Valley of the Crows
My office is on the second floor of a building located not far from Beal Park and the Downtown Bakersfield area. My desk faces two large windows with a busy traffic street view from an elevated level. My boss’s office is across from me, he usually leaves his door open and I’m able to see out his office windows. The conference room with wall-to-wall windows is directly behind my office area and when I turn around in my chair I can look out the windows at a quiet residential street view. I am the only one in our firm with this many window-viewing opportunities. The only one who wonders if the convergence of crows on our building is normal!

It is not uncommon for me to look up from my computer at any given moment and see 30 or so crows perched on the power lines at eye-level staring at me with their black beady eyes. It can be a little bit disconcerting and unnerving at times. They seem to see through me “…wondering, fearing, /Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before…”. And I’m transported back into an Edgar Allan Poe Raven moment of memories long gone. When in ‘Hitchcock’ thriller fashion the birds descend on the building ledges along the windows and
“…suddenly there came a tapping, /As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.” The crows peck and pound on the tempered glass windows and flap their wings trying to gain better footing on the ledges. They want in. I just know it! “…Soon again I heard a tapping somewhat louder than before.” They peck and pound so hard I often wonder if they will one day break through the glass and attack. I can see the headlines now: Pyscho Crow Mauling Inside Local Office Building! My boss will take his shoe off and beat the glass trying to make the crows stop pecking and pounding the windows in his office. I don’t know which is worse: being freaked out by crows or watching my idiot boss beat the window with his shoe.

During staff meetings in the conference room I sit, half paying attention to my boss as he micro-manages us to death, and wonder and marvel at the crows pecking the windows. They squawk and spread their wings and peck some more. “…But the raven still beguiling all my sad soul into smiling, /thinking what this ominous bird of yore -What this grim, ungainly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore/Meant in croaking `Nevermore.'” Do the crows have a message like Edgar Allan Poe’s Raven? (Crows are supposed to be intelligent birds). Or are they just pecking at their reflections in the glass? Will they suddenly burst out in song? Perhaps a squawking rendition of Accidentally in Love, a song by their fellow kin. At least their pecking drowns out my boss’s dominating voice for a brief time giving me a reprieve, however small.

The other day I heard a very loud and unique squawking noise behind me. It was so unlike the usual crow pecking and squawking it made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. I turned around in my chair and there on the conference room window ledge was the biggest crow/raven I’ve ever seen in my life! Instead of pecking the window… it looked at me with black piercing eyes opened his large beak and squawked at me “`Nevermore.'”. I was freaked! I was sure that crow was Brandon Lee reincarnated as Eric Draven and not being a cult-follower-- I was a gonner. “…Bird or fiend!' I shrieked upstarting -/`Get thee back into the tempest and the Night's Plutonian shore! / Leave my loneliness unbroken! / Take thy beak from out my heart”.

Beep, beep went my intercom line. I picked up the phone and my co-worker said: “Is that your computer making that noise?”

“No!” I shrieked. “It’s the biggest freakiest crow I’ve ever seen!”

My co-worker came out to take a look at the crow torturing me. We both stood there staring… “And the raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting…”.

“What the hell is that thing?” My co-worker asked.

“I don’t know!” I exclaimed staring into its eyes. “His eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming”.

And I wondered if the crow had seen ‘in’ me. If I would be somehow changed. “And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor/Shall be lifted - nevermore!”

My boss came out of his office and threw a shoe at the window. The crow cocked his head, looked at us, and then flew away. My co-worker went back to her desk. And I sat at my computer and began to type again… from somewhere behind me I could still hear the squawking chant of a crow’s “`Nevermore.'”

“`Nevermore.'”

*Short Fiction published in the 2006 Cerro Coso Community College Journal of Literature and Art: Metamorphoses  posted by Matildakay at 11:58 PM