There on the corner the grey crow brushes him with his wing and lands atop a black car and regards.
Here you go, pal, says Odin and gives the crow half of half of his salami sandwich. The crow dissects it and hides a piece of bread with salami in the gutter, carefully covering it with leaves.

What say the slain?

No one, when they die, regrets not building more pyramids.
They regret not engaging in enough monkey business.
Ergo: monkey business is the highest human activity. And shenanigans, and hanky-panky. High-jinks, lunacy, antics, pranks and hoaxes.

What say the hanged?
One so often finds oneself in situations externally dictated that it is really nice now and then to be able to say, this is weird, i don’t know what it is, but it’s all mine. Sustain whatever crazy little shard of creative oddness pierces your heart.

Odin gets two small smoothies because they come in bottles he can use to make smoothies at home for Loki, now that he lugged the blender back up to the kitchen from the cellar. The glass jar he used the first time, Loki finally got a janitor to open it for her.

On the way back to the office, halfway up the hill, Odin gives some peanuts to Huginn and Muninn and admires the black storm clouds gathering over the city. There is nothing like that dramatic light, is there, when sun shines on black storm clouds.

He is back in his office before the hail falls.

It doesn’t last long.

Are you happy with your life? Odin’s wife asked him.

He thought about it. He was miserable, but not with his life. It was not his life’s fault. His life was fine and he liked it and he told her that. All the circumstances of his life. Loving wife and daughters. Nice house. Job.

He was just sick of himself. His life was innocent.

He had a dream after that, a nightmare about a beige McMansion. After the dream he asked it questions. Who are the scary men? They are your fears. What is the house? The house is your life.

So maybe he wasn’t 100% happy with his life, really. But it wasn’t his life’s fault it was beige.

What say the hanged?

If you have a twin inside you, don’t stop talking to it or you will eventually forget it is there and it will turn to stone.

What say the slain?

If you think you don’t have a twin inside you, you just haven’t found it yet. Or you forgot it already.

He wonders, is that what happened to Van Gogh and he made up the whole cut off his own ear story because mad artist sounded better in the 19th century than kitten?

See Odin woke up at 3.30 with a kitten gnawing on his ear, making nomnomnom sounds and purring sounds, and smacking its lips.

It also bathed his entire head as he tried to fall back to sleep.

You ever try to fall back to sleep in the middle of the night with a kitten chewing on your head? he asks the crows.

Of course not.

Of course not. The crows aren’t even there, Odin is just imagining them today. His wife packed him a lunch and he ate it early in his office and now he’s sitting there while workmen drill holes in brick walls on all sides and concrete walls and do other things similarly noisy to floors and ceilings with other power tools.

What say the slain?

Here is what I wish for you: that one day you lay aside the millstone of recognition for just a second and driving down the street, say, you see a young woman walking toward you on the sidewalk, smiling in the morning sunshine, on her way to work, dark hair flowing in the breeze and unaware of you and the sight of her makes you happy and you think, what a beautiful, together, strong, happy, professional-looking, competent, smart, intelligent, interesting, charismatic and unique woman and only then after this objective reaction to a stranger, realize she is your daughter.

What say the hanged?

Seeing yourself at the center of creation is a failure of imagination.

He thought a minute.

Oh yeah he stubbed it earlier in the day.

One mystery solved.

Odin walked to the store, not raining, crow recognized him, followed him to the store.

Do animals have consciousness? They think. They solve problems, is that consciousness? Also crows lie and steal, they look over their shoulders when they’re doing something shady to see if anyone is watching.

Here, Odin gives the crow a hard sausage. A piece of one. Then he gives the crow a second piece to see what it will do.

It studies the pieces. It arranges them side by side, perpendicular, then parallel until it has them arranged in such a fashion that it can get both into its beak at the same time and do something – hide them or fly off with them, Odin doesn’t stick around to watch.

It could have just flown off with one, left the other, come back for it later, but a second crow was watching so it had to take both.

What say the hanged?
I seen you on the dock letting the sunrise warm your face, you were smiling.
I remember how you liked to pick cigarette butts out of the gutter, back when you were still learning to walk.
Second-prettiest eyes I ever saw, some mechanic, brown eyes glowing amber in autumn sunlight.
Prettiest: green-eyed girl in an airport long time ago stopped me in my tracks.

What say the slain?
Nihilism is childish.
Agnosticism is where it’s at.
Certainty is for morans.
Who knows? Not me.
Who knows? Not me. Let’s find out.

It’s not like crows are afraid of the rain. Are they? Have you paid attention to that?

Odin can’t say that he has.

He stands on the corner and feeds a crow part of a random sandwich. The crow buries most of it under leaves, and discards the lettuce entirely.

What say the slain?

From above, an umbrella is a large mask.

From above, umbrellas are black monsters eating people.

That the people carry around.

From above, it is a long way down but you’re still flying so it’s okay.

Everything that can go wrong has gone wrong, so there’s nothing to worry about.

Except existential horror, that is, because even after everything has gone wrong, more can go wrong.

Rain and sunshine are equally beautiful.

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.

Crows swooping close.

A habanero plant with slugs on every chili pepper.

Rain, but then sun.

Odin walks past the bench. He walks in the direction of the lottery ticket shop, in the direction of the bakery, but then circles back to the office, crossing gliding crow trajectories, because he feels neither hungry nor lucky.

When did newspapers change their slogan from “All the news that’s fit to print” to “Be very afraid”?

Odin wishes he could have thoughts more complicated and clever than “the universe is heaven, except when we make it hell”.

Maybe a more clever thought will come along soon.

Any time now, maybe.

In his office, which he shares with a dozen people because of rennovation work on his regular office, they have put the radio right behind Odin, and it plays 90s’ classics all the live-long day.

Some of the songs are okay. Most are not.

This can be said of most eras.

Odin makes a deal with a crow. They trade bodies and Odin flies around.

Odin swoops down the street past a police officer with a machine gun guarding a sensitive embassy.

He flies over red urban rooftops and marvels at the ivy turning red and the distant mountains and bodies of water glistening in the sunlight.

He marvels at the sound of wind in his feathers.

He flies back and trades back for his old body.

People come around the corner with rakes and pitchforks.

A woman points at him and shouts, “There he is! Get him!”

Odin wonders what the crow did while they were trading bodies.

What crows dream of, I guess.

says Odin.

Laborers, or criminals; foreigners, male and dark.

They could not speak our language.

I did not let them inside.

They looked hungry. I will make you a sandwich, I said

says Odin.

I found bread, white loaves. I couldn’t decide whether to spread butter or mayonnaise on the bread. Then I found mayonnaise I had made and thought, it will go bad faster than butter so I had better use it up.

I made them cheese sandwiches with mayonnaise and sliced cheese that was beginning to go translucent around the edges. I fed them before I woke up

says Odin.

What does my dream mean.

Fear and liminality

says Loki.

You are an old man blind in one eye. Long white hair and beard, and blind in one eye.

but

says Loki.

Still you love the unknown and secret and feed it freely.

Next time feed it something richer than old cheese sandwiches with old mayonnaise.

And see what happens.

Of course the question is, should you take a trickster’s advice.

What say the slain?

They say, do not worry so much.

They say, bless you.

They say, come down out of that tree.

They say, look, a rainbow.

They say, everything is connected by little strings you cannot see or feel; if you could grasp the strings, you could yank someone right off a horse.

What say the hanged?

50 per cent chance of rain, 50 per cent chance of sun: so why freak out about the rain?

Whoa, hello little dude says Odin.

He squats down and the little grey bird hops over to him.

Don’t get too friendly, says Odin. Also watch out for cats.

Odin looks over the little bird, trying to decide if it’s a cuckoo or a crow. He guesses crow. There must be a nest.

Odin has no food for it.

He apologizes.

He squats there in his suit having a stare-out with the baby crow. He wonders if the crow is imprinting his face.

We’ll see, I guess.

The bird flaps its wings and gets a little air.

Watch out for cats, Odin repeats. He stands and when he does, he notices another fledgling further on down the sidewalk, exploring. He has the impression there might be a couple more out there, but when he looks closer he doesn’t see any more.

What say the slain?

What’s a slain, says the fledgling.

And to sit on a wire or branch at midday and cars drive past below and dogs on leashes and people some fast some slow and the god of lunch sits on his bench and shares a sausage or crispy chicken, the sweet-sour sauce is sticky on the beak and must be wiped in grass, but the chicken is tender and still hot from the wok.

Skwerls clink to bark, they and everything else are in their place, the slain are on the battlefield the hanged hang everything is as it should be. A girl walks with her father and declaims the doom of all existence or at least humanity and right she may be and he puts an arm around her for a second or two and lets her go again.

But as a boy, the meat locker was where you kept the meat. Mom would say, get your coat even if it was summer and you rode in the station wagon to the Bi-Lo Market on Highway 99, the bell ringing over the door as you entered the store, and went back into the meat locker where you could rent space and where they kept a side of beef they had raised, and which a man had cut and packaged in white butcher paper in exchange for the other half of the animal he had shot from his truck, then hoisted on a crane mounted on the bed, opened in a flood of gore with a small chainsaw (to the amazement of neighborhood kids watching) and gutted right there in the field.

Now everything in life is bewilderingly and confusingly malleable and relative, but at that time the world was solid and given, the meat locker and the man who ran the Bi-Lo and everyone else just were, requiring understanding and comprehension as little as the mountains on the horizon or the macadam of the parking lot.

Everything just was and always had been and always would be, amen. Everything was mysterious, but there was no other way it could be, understanding was neither possible nor required. People were what their uniform said they were or what your parents told you. There was no death and no age and no change. There was only scratching a dog behind the ears or on the sweet spot on its back that made it pedal with one leg, the soft texture of a horse’s nose, the grain of the boards on a wood fence, the taste of wild blackberries dusty from the road and warm from the sun. Adults did what they did, mysterious. You went to school. You read the short articles at the front of every section in the World Book Encyclopedia about the evolution of the letters of the alphabet, and learned new words from the unabridged dictionary.

Everything was solid granite, and what is there to understand about granite?

The inside of the meat locker is white.

The light is dim but your eyes adjust.

When he finds himself in a universe in which time has stopped, or become malleable, Odin returns to the meat locker and observes the events of his life as they hang suspended in the fog his cold breath makes. He walks among them and studies them from all angles and perspectives.

As a boy, things were mysterious but this was no cause for alarm, it was their nature and it was the nature of a boy to be ignorant and mystified.

As a man, things are sometimes confusing.  Sometimes you think they are not confusing and that you have everything sussed, and sometimes you do but sometimes you find later on that you were mistaken, or you are mistaken but you never find out and either no one else does either, or they do but are too polite to tell you. Things happen fast and are confusing and sometimes you figure them out and sometimes you do not.

So in the meat locker, in the absence of time, Odin has a rare respite from things changing faster than he can figure them out and can approximate wisdom by looking and looking until he finds an angle that makes sense. He can find the opportunity in a crisis, the lesson in a failure, and the good intention behind something that had hurt his pride.

It’s all hanging there on hooks in the cold, amidst the meat.

He can look until his lips turn blue, if he wants.

Let me tell you something: having largish birds swoop around you close enough to hear their feathers on the air quickens the heart with joy, as long as they’re not pecking at you or shitting on you or something belonging to you or where you wanted to sit.

Heart quickened, Odin buys a mylar bag of cashew nuts and dried cranberries, and a small plastic bag of miniature dried sausages.

Odin eats some nuts and eats a sausage on his way back to the bench to share with the crow.

The atmosphere is cycling back and forth between the poles of nice, sunny, late-spring day and Is it maybe going to rain or not, without ever actually raining.

When he arrives at the bench, Odin is thinking about writing a love scene with the sentence, They kissed so hard a piece of dried sausage trapped between two molars was dislodged.

The grey crow has its rules of engagement, and they include not approaching closer than four feet. It will not come onto the bench for a bite of sausage. It hides the big pieces, and some of the nuts, and eats the small pieces and the rest of the nuts and cranberries.

On a two-hour lunch break, you have time to just sit on a bench in the sun/shade/sun/shade and rejoice in being a living thing.

Part of all this.

Just a part, one part among many.

What say the slain?

How fortunate you are, this very second.

And how I love you.

The crow marches up and down the street like Groucho Marx chomping on a cigar, then hides the sausage by the curb. Odin walks to a nearby park, but not without being accosted by the crow a second time. Sorry, pal, just one today.

How would his suit smell if he packed sausages everywhere he went? Like a mad relative, that’s how.

The park was recently re-opened after running wild for decades and is green and overgrown. Crows watch him from the trees and there is an observatory.

What say the hanged?

How unlikely it is that we are even here, we lucky crowd, conceived against millennia of opposition, branches withered and frozen, starved and broken and trimmed and yet here we hang, fat and ripe and feeling sorry for ourselves.

There is a science to luck and that science is put yourself in its way. Life might follow you into your room and roll on its back at your feet while you sit there at your desk, but luck is outside, barking at cars and jumping from branch to branch and looking you in the eye and smiling.