|3|2EA|)LA|)Y

(First published in Beestung in Autumn 2020)

When the manuscript first arrived, it seemed like a prank.

It wasn’t immediately apparent that it was a manuscript at all. It appeared on our stoop reeking of dirt and rot. It had no return address, and every page had come from a different source: sheets torn from a legal pad smeared with fetid condiments, lined notebook paper that had been crumpled up and then haphazardly unfolded, letterhead from legal offices where the back was cramped with jagged lines and flecks of ink. But it had hints of purpose, as the front cover’s markings were spaced as if in modern manuscript format. Where I might find ‘about 1,000 words’ in the upper right, I saw loose scratches surrounding two-stroke circles, which vaguely resembled zeroes.

It wasn’t unusual for a journal like ours to receive awful submissions: works so rote they seemed machine-written, works that lacked the awareness to even achieve roteness, and the occasional incomprehensible word-spew. I had grown accustomed to dropping such things in the recycling before writing a neutral thanks-but-no-thanks letter to the author, but I had never seen anything like this.

Because it stank, I threw it in the dumpster behind our building. On a telephone wire above me, just outside my second floor office, a trio of crows began to bark loudly as I walked away. Crows love trash, so, I didn’t think about it.

When another such mess arrived the next month, I wondered if we had a stalker. Nobody in the office reported anyone following them, though Hilda joked about an ass of an ex who she called, “About as eloquent and aromatic as that!” So I threw it out again and got back to reading the usual tripe, but the worry that those indecipherable texts put in me outdid anything else we received that month. As a horror journal, most of our submissions came down to personal anxieties that authors externalized, distinguished primarily by craftsmanship. We would laugh, “What’s that staring up from the bottom of the stairs? Lurking at the edge of the forest? Stomping about the neglected attic? Why, it’s a Jungian archetype!”

It was the third manuscript that I first tried to read. Relative to the previous two, some of the marks on this one had become legible. I could make out ‘A’, ‘N’, and other block letters, though the author clearly had trouble writing circular characters like ‘b’ and ‘d’, so much so that I still couldn’t discern full words. I decided to keep this one, and zipped it in a plastic bag to contain the smell.

The fourth arrived later than the others, a couple weeks after a month had passed. In that time, I worried the mystery would end unsolved. When it showed up on the stoop, I sighed in relief before retching at the scent. This time I could make out enough words to get the gist of at least some of the sentences. They concerned people fighting over treetops, arguing about bugs, and learning to fly. I wondered then if the author were someone who our sham of an educational system had failed to make literate, but who nevertheless wanted to write so badly that they scrounged for whatever paper they could and emulated literature upon it. Learning to fly was a not uncommon coming-of-age metaphor, which indicated a narrative awareness that struck me as promising. I imagined someone grungy and shy, furiously dreaming of something different, somewhere else.

I still couldn’t read the manuscript end-to-end. The few sentences I could understand were far and few between, so I stuffed it in a bag and placed it in the drawer where the second one had remained.

By the time the fifth arrived, through a combination of improved penmanship and my own adjusting to the script, I managed to put the whole story together. For a couple of hours I sat at my office chair and read it, turning page after page as I pieced together the chicken-scratch handwriting. The title, I finally understood, was, “Breadlady and the Broken Wing: A Horror Anthology.” Within, five stories ranged from a bird dying of having eaten a poisoned millipede masquerading as a harmless caterpillar, to a bird that broke their wing when they fell from the nest only to become a capable groundling and the menace of many a neighborhood cat. In one story, a human identified as ‘breadlady’ spread a mind-controlling bread that turned birds into bored office workers. Every story centered on birds, crows specifically, and it was as I finished it, when I glanced out my window to reflect on what I had just read, that I saw those three crows from months ago. Maybe they weren’t the same crows, but…

One of them was holding a pen in its beak.