We thought they were crows as they swung low in the sky. Lula, Rose, Boy and I were coming home from an away game. Boy was driving. It was a long drive back, and the sun had set. The road had been bending next to the river for a while now. A mix of empty and active warehouses lined the waterfront. Like looming specters they hung in the January air; a few with windows winking with light. Trees were bare, if they were there at all.
The river banked, as rivers do. I had been staring out the window daydreaming- but movement caught my eye.
“Birds.” They were moving together in harmony. My mother says they vote sull'ala “on the wing” that’s how they know where to go next. And so the net of birds throbbed echoing each other's movements.
I’m a city boy but I’ve read a book, so I know that starlings are the ones who do this little psychic dance. They call it a murmur. Starlings are small birds, they look like black pools of oil spattered down carelessly. But these were not small birds. They were innumerable creatures of significant size- wingspans of five feet across dipping and darting I’m lazy formation over the cold, polluted river.
I looked behind us and in front of us. Why were we the only car on the road? By this time even Boy had noticed the creatures as they seemed to sail above us. I made brief eye contact with my cousin, he feigned grit and I swallowed. Boy’s eyes darted back to the road just in time to swerve around a creature stopped and hulking on the asphalt. Our car’s tires smoked, and the thing heaved with heavy labored breaths in the road, as if we had stunned him. The girls yelled and they slammed their fists into the headrests to shake us from our shock. The creatures enourmous wings flapped and it rose, two legs like a man’s extended out of a dark cowl from which two red eyes gleamed. I grabbed the St. Christopher medal from behind the rearview mirror “Give us a hand here. We’re travelers. Or call St. Michael because I think this is the Devil.”
Boy shifted into gear and accelerated. “Well, either way hang on St. Christopher” I thought as the car pushed forward. The air was thick with with the dark creatures now, and they undulated in formation around us. They kept up with us too easily. The odometer climbed. The car did its best. It lurched and groaned. There was the sound of claw on metal issuing a high screech that echoed in your bones. I was sure that they’d be on us any minute, and my stomach soured, dropping against my spine. They were so near, reaching, their inky blackness and eyes like pools of rust and light. “When they reach us, maybe I can distract them enough that the others can get away...” But then, a minor Miracle, the old car lurched forward a little faster, and the spectres began to lag behind and slowly drop out of sight. Even after they had all been left far behind us and each beast had become a black dot and disappeared from view, Boy didn’t slow the car. The drive usually takes fourty minutes home but we made it in twenty and spent the night waiting for legions of black winged creatures to descend on the house or be reported on the news. But they never were. In fact we would have thought it was some kind of shared dream, if not for four long claw marks on the trunk of the car that we drove along the river that night.
