ROUND ‘ERE WE SAY BIRDS NOT BITCHES

(ABELINE, TX)

We drove from Carlsbad to Abeline, Texas and pulled up to a cinema that was showing Watchmen. Woo-hoo! But it wasn’t on for an hour and a half, and Natty was tired from driving all day. Oh well. I guess I can’t complain, but I did feel a bit like a kid who just missed High School Musical 3. After nineteen years waiting to see the greatest graphic novel ever put to celluloid, I could wait one more day.

So we parked in United Supermarket’s giant car park. Then they arrived. They were from the crow family but had long tails. A murder of crows I believe the collective noun is. Only this was more like a genocide. Thousands of them were roosting in the ten or twelve trees encompassing the car park. Every tree was black with them, every single branch or twig acting as a perch. As we approached on foot they took flight, several hundred of them squawking to the next tree in a deafenining fit to wake their master, the devil himself. We successfully avoided being poo’d on. Eerily they stopped their chorus at midnight on the dot, then they were gone. Invisible, imagined, winged denizens of the night preparing to attack like Hitchcock’s Birds. They occupied Natalie’s head, flying in through her oversized cake-hole, invading her brain and plaguing her dreams.