Silas
We’resilent on the drive back to Kat’s house, the radio in my truck quietly playing radio hits from ten years ago. She’s still as a statue in the passenger seat, hands in her lap, skirt demurely above her knees. She looks a little like if she gets jostled the wrong way the fissures might open up, a feeling I know all too well.
Twenty minutes into a thirty-minute drive, I can’t take the silence any more.
“I once had a panic attack because of a crow,” I tell her on a dark stretch of two-lane road.
There’s a long silence, so long I get a little worried.
“Was it a particularly large crow?” she finally asks.
“No,” I say, eyes still ahead, not looking at her. “But it had learned to imitate a car alarm, and it did so while perched on my windowsill at five o’clock in the morning.”
“That sounds like an ill omen of myth and legend,” she says. “What’d you do to the crow?”
I feel myself smile at ill omen, slide my hand around the wheel to the bottom.
“I’d spent the night at my buddy’s house, and he has a relationship with them,” I start to explain.
“He feeds them and they bring him stuff?”
I glance over. She’s looking at me now.
“You know Levi?”
“No, but everyone knows that about crows.”
“Not everyone,” I point out.
“It shouted at you and you had a panic attack?” she asks, and I brace myself but that question isn’t mocking, it’s only a question. I lick my lips, move my hands on the wheel again.
“I was dead asleep and thought it was the warning sirens back at Dwyer,” I say. “Fell out of the bed and then crawled underneath it until… it stopped.”
The panic attack didn’t just stop. The day before that I’d been rear-ended on the highway, and even though I wasn’t really hurt the shock and the loss of control were enough to send me spiraling, so I did what I’d learned to do by then: I went to Levi’s house.
His house was the first place I found solace after I came back home. For years, it was the only place I could find it: quiet, serene, isolated in the woods, built by the man who’d been my best friend for two decades.
When I spiraled I’d call, and he’d say to come over, and then he’d make tea or hot cocoa or water, whatever I needed. He’d sit with me and listen if I talked and talk if I needed to hear something. He’d hold me if I needed it, and I did. More than once I woke up in the middle of the night, the two of us slumped together on the couch, the first time I’d slept in days.
It wasn’t sexual, or romantic. Just the bone-deep understanding and love I needed.
The morning the crow gave me a panic attack, Levi heard the thump, found me under the bed, crawled in after me, and held me until I could breathe again. I don’t tell Kat that part. I can feel her looking at me, thinking, her hands folded in her lap, the medical tape bright against the dark of her dress.
“Thanks. At least I’ve never had a bird-induced panic attack,” she says.
“You’re still young and there are some fucked up birds out there,” I tell her, and she laughs.
It’s louder than I’d imagined. It sparkles, more like broken glass than stars, but it’s surprisingly pretty all the same and I smile.
“There are some fucked up birds,” she agrees. “Geese, for example.”
“Bastards,” I confirm.
We’re silent again until I pull up in front of her building, a duplex on a quiet street near downtown Sprucevale that’s a hundred years old if it’s a day. I shut off the engine, the headlights, and we’re bathed in the orange glow of the streetlight.
“Thanks for the ride,” she says, then pauses, her hand on the door handle, fingers tapping. She looks out the windshield at the car parked in front of us. “So, uh, how do you want to break up? Do you want to say it was mutual and we were growing apart or whatever, or do you want me to be the bad guy, or do you want to, or…?”
Finally, she glances over, pushes up her glasses with one knuckle. I clear my throat.