{"id":22039,"date":"2025-07-16T07:16:52","date_gmt":"2025-07-16T11:16:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/?p=22039"},"modified":"2025-07-16T07:16:52","modified_gmt":"2025-07-16T11:16:52","slug":"crow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/flash-nonfiction\/crow\/","title":{"rendered":"Crow"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last fall I saw a solo crow in midtown. She was seemingly stuck and banging about on one of the thin window ledges of the Padulo<\/em> office tower.<\/p>\n

Was she attacking the windows? Her own image?<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve seen birds Quixote their own image in windows. They think the reflection is a rival in mating season. But mating season was way down the line.<\/p>\n

I stood with my dog watching at the corner of Yonge and St. Clair for a while.<\/p>\n

The crowing was a complaint, and a plea. Look, help. An angry complaint of danger obvious to the crow only. Anger toward, I am now convinced, the fatal human vanity of taking up earth and sky with crow-useless buildings and their miniscule window ledges.<\/p>\n

A few days later I was on a break at work, walking my dog. I could hear the crow again. The same kind of anger. She was on the low ledge of a bank building backing onto a public transit bus hub. Teenagers were throwing French fries at her to either feed or mock her. She ignored them. I walked back to work with my dog. \u00a0The crowing was resonant all the way.<\/p>\n

Over the next few months, I kept seeing the crow from my window at work. She would land on mid-rise rooftops in the distance, appearing in my window\u2019s backdrop behind someone\u2019s head or shoulder whom I was facing. Her image in these moments was atemporal and achromal, a black and white still.<\/p>\n

The public crowing episodes faded away, but she at times seemed to sail purposely above me on walks, letting out one or two low caws. The sound like a familiar tug on my coat.<\/p>\n

Meaning? I don\u2019t know. But I think of feelings, not meaning. Makes me ask: Can I as a human animal have feelings that are animals? I\u2019m not thinking of similes to describe human feelings. Angry as an elephant. No, something integrative, existential, primitively magical and metaphorical. I feel elephant. I feel dog. I\u2019m squirrel.<\/p>\n

Tonight, from behind the winter black reflection of my office window, I am crow.<\/p>\n

I wonder, can I desire to work backwards from this concept and communicate through it in so-called everyday language? Into fragments? Blunt, beautiful units of sound?<\/p>\n

I wonder, would I disappear as an identity into this integration, or somehow become more alive? Or both? Me caw, Caw.<\/p>\n

Can a tug at my coat coax into bird flight a breathable life\u2014my blunt life\u2014beyond buildings where language phrases like \u201cI am now convinced\u201d and \u00a0\u201cI wonder\u201d fragment into a new freedom with new meaning?<\/p>\n

Or, as earth & sky, accord freedom without any meaning?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The crowing was a complaint, and a plea. Look, help. An angry complaint of danger obvious to the crow only. Anger toward, I am now convinced, the fatal human vanity of taking up earth and sky with crow-useless buildings and their miniscule window ledges.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":182,"featured_media":22662,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3529],"tags":[853,4333,4331,4330,4332],"class_list":["post-22039","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-flash-nonfiction","tag-creative-nonfiction","tag-human-animal","tag-lyric-essay","tag-primitive","tag-psychology","writer-sean-g-meggeson"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22039","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/182"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22039"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22039\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22663,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22039\/revisions\/22663"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22662"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22039"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22039"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22039"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}