiful about death.

He watches the dogs receding, feeling the bile of bitterness in his throat. Her gaunt mother figure retreats amid the trash bags. He hates that he can see the beauty in it too, because he feels, at the center of his emptiness, that such suffering shouldn’t be beautiful.