Crows
I trained them.
I’ve got a fire escape out of my apartment on the fifth floor, where I sit in the evening when I get
home from work. An ashtray collects stray leaves in the corner. A single perpetually-damp
pillow is set against the wall. Twenty feet across from the rusted railing is a very high, very old
brick building with very small windows that are never occupied. Down either side of the alley is
the city, where people and cars are heard at all hours but never seen.
I waited with a book of Byronic poetry until I noticed a crow picking through the garbage bins in
the alley below me. I put my bag of Fritos to good use and lined the curled golden chips up on
the railing, standing like soldiers. The crows who fly through the alley are usually too skittish to
come within a few feet of me so I ducked back inside and waited behind the glass.
It was a good ten minutes before the crow took my bait. It hopped around on the wrought iron
railing like a wind-up toy and gobbled the chips one by one before swooping away– hopefully to
tell its brothers and sisters of my generosity.
One more offering of Fritos before I left the fire escape alone for the day. The crows might not
come back if I didn’t ration my junk food. From bed, I watched the window, and smiled as
feathery shadows flitted to and from my room.
I had to stake out the alley crow again the next day. Crows establish routines just like humans, so
I set my alarm for 7 pm to put more Fritos out. I didn’t want them to be afraid of me.
Bottles
The crows and I developed a mutually beneficial relationship. During that first week there were
three regulars, who I summoned with corn chips like clockwork every night at 7 pm. I think it
was the same three although it’s hard to tell with crows. Two larger birds, always bracketing the
smaller bird in the middle, who they allowed to take the first Frito every time. After a month, I
must have had at least two dozen who gathered on my fire escape an hour early in anticipation
for their meal. They followed me when I left my apartment, flying from telephone lines to trees
and announcing to the neighborhood when I had returned with flapping wings and hoarse caws.
Not only did I make new friends, but they brought gifts to me. The first gift was a twig. At first, I
considered throwing it away, but I couldn’t bring myself to toss a piece of research, so I put it in
an old shoebox under my bed. Most of my life I’ve been alone, so presents were few and far
between, and I kept them all no matter how useful they proved. Pairs of socks from my aunt. A
mug from an ex-lover, which I never use, pushed to the back of the cupboard.
Over time, the crow’s gifts became more elaborate. Lost earrings. Bottlecaps. Bits of thread. A
few of them even carried empty plastic bottles up from the alley, which I washed and put away
in the shoebox. The labels were either faded or pecked away. It was endearing, the way a crow
would tow the bottle up in their scaly feet and place it in my lap like a cat bringing home a dead
mouse.
In exchange, I expanded their offerings from Fritos to Doritos to Cheetos, a salty bird
smorgasbord. I dumped entire bags of chips out in bowls for them to swarm. When they saw me,
there was a twinkle in their beady eyes. It was not a group of singular crows but one collective
creature. By month five, I could not distinguish one from the many. They descended in a black
sea of flapping wings and raspy voices at all hours of the day.
Teeth
Birds do not have teeth, since jawbones are too heavy for efficient flight, so you can imagine my
surprise when one of my dutiful corvids swooped onto my fire escape and dropped a tooth onto
the grille at my feet.
The tooth was long with three stubby roots at the end, completely intact, like a delicate pale bug
that might skitter away if I gripped it too tight. Did one of my neighbors' kids lose a tooth? Was
there a decaying animal somewhere that the crows raided for meat? It looked like it could have
come fresh from my own mouth. I checked my smile in the bathroom mirror just in case.
I didn’t think too much of it at first. I wasn’t sure what to do with it, so I just put it in the
shoebox with the rest of the crow treasures.
But they kept coming.
Another tooth the next day, and the day after that. I couldn’t understand where they were coming
from, and still don’t. All of them are varying sizes and in degrees of sickly cream and yellow, the
color of corn kernels, but roughly the same shape. I started to recognize the “year and make” the
more I collected. Once my collection was large enough it was cross-referenced with an
orthodontist textbook from the library. (At this point, I was running out of space in my shoebox,
so I repurposed a fig jam jar and kept the teeth safe behind glass.) Incisors and canines are
shaped like shards of shells off a beach. Molars are long, absurdly long, and worn at the tops
from use. The more misshapen the crowns are, the older their owner lived.
The daily offerings of bottles and string and earrings are slowly being replaced. Each and every
crow in the city must have corresponded for this single mission. Sometimes each one will bring
me two or three teeth a day, either clutched in their talons or clamped in their beaks, swarming
my fire escape and dropping their offerings on the metal like the pattering of rain.
I found a molar baked into my Twinkie today.