© Alex Falcao
By Michael Kaczmarczyk
I was watching the Bulls game when the boy from Texas got abducted. Poor bastard. Things were happening and even the government couldn’t hide what was going on. UFO sightings were, as of late, on the rise. There had been reports of extreme weather occurrences, and bright lights flashing in the sky. Men in suits skewered crime scenes and filled the background behind anchors on news channels. Everyone was suspicious, and religious groups began to shout predictions of a coming apocalypse.
I had seen it all before…
Terror and hysteria wasn’t a new concept. They were right, we saw more of the men in suits and sunglasses, but they were always around, to think otherwise was ignorance.
What did scare me were the personal things. The world might have been acting strange but something was happening with me, that I found to be much more disturbing.
I found myself explain things to items of furniture. I would black out and wake up half way down a street without any idea as to how I got there. Words got jumbled in my mind and I found myself incapable of being able to speak properly or sometimes at all. I couldn’t get off either. I would go at it for ages, and nothing would happen, aside from an irritated rash and a lot of sweat.
Shirley Diamond’s words rang loudly in my ears.
”…I’ll be in touch”
She had something to do with it; with all of it.
I was dealing with questions that the bottle could no longer assist me with, and so I made the mistake, one day, of going to her house.
I rang her doorbell, and no one answered. I needed answers and I was irritated, probably because I was so backed up.
I decided to check around the property a little and when I got to the back yard, I almost ended it all.
There were crows.
A near literal sea of crows.
They were everywhere, fucking and eating each other alive.
I wasn’t sure how I didn’t hear the noise from the front of the house, because it was absolutely mind numbing. Screams of both pain and pleasure filled the air.
I squinted, and in the sea of crows I spotted a man’s body, bloodied and still. He was, I assumed, Shirley’s husband. If he had ever been engaged in a scandalous love affair, his days of sleeping with other women were certainly over. I bent over to vomit, but before I could I noticed a single bird break free from the winged orgy. He was tattered, and his appearance forced me to try and remember the last time I’d seen a bird missing both a leg and a wing.
I recalled seeing my reflection in its eyes as it said,
“There’s more water in a man than in a cactus. It’s time to stop living and to start surviving…”
I vomited and fell to the ground. My head was pounding, and reality began to fade from my eyes. My skin felt cold and I began to sweat ferociously. The crow’s final words haunted my ears before my mind found the mercy of sleep.
“…Welcome to The Desert.”
