The Crows Tell Me They Are Time Travelers
The crows tell me they’re time travelers, and if true, they’re opaque in their relations, taking flight into the long tomorrow and the long yesterday, and I find three of them gathering in the long today, perched on an oak in the woods behind my house as they chatter about ghosts and shadows, about what is and what was and what shall be, and I catch loose strands and fragments—cities rising and cities falling, barbed wire and butterflies stretching for miles, ice ages and the dearth of snow, the great plague and the small goodbye—pebbled cataclysms with no order. What I catch, too, is that the stories we tell ourselves, the stories I tell about my son, have no order and may or may not be real, and when I look for a rock to throw, the crows alight before the sharp edges bite into my hand, and the thwack as it smacks into the oak’s trunk and the thud as it falls to the ground echo among the trees, and if humans could learn anything from crows, it should be to accept that our tomorrow isn’t firm and our yesterday isn’t quite what we remember.
The crows tell me they’re time travelers, and if true, they’re subtle in their conveyances, because who knows what matters to crows and the thoughts they really think as they fly across place and time. This afternoon, they gathered in a conclave, hundreds of them, whiling their hours by flitting from branch to ground, ground to branch, spending their energies in remembrances of smokestack factories and dead fish in polluted waters and how I tried to put the ocean into a bottle after my son’s first jail stint, and his second, and his third, and with dusk approaching, I mingled among the crows in hopes of capturing a tired one, stealing it away to learn its secrets and align mine, and each one I approached skittered away, and when evening arrived and they all disappeared and left me spent, rooted to the ground with only two stars appearing through the treetops, I wondered whether our far tomorrow selves will release these crows back as witnesses to what we do and what we don’t, and if humans could learn anything from crows, it’s that the world needs more witnesses, and more of us to bear witness, and more of us conversing in a conclave.
The crows tell me they’re time travelers, and if true, they’re cryptic in their tones, and when I pass a solitary crow perched on a branch watching me with her side-eye, I feel I can turn this encounter to my advantage, learn to correct past errors and avoid future ones, expose something about missed apologies and whether forgiveness is possible for the mistakes we’ve made, a way to substitute compassion for disappointment toward a son, and my heart lists from the waves roiling through me as I approach my singular, personal oracle, the one who’ll tell me what my next step will or might or shouldn’t be, the path from a son’s joyous birth to a father’s lingering as clear as interpreting the influences of the stars or the cracking of burnt sheep bones, a future so sure, a way out and a trail forward.
“Quite a gathering yesterday,” I say.
“Quite, quite,” she replies.
“Come to any agreement?”
“Agreement, agreement.”
“When’s that cataclysm coming?”
“Tomorrow, tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow, Tuesday, or the long tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow, tomorrow.”
“What about forgiveness?”
The crow caws and alights, the shaking of the branch her answer. That’s how they talk, uttering something once, then again, as if the story’s better the second time around, as if to ensure the listener hears what’s meant, and if humans could learn anything from crows, it should be not to waste our words, not to let them slip through the cracks that separate us.
The crows tell me they’re time travelers, and if true, they’re shaded in their junctures, don’t know one year from the next, their tales veering toward the jumbly, and the cataclysms they warn of could be the Little Ice Age, the Black Death, the Holocene extinction, or us, always us and what we’re afraid we’ll eventually do because we’ve done it so many times before, and no matter what you ask or what you hear or what they profess, crows can’t know, not directly, whether you can change the future or the past, and what’s the point of time travel if I can’t change my future or my past, if I can’t return to my son and let him know his faults weren’t his alone, they were mine, too, if only I had recognized them, and maybe, just maybe, he could have been diverted from that final choice, and if humans could learn anything from crows, it’s that the ghosts of the long tomorrow and the ghosts of the long yesterday weigh nothing compared to the ghosts of the long today.
Todd Honeycutt is a public health researcher and speculative fiction writer who lives with his family in New Jersey. In alternate universes, he’s a costume designer and a railroad modeler, but in none is he an iron sculptor. His recent stories can be found in Nature: Futures, Amazing Stories, and Utopia.