Intersections
So today I was standin round at the WAP* and I said to my face-painter with 80's style rocker hair,
"That crow is fuckin' HUGE."
So she put down her sponges and her wet brushes and she came over. She came over and she said,
"Damn,"
because this crow looked like the Eater of Souls
and could be accurately measured in lengths of whale penis.
So then we stood there,
the way you stand when your mind has forgotten your body and we looked at this bird, sitting on top of a fake grass hut meant to make people feel like they are eating foot long wieners in the backwaters of Africa.
The bird crouched low and you could tell it was eyeballing the exact spot on the earth where it was going to land. It felt like it was going to be the center of my heart, with his stony ice pick of a beak, most certainly long enough to enter through my eye socket and retrieve the part of my brain that is rightfully afraid of crows.
"That crow could KILL us," I said to my facepainter. On her face was a small, glittery butterfly.
"It's like Alfred Hitchcock's the Birds, except there's only one of it, and I'm still afraid," she said.
The crow pushed off and landed on a stick of bamboo. This crow was so large that the stick of bamboo bent parallel to the ground and just kept going. For about thirty seconds the crow flapped in the bamboo for purchase, then realized "oh wait, I am like the size of a flying Mini Cooper," and gave up.
My facepainter pointed out that another Soul Raven was strutting about the Nacho Shop, somewhat larger than a rooster, and a billion times as black and evil.
We wondered, silently but in tandem, what it would look like if the bird were to order nachos.
Suddenly, an outburst behind us. We look up into the sky. Hark, a downy Mourning Dove has engaged in battle with the Dire Crow.
"That dove has balls," I think is what I said exactly.
We were naturally miffed that a small bird, or, rather a bird that was not sacreligiously large, would fight something that looked like it had been imagined playfully by Satan on a particularly boring day at Hell School. It took us a bafflingly long five minutes to realize that the dove was more than likely defending her nest. A quick scan of the nearby mesquite revealed the underside of what was indeed a less random than average arrangement of sticks and needles.
The Black Crow advanced, we assumed to devour the dove's eggs.
Gutsily, the dove held the crow at bay for ten minutes before the larger bird began to make serious advances. When he pushed, the dove had no choice but to back all the way to its doorstep. The fight had moved from the rooftops where the dove was clearly diverting the crow to the dove being cornered at its nest.
I was amazed, but I realized that this was far more natural than the alternative, such as crows knocking on nests like polite, avian Jehovah's Witnesses asking to borrow eggs. I wondered briefly why this sort of thing wasn't actually seen more often.
I also realized that what was happening in the trees was probably eight times more dramatic than any single event in my entire life.
The dove's one card was its clever use of topography, which Napoleon, or the Russians, or someone, has taught us is half to eight tenths of the war. The nest was approachable by the foot and a half tall crow from a single angle, the rest of it netted in thick brambles. The crow ihad intense difficulty in even reaching the nest, and jabbed its horrifying beak into the bark numerous times to express its frustration.
The dove watched the crow.
The crow paced in the tree.
At last the crow made its decision. Selecting a narrow, unexpected branch, it began to hop toward the nest- sideways, precisely as in cartoons. With death at her door the dove burst above the crow's back and latched on, going for its neck. The crow, able to turn its head by a billion degrees, grabbed the dove by the wing and threw it off. With feathers falling from its injured limb the mother bird fluttered to the next tree, and she looked the other way.
Too large to fit through gracefully, the crow seemed visibly put out that it was still sitting there trying to reach the nest. It looked at the nest, and paced up and down the skinny branch.
"That's what you get," said the girl from the hair band, and we laughed at the crow's lack of foresight, feeling a renewed hope for the eggs inside.
It wasn't until later that I realized I wasn't sure why I had assumed the nest contained eggs. The nest had just been quiet the entire time, the contents invisible.
The crow snaked its black head through the brambles and plucked, like its favorite gumball, a screaming, writhing baby dove from the nest.
The crow ripped the baby dove's chest open, tore its wing off, and ate it.
"AUGH!" I and the facepainter said.
It was at that particular moment that the only two guests in the entire park drifted beneath the tree and also witnessed, unexpectedly, the execution of the baby bird.
"OH GOD," said a man in glasses, "what a CRAPPY park!"
A few minutes later, after the first crow devoured the baby on the rooftop, the second crow emerged, tore a second baby from the nest, and consumed it on the branch right next to it. This crow was considerably less circumspect, as it had not wrought the tiresome battle of attrition that the first crow had, and it dropped some long, writhy slimy part of the baby bird into the nearby bushes, splattering the pavement in its blood.
It was at this point, with all the babies dead, that two doves tore into the second crow. It dropped the rest of its meal.
With nothing left to protect, I wondered what had made the doves do that.
The mother, identifiable by her torn wing, rested next to her ruined nest.
She was still there about an hour later, and she started to coo.
Some time after that, two doves were preening one another in the tree, the one dove picking around the mother dove's wound. It occurred to me that they were very lucky to have each other.
They stayed there for most of the day, and when I looked up at them from time to time I thought about their morning, and how their day had began. Mine had begun by getting irritated with a few things on facebook and unenthusiastically setting up for another identical day of work. Theirs began by battling a foe upon whom, relatively, they only came up to it's crotch, and watching these two beheamoths devour their offspring.
They certainly weren't paying any attention to me and my world.
"That crow is fuckin' HUGE."
So she put down her sponges and her wet brushes and she came over. She came over and she said,
"Damn,"
because this crow looked like the Eater of Souls
and could be accurately measured in lengths of whale penis.
So then we stood there,
the way you stand when your mind has forgotten your body and we looked at this bird, sitting on top of a fake grass hut meant to make people feel like they are eating foot long wieners in the backwaters of Africa.
The bird crouched low and you could tell it was eyeballing the exact spot on the earth where it was going to land. It felt like it was going to be the center of my heart, with his stony ice pick of a beak, most certainly long enough to enter through my eye socket and retrieve the part of my brain that is rightfully afraid of crows.
"That crow could KILL us," I said to my facepainter. On her face was a small, glittery butterfly.
"It's like Alfred Hitchcock's the Birds, except there's only one of it, and I'm still afraid," she said.
The crow pushed off and landed on a stick of bamboo. This crow was so large that the stick of bamboo bent parallel to the ground and just kept going. For about thirty seconds the crow flapped in the bamboo for purchase, then realized "oh wait, I am like the size of a flying Mini Cooper," and gave up.
My facepainter pointed out that another Soul Raven was strutting about the Nacho Shop, somewhat larger than a rooster, and a billion times as black and evil.
We wondered, silently but in tandem, what it would look like if the bird were to order nachos.
Suddenly, an outburst behind us. We look up into the sky. Hark, a downy Mourning Dove has engaged in battle with the Dire Crow.
"That dove has balls," I think is what I said exactly.
We were naturally miffed that a small bird, or, rather a bird that was not sacreligiously large, would fight something that looked like it had been imagined playfully by Satan on a particularly boring day at Hell School. It took us a bafflingly long five minutes to realize that the dove was more than likely defending her nest. A quick scan of the nearby mesquite revealed the underside of what was indeed a less random than average arrangement of sticks and needles.
The Black Crow advanced, we assumed to devour the dove's eggs.
Gutsily, the dove held the crow at bay for ten minutes before the larger bird began to make serious advances. When he pushed, the dove had no choice but to back all the way to its doorstep. The fight had moved from the rooftops where the dove was clearly diverting the crow to the dove being cornered at its nest.
I was amazed, but I realized that this was far more natural than the alternative, such as crows knocking on nests like polite, avian Jehovah's Witnesses asking to borrow eggs. I wondered briefly why this sort of thing wasn't actually seen more often.
I also realized that what was happening in the trees was probably eight times more dramatic than any single event in my entire life.
The dove's one card was its clever use of topography, which Napoleon, or the Russians, or someone, has taught us is half to eight tenths of the war. The nest was approachable by the foot and a half tall crow from a single angle, the rest of it netted in thick brambles. The crow ihad intense difficulty in even reaching the nest, and jabbed its horrifying beak into the bark numerous times to express its frustration.
The dove watched the crow.
The crow paced in the tree.
At last the crow made its decision. Selecting a narrow, unexpected branch, it began to hop toward the nest- sideways, precisely as in cartoons. With death at her door the dove burst above the crow's back and latched on, going for its neck. The crow, able to turn its head by a billion degrees, grabbed the dove by the wing and threw it off. With feathers falling from its injured limb the mother bird fluttered to the next tree, and she looked the other way.
Too large to fit through gracefully, the crow seemed visibly put out that it was still sitting there trying to reach the nest. It looked at the nest, and paced up and down the skinny branch.
"That's what you get," said the girl from the hair band, and we laughed at the crow's lack of foresight, feeling a renewed hope for the eggs inside.
It wasn't until later that I realized I wasn't sure why I had assumed the nest contained eggs. The nest had just been quiet the entire time, the contents invisible.
The crow snaked its black head through the brambles and plucked, like its favorite gumball, a screaming, writhing baby dove from the nest.
The crow ripped the baby dove's chest open, tore its wing off, and ate it.
"AUGH!" I and the facepainter said.
It was at that particular moment that the only two guests in the entire park drifted beneath the tree and also witnessed, unexpectedly, the execution of the baby bird.
"OH GOD," said a man in glasses, "what a CRAPPY park!"
A few minutes later, after the first crow devoured the baby on the rooftop, the second crow emerged, tore a second baby from the nest, and consumed it on the branch right next to it. This crow was considerably less circumspect, as it had not wrought the tiresome battle of attrition that the first crow had, and it dropped some long, writhy slimy part of the baby bird into the nearby bushes, splattering the pavement in its blood.
It was at this point, with all the babies dead, that two doves tore into the second crow. It dropped the rest of its meal.
With nothing left to protect, I wondered what had made the doves do that.
The mother, identifiable by her torn wing, rested next to her ruined nest.
She was still there about an hour later, and she started to coo.
Some time after that, two doves were preening one another in the tree, the one dove picking around the mother dove's wound. It occurred to me that they were very lucky to have each other.
They stayed there for most of the day, and when I looked up at them from time to time I thought about their morning, and how their day had began. Mine had begun by getting irritated with a few things on facebook and unenthusiastically setting up for another identical day of work. Theirs began by battling a foe upon whom, relatively, they only came up to it's crotch, and watching these two beheamoths devour their offspring.
They certainly weren't paying any attention to me and my world.