the crows adore me

Sabine Wilson-Patrick, Barbados

The crows adore me; I want us to grieve together. They leave a penny from the early 2000s on the doorstep instead of marigolds; the Farmer’s Almanac says they are for expressing grief. My mother’s house is bursting with funeral bouquets, I don’t really need the crows to bring me any more. I am too old to need anything from anybody, but I want many things desperately. I want: a yard of pink satin ribbon, all the keys I have ever lost and remade, an advanced degree, un-crooked teeth, unsullied high school memories, more positive feelings on my womanhood, birthing hips. My mother collected all her crow-given-gifts in a crystal bowl on the mantel; each one is tragically material.

There is a box in the corner of my mother’s closet containing everything white she ever owned. Her big box of luck. Her wedding dress is bundled up at the bottom, it coughs up dust from the 90s. I don’t know if it’s lucky anymore, the silk has yellowed. I tried on the dress once even though I wasn’t thin and it ripped up the seam. I sewed it up with black embroidery thread and said a genie prayer in hopes that my mother wouldn’t see it. She got married in Cape Canaveral in Florida; she had an obsession with the great beyond. When the Challenger shuttle exploded, my mother taught me how to mourn. I take the white pillar candles out of the box and light them in every window of the house, as I was taught. From a distance, my whole world is on fire.

They bring me a paper doll, she’s soaking wet from the rain. I let her dry first so she doesn’t fall apart in my hands. A wet paper doll is a metaphor for something. The crows know my inner child. When it’s warm enough, I replace her with a fistful of sunflower seeds. Her paper has creased in the inclement weather. She looks like one of those lost women my mother pointed out to me by corner stores. Lostness is characterised by old skin and smudged makeup and wide pupils that make you look sick on something. A face that has run off in the rain. I am L'Oreal anti-aging while I am still soft, in the hopes of being un-lost for as long as I can. All girls should be pretty.  I make her new again with sharpie marker and non-toxic paint and lay her to rest on the mantel.

I miss being a child. I was one of those little girls who hunted fairies. I wanted them to claim me. It is the very last age I longed to feel small. I would bait the fairies with Starmix, I pictured them ripping up fried eggs and cola bottles in their fragile little hands. Tiny little things living on processed sugar and trans fats. My mother asked me to stop, she told me my yearning would attract rats. But I want to be small so badly I started emptying whole packets of sweets in the bougainvillaea beds. The rats came; they rationed the fairies through the winter. 

I spent an afternoon holding up a bone fragment to my laptop screen. I want to know what the crows picked apart to tell me I am loved. A mouse, a stray, some part of a sparrow. I decide it’s from the rib of a fawn; the crows killed a sacred thing for me. Or just pulled something slick and shimmery from the spring thaw. I feel sick. I am not one of those girls into death. I hate the perceived dirtiness of it. I soak the bone in peroxide before I will even touch it.

There is nothing on the doorstep and I am devastated. I stare at my bare feet and try and imagine they are given to me by crows. My weak ankles are gifts; my weak ankles should go up on the mantel. One of them is watching me from the bare tree that I sat under in the summers. I wonder if it has seen that I am undeserving of old pennies. My mother fed them live spiders in glass saucers; I give them sunflower seeds in the musty concrete. I hate them. They stick in my teeth. I want the crows to shower me in porcelain crowns and tell me I am forgiven. I am loved. I think I have an ugly cry, like an animal missing a rib. The crow flies away. It knows I am not my mother. She had a very distinctive scream. 

I develop a benign obsession with the house across the street. The white picket fence is taunting, in a suburban-monster kind of way. If I squint my eyes the wood becomes fangs. The girl and her mother are both very bright and very pink, like bubblegum. Or gashes. It’s just the two of them. I want to be her, I want to be the mother. Everything she wears is inundated with daisies. The Farmer’s Almanac says she is innocent. There are daisies sprouting up on their lawn, forcing their yellow heads through the domestic dream. I want a happy shiny daughter like hers. I want to teach her how to make daisy chains, I want to teach her how to hold every kind of knife. I watch them from the front window and imagine they cannot see me; they wave good morning. I want to give her something of mine, something precious and light in her hands. Something important that I’ve picked up off the ground and I think of her so she has to have it and keep it safe. I don’t want to be a mother, or a girl. I want to be a crow. 

Sabine Wilson-Patrick is a 21 year old student of Creative Writing and Literature studying at Cardiff University in Wales. Her work can be found in Mulberry Literary, Nawr, MixedMag and Proseterity Magazine. She is an editor for Quench Magazine and Managing Editor of Rover Magazine.