If you want to bring a crow to your yard, get rid of anything that could scare them. Throw out your bells and windchimes and fix the squeaky hinges on the front gate. Get rid of reflective surfaces–they don’t like to look at themselves.
After every show, when the crowds shuffle home with the stage lights still winking in their eyes and buttery popcorn kernels refusing to digest in their stomachs, you crawl into your trailer, the one where the freaks sleep.
When you’re gone, I practice for when you’re dead. You might be gone to the store, or taking out the trash or having a bath and I’ll pretend not to hear the car or back door or water draining the tank.
Though it is ill-advised, she looks back. How can she not? She looks back and sees the place of her life and her inside of it. Her and her brother rescuing the worms after rain. Moon shining in her dark wet hair, head leaning out the window, smelling the rosemary, smiling, saying goodnight.
Belmont station and it’s 2 a.m. and the father’s stranded out here somewhere in who the hell knows on his way back home, when it should have been a straight shot but has somehow taken him a good two hours to just end up getting lost like the sad-eyed dogs you’ll see tied up side of the highway sometimes and plus he’s starving, so bad it feels like pennies in his guts.