Man, to mangy, fat crow staring at him from the balcony: What.
Crow: Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
Man: That’s a trick question.
Crow: What.
Man: It’s a trap. Which reminds me, I was shopping for “miniature bear traps” online today, for reasons I forget.
Man: They exist.
Man: I mean, both miniature bear traps and my reasons.
Crow (patiently): Trap?
Man: Yes. There is doing whatever, and there is planning to do it. They rule each other out.
Crow (nods): Yeah I grok.
Crow (turns to face the autumn foliage, same as the man): This is what we’re doing, baby.
Man (stretches, winces): I explained to my wife yesterday why leaves change color in the fall and she listened to me patiently.
Crow: Wow.
Man: Apparently I hadn’t exhausted her goodwill. Or she likes biology.
Crow: You’ve known her for how many decades and you don’t know if she likes biology?
Man: Of course she likes biology. Who doesn’t like biology? I mean, she seemed to take a scientific interest in photosynthesis.
Crow: Ok.
Man: I just think it’s beautiful that the yellows and oranges are there all the time and we just don’t see them until the chlorophyll runs out.
Man: Also, the idea that trees take half the year off.
Crow: And yet they never travel.
Man: Traveling is overrated. Especially flying. No offense, I mean like airports, security lines, cramped seats.
Crow: I would travel if I had six months off.
Man: You don’t?
Crow: Oh hell no. Constantly flying around, you know? Between the dead and the slain and Odin and stuff.
Man: How’s Odin?
Crow: You’re Odin, you tell me.
Man (regards a tall tree, the root of which is being gnawed by a big snake): Hmm. Then what say the slain?
Crow: Living beats reflection; you’ll have time to reflect when you’re a lake.
Crow: Let me rephrase my question: what will you do now?
Man: Something wild.
Tag Archives: odin
The Gauntlet
The day has a weird liminal feeling to it. Grey and quiet, except for a lawnmower, crows, traffic and pedestrians, like the soundtrack to a National Geographic documentary on urban corvids.
Odin tries his wife’s number but she doesn’t answer.
He walks down the street, past a line of crows. They just stand there watching him: the old black one with white feathers, three grey ones. More keep showing up.
Odin wonders has he overdone the crow thing.
He follows a little old woman with a tiny little dog on a leash. What is it with old people and little pets, he wonders. They can never, like, stay out all night drinking or anything. Sorry, I have to get back to the little dog! And they are the ones with all the time for adventures like that, and then they go tie themselves down.
He turns a corner and a sleek black crow swoops down from the other direction and follows him to the store, hopping from car to car.
Odin’s phone rings. It’s his wife.
The day has a weird feeling to it, says his wife.
Weird and grey and in-between, agrees Odin.
He tells her about the crow gauntlet because she always laughs at his crow stories.
He holds her up to his ear and talks to her all the way through the store.
I picked out a ham-and-cheese sub for the crows, he says.
Which ones?
All of them.
I’m getting cottage cheese now, he says.
He hangs up before paying the cashier.
He feeds all the crows he can find on his way back to the office. They eat the whole sandwich, except he eats the parts with pickles, as they don’t like pickles.
It’s like a day hidden between other days, he had said to his wife.
She agreed.
Posted in Das Gehirn, Familie, ferner liefen, Metamorphosism