02-21-2007, 04:17 PM
Hey you, i thought id type some up for the competition i was about to enter, then they told me they weren't taking any more users...
Well here's some, i have many more !!!
A black crow arrived when the rain stopped. There was a gnarled old post on our boundary, near where the fence sagged over the creek, and that's where the bird perched and cast its cold yellow eyes over our farm.
The creek. Oh, that beautiful creek, meandering across the fertile flats like a big green serpent, its head buried in a grove of mature gums to the south, its tail somewhere out of sight, north of the sagging fence. It pulsed with life, a constant artery carrying the crystal blood of some distant unseen heart deep under the pastures and rich volcanic soil. "We're bloody lucky to have this creek," Dad would say, ruffling my hair. "Bloody lucky. I reckon if that creek ever dried up, we'd be stuffed. We'd have to sell up."
I never took much notice when he said that. In my seven years I'd only ever known the creek to flow. It seemed implausible it could do otherwise. Until the crow came. I'd seen crows before, of course. Watched their effortless paths across the sky, and listened to them drawl their laconic obscenities from the treetops. But I knew I'd never seen this one, blacker and colder than a moonless night.
"Sbeen a bit of a dry autumn," Dad said the night before the crow arrived. "Looks like the winter'll be much the same." The lack of rain had, at that stage, escaped my notice. But I noticed the crow. It was just a bird on a fencepost, and yet somehow it was more. An omen. On my way down to the creek, fishing rod in hand, I felt its black presence before I saw it, nonchalant as it stared at me, through me, beyond me, as if summoning something from beyond the hills. And the something came, like slow spreading oil. The drought. There was no howling wind, no violent red storm, no cataclysmic holocaust. Just a continuing absence, a lack, and an endless blue sky, day after depressing day. Green paddocks transformed into squares of baking dust; dams became big clay bowls, their bottoms cracking like a jigsaw; young trees gave up and died, leaves shrivelling like burning plastic. And the crow presided over the whole unfolding disaster from its spot on the crooked fencepost.
One time I thought I could make it rain by shooting the crow with Dad's old shotgun. But the bird flew off before I even arrived, floating like a dark shadow at a safe distance above me as I discharged two ill-aimed shells into the indigo sky, and Dad, purple with rage, snatched the weapon from me and locked it away. The next day I had no gun, and the crow was back, eyeing me. Mocking me. .
It was a while before I noticed the creek dwindling. But after two following rainless years its banks were crisp and dingo-coloured, the once-vital stream a cheerless string of stagnant ponds, wriggling with mosquito larvae. I remember that's where I sat, bum in the dust, when I noticed Dad's shadow beside me. I looked at him, his eyes sad and distant, his sun-drenched forehead creased with burden. He just …stood there, silent. And the crow watched. "Dad…?" He steered his gaze toward me, and I knew what he'd come to tell me. "I've sold the farm mate," he said, and took a great, steeling breath. "Had to. Dint git much for it, but the 'countant reckons we're probly better off." He shifted his glazed eyes to the middle distance, focussing on nothing. "I'm sorry mate," he said, and trudged back to the house that was no longer ours.
I glared at the crow, and it mirrored me with its eyes of frozen yellow. My tears came then, running from my cheeks and into the thirsty earth. I don't know how long I sat there, but when I lifted my eyes again, a cold wind sprang up from the west, and all I could do was stare and tremble. The crow had gone.
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