Now I Am a Crow

Translated, from the crow by J. Hazard Fitch
illustration by Shannon Purcell

It is thought that the crow is a species of bird like others – that it hatches from eggs laid in a nest, gets fed by its shiny black parents and flies away to sit on a wire for a while before making a nest and having a family of its own. Before I became a crow I believed this, but now I know it is not true. Many years ago, before cars and electricity, people understood us to be creatures of a somewhat… derived origin – that is, formerly human. Some were afraid of us for this, and hated us for living in their fields and eating their grain, but most knew that we had to do it. The crow is not a true bird and cannot live like one. We always return to humans to survive. It’s all we know.

Before becoming a crow, I was a young man living in Western Massachusetts. I will pass over the details of my former identity. I deem them irrelevant. I was anybody, doing any sort of job, leading any sort of life, with one exception – but I will get to it. The agent of my transformation – and it should surprise no one to hear of this – was a scarecrow. It is a foolish notion today that a scarecrow is supposed, by resembling a man, to deliver the harvest from the pestilent creatures of the air. But that is not its design. It is, to combine the two preceding notions, an agent of deliverance, but of a different sort. It is like the fabled Hebrew golem in that its object is to remove a human blight. I said that the details of my former identity were irrelevant, except one, which I will now correct. There is one detail, and it is the crucial one, that must be reported. As a human I was also partial to products of the field, namely barley, malt and hops. I had the habit of drinking far, far too much.

Now imagine if you will a small New England town in the eighteenth century. There are horses, there are farms, there is not always enough to eat, and there is fire. Candles, hearths, lanterns, and sometimes house fires and barn burnings… The scarecrow, whose traditions came with the early settlers from England, was a form of indemnity against drunks who sometimes caused through their drunkenness the kind of destruction that was intolerable to the fragile, close economies of those times. In larger towns, the practice of erecting a scarecrow for the purpose of transforming drunks into crows was known but not believed. And it probably did not work there either – that is one part of the lore I do not know. It was, however, condemned by the churches as superstitious. But in the areas in the country, it was necessary and condoned. It was not murder. It did not involve any heretical rites. A farmer – who sometimes in extreme cases was even the object of the proceedings – received suggestions from the community to put a scarecrow in such and such a field, and given time, the problem disappeared. Just flew away, as it were.

In my case, the farmer was a neighbor of mine. Now because we are in modern times, I don’t know if his scarecrow went up specifically for me or if it was just a decoration or if he really had a problem with birds, or what. But I was totally clueless anyway. I could not know what was going to happen to me. I had, however, run over this farmer’s dog the year before. I drove a pickup and I was drunk. I paid for the dog. My life continued on its course. Then one night I stopped along this farmer’s field to piss – and there was his scarecrow, looking at me. It had eyes made of red cloth, I do remember. The farmer had a spotlight he used to shine at night from the back of his house out over his field in back. In the light of this, the scarecrow and I regarded each other for a full few minutes. Then I went on my way and didn’t think anything more of it, until my transformation was complete. In the meantime, I had too much trouble to think at all.

If there is a judicial consideration to be made on the transformation of a human being into another sort of creature, it rests probably on that statement and the fact of the transformation alone. But being still worldly, and less inclined to think on those higher things, I would introduce another consideration – the extreme physical pain that comes with the changing. It is something that has never been told before, and no one has ever seen it happen except other crows, and crows don’t talk. Not in human sounds. If there is magic in the transformation, it is not experienced by us. For us it is wholly physiological. The process – and I have seen it once in the time since my own – takes about three and a half days. When I woke up the morning after pissing in the farmer’s field, my nose and the sinuses of my head were burning with such intensity that I was sure there were live coals inside my head. My jaw, too, had a keen ache throughout, as my teeth were being pushed and discarded from their roots. In two hours they were gone, scattered in blood on the floor of my bedroom and the counter of my bathroom. I was, of course, growing a beak, tiny, insistent and disruptive, and all the rest of my human facial features had to go. That morning I fled my house and the company of men. I went to the woods to suffer. Welts appeared all over my skin, and gradually quills began to poke through the welts. My sternum pushed itself out at the bottom, so that for a brief time – before the time I went temporarily blind – I could see it jutting outside the skin. In the meantime, it and all my other bones were shrinking, the calcium being deteriorated and bled away through special gashes in my skin: one on the inside of each foot, two more on my thighs, one on each side of my abdomen, two more up underneath my arms, on the insides of my forearms, and one on the back of my head, just underneath the knot where the spine meets the skull. This one and the ones on my legs were especially profuse. I stank. My flesh dried and left me in a blizzard of tiny flakes. I was thirsty beyond thirst – no amount of water or liquid could replace what I was losing. My face finally fell off in one piece as I thrashed among the leaves of the forest floor. All was darkness; I could not see. It was a holocaust of mind and body.

Meanwhile the other crows had gathered around me, hopping here and there and looking at me sideways. Light itself gradually came back into my consciousness and I saw them for the first time when my new, smaller eyes finally came into focus. I was not a crow yet, at least I don’t think so, but I did not have any hands and I couldn’t really see any part of my new body. So all I could do was lay there and look back at the other crows. What I felt like at this point was mostly like when your foot or arm falls asleep at night, and occasionally something twisted inside me or shot through me like a worm. But I was mostly out of pain, and in another twelve hours I was able to get up and hop around with the others, who hopped with me and pecked at my feathers to clean them and get me ready for my first flight. I was fantastically hungry. The flying part was actually easy – I believe that if every person had a pair of wings suited to the human form they would be able to fly away immediately, just as in dreams.

I have no further need to beware the scarecrow. My favorite food as a crow is sweet corn, followed by barley and sunflower seeds. None of us really like road kill, you just see us eating it because we have to sometimes. As for being a crow, it’s not so bad, and they tell me here now that none of us will ever die so long as there are humans on the earth. But we are not just spectators and we do, in fact, have magic. We can fly through walls and become invisible. Sometimes it is we who misplace your keys or cause the water to run brown from your tap. It’s not that we have anything against you in our former world. We just hope not to be forgotten. So remember, stay out of the fields at night if you are drunk. And leave us alone. Smite a crow, walk away, he gets up to fly again.