Last Night.

A bar in a shopping mall, for some reason.
The old paralysis sets in and it takes me a long time to drag my stiffening legs across the threshold.
I lever myself up on to a barstool and order the usual.

There is a crow clambering along a railing. Not a pet – not tame – but fearless, and soon it is crowding me and shifting its weight along my arm, flat on the bar. It’s hunching its wings, inspecting my lap, and I stroke its head deliberately, pressing my fingers firmly into the back of its neck, the dip of its throat. There’s a crust of mucus around its right eye that I try not to smear on the cuff of my shirt.

Over by the wall, there’s someone I know, someone I haven’t spoken to in a while. They call across the bar and ask if I have missed them. “As much as I ever do,” I answer evasively. “I’ll give you a crow as a token of my…affection”, I say, looking down at the creature in my hands. It is surprisingly heavy.

But then something happens. Something happens inside of me and without really knowing how it happens, in an absentminded gesture, almost a reflex, I eat the bird.

It should be too big to even fit in my mouth but somehow I close my lips around its dry, dirty feathers and feel the delicate scaffold of its light, brittle bones collapse under my teeth. The spaces that are left fill with blood but there are too many textures in my mouth drowning out the taste.

I swallow. I sit a while. Everything is fine. Everyone is calm. I am calm.

But then I remember that I am sick. I have been sick for a long time. I lie down each night and cough into the mattress. This isn’t going to help: going to bars, eating dirty crows, raw. I think again of the mucus oozing from the bird’s lightless black eye.

I find the bathroom. A narrow, grim room like a truck-stop restroom. Next to the toilet is a shallow bucket for a rubbish bin. I will myself to throw up what’s left of the crow. My stomach heaves and I feel a reptilian foot, still intact, claw the inside of my cheek on the way out. I open my mouth wide and vomit the bird into the nest of used white tissues in the bucket. It looks so much smaller now, compressed and almost flat, like roadkill. I note with detached curiosity that there is still so much blood. Pooling in the nest, pinkening the tissue.

I move to the sink, catch sight of myself in the dirty mirror while I bend to rinse the taste from my mouth. I try to brush my teeth with something like a nail-brush, its bristles coarse and stiff. I can still taste the grease of its feathers, the mineral tang of blood.

I can still taste it.