The Crow’s Harvest

That night, the squirrels dug under the chicken wire and tore fresh seedlings up by the roots. They destroyed the entire patch, chewing up the plants and leaving gaping holes in the dirt. Tender young growth just budding with life had been gnawed to pieces. Maddie’s last thriving summer crop, some tall, spindly okra plants, drooped sideways.

The fight against the squirrels began much earlier. For months, Maddie had scattered coffee grounds and tangles of hair from her brushes through the rows, hoping the human smell would deter them. She coated the dirt with cayenne pepper to singe their paws. She put a solar-powered plastic owl in the garden that swiveled its head when it detected movement, hoping to frighten them.

Maddie gripped the splintered railing of her back deck, watching a few fat songbirds picking through the mess for a fresh worm. It was time take more drastic measures. She wasn’t ruthless enough to decorate the yard with squirrel corpses herself, but a more creative approach occurred to her.

She had always been fascinated by large birds of prey. As a little girl she would beg to go to the zoo just so she could plant herself in front of the raptor enclosure. She could never seem to stare at them for long enough, their large eyes like smooth gemstones watching her closely and their scaly, prehistoric toes curled around their perches. She lived for the thrilling moments when they would get agitated and beat their wings, to feel that throb of fear in the face of something beautiful and dangerous.

The solution seemed simple. Just lure the native owls and hawks in the area to hunt the squirrels for her.

—

Outside the Wild Bird Center, a wide-eyed girl stared at her from a flier on the window. It must have been a high school photo, printed in color against that classic mottled blue background. Her smile tugged higher on the left side, with a single dimple pressed like a thumbprint from someone squeezing her baby cheek.

HAVE YOU SEEN ME?

Edi Hahn

Last Seen: 9/26/19

Female

Age: 17

Race: White

Eyes: Hazel

Hair: Brown

Height: 5’4

Weight: 120   

Maddie couldn’t tear herself away from the photo. Something in the girl’s gaze reached to her, from the moment Edi sat on a stool in an auditorium and looked into a camera lens to the moment Maddie stood on a curb in front of a feed store with autumn’s breath cooling the air. It occurred to her that if she had wanted to have children, her own daughter could be the same age. She pulled out her phone and snapped a picture of the flier.

The sound of mechanical chirping announced her entrance as she pushed through the door. A wild-haired woman looked up from the counter, and Maddie asked her if they carried raptor perches.

“Critter problem?”

Maddie nodded, and the woman indicated a long wooden beam shaped like a thin cross leaning against the back wall of the shop. “It’s illegal to feed hawks.” She shot a furtive look at the only other customer in the shop, leaned in, and lowered her voice. “But I know for a fact they like dry cat food.”

—

Maddie and her ex-husband originally moved into their cottage-style home at the end of an empty cul-de-sac because of its distance from everyone else—they wanted each other all to themselves. She had filled the front of the house with plants to further barricade them from the outside world. Planters overflowing with petunias spilled out of the shuttered windows.

The back deck overlooked the bottom of a steep hill. The slope of the yard eventually evened out and then trailed off into the woods, pine and sweetgum trees surrounding the fence. Maddie had eked out a small square where just enough light filtered through the trees to designate a garden space, envisioning herself as a sort of suburban homesteader.

They didn’t want children. Maddie had plans for her future that giving birth would only hamstring. A life of travel, photography, maybe one day owning a vineyard. Every night they would sit on the back deck, fingers intertwined. He smoked a pipe and she drank a glass of red wine. Years of menial office work filled the interim until at some point she stopped mattering to herself, and one day she mattered less to him, and then she didn’t matter at all.

Now that she lived alone, Maddie often considered this forced seclusion. She didn’t have a mothering instinct. Her own mother had always complained, “who’s going to take care of you when you get old?”  but it never seemed like a good enough reason to force someone into existence.

She lugged the raptor perch down the hill to the back corner near her garden and balanced it against the fence. If nothing else, stubbornness kept her moving forward. Dripping pipes, broken door frames, and now an insidious squirrel problem all fell to her. With an electric screwdriver and some two-inch nails, she anchored the beam so that the cross stood ten feet above the ground.

Satisfied, she went back in the house for a bowl of dry cat food, then came out onto the deck and admired her work. She set the bowl down on the railing and looked out across the yard.

A soft flapping startled her. A crow landed next to the bowl, grabbed a piece of cat food, and hopped a few feet away. She watched it tap the morsel with its beak, then snap it into crumbs. It finished its bite and looked up at her. Though not her intended bird visitor, she still found herself charmed by its deadly elegance. Its black feathers shined with a bluish iridescence like spilled ink. It cocked its head at her and blinked its milky eyelids.

Up close it seemed ancient: a small, calculating dinosaur. It was measuring her up, assessing whether she was a threat. Maddie didn’t move. It hopped tentatively toward the cat food. Without breaking eye contact, it grabbed another piece and then jumped away. Finally, it looked at her and shook out its feathers. She took that as a sign that it had accepted her presence.  

Maddie left the bird to enjoy its meal and picked up her phone to stare at the photo of the flier for the missing girl. Edi Hahn. She traced her finger along Edi’s curled hair and thought of her own senior yearbook photo. Same optimistic grin. Same ugly photo background. Could it be the same photographer? Surely not, twenty years later.

She searched Edi’s name. Several news stories came up. She had gone missing about two weeks ago. Her parents said she had gone out with friends and just never came home. Her friends couldn’t remember her leaving the group. The prevailing theory involved alcohol—there wasn’t much else to do in this town. Edi’s house was only about ten miles away from Maddie’s. The police were investigating, and search parties went out every afternoon.

Was anything more heartbreaking than the loss of a child? Edi had a life stretching out before her, opportunities ripe for the plucking.

She pulled up a map of Edi’s neighborhood. It was an older suburb, not too far from a main highway or the drug store parking lot. Curious, she opened the street view of Edi’s house. There was a Valentine’s wreath on the door—the map hadn’t been updated in a while. Maddie wondered if she could see Edi through a window or walking down the street. She clicked around the street view images for a while, hoping to spot Edi’s ghost.

—

Maddie took another handful of cat food out to refill the bowl as the sun rose. She sat on a deck chair with a mug of coffee and looked out across the yard. A crow landed on the railing. The same one? She noticed something sparkle in its curved beak. It dropped the object next to the bowl, grabbed a few bits of food, then flew off. She walked over to find a soda tab, slightly dirty, but still glinting in the sunrise. Smiling, she put it in her pocket, then steeled herself for the hard work of replanting the garden.

Maddie didn’t mind getting dirty. There was something calming about shaping the earth into neat mounds, mixing soil amendments to get the right pH balance, encouraging a seed to take root, burst through the crust, spread upwards and fruit. It made her feel connected to something larger than herself.

The raptor perch cast a shadow across the garden as she sunk her thumb knuckle-deep into the soil, inch by inch across the row. She peeled the mud-caked glove off her right hand to open her packet of heirloom pumpkin seeds. She had a superstitious ritual for picking the fattest seeds—it seemed to her that the fat seeds were stuffed full of the most potential. She crawled with her knees in the dirt, using her weight to press seeds into the bed.

Maddie piled the dirt around the base of her okra plants to set them upright again, broad leaves facing the sunlight. Her Southern grandmother called them “Ladies’ Fingers” because of their delicate, tapered shape. She admired a blooming okra flower, pale yellow with a dark center, like a small tropical hibiscus, then noticed a heavy okra pod she had failed to pick. If you leave them on the stem for too long, they turn bitter and fibrous. It cracked off the stem as she yanked it downwards and tossed it into the yard.

An hour passed as Maddie painstakingly removed tiny weed sprouts by hand to keep them from choking her pumpkins. Spent, she fell back onto the grass around the garden and looked at the fresh piles of dirt. The skill and patience needed for gardening felt like the last thing she still had a handle on.

A familiar flapping, a high-pitched raspy “caw,” and she looked up to see her crow back on the railing. He saw Maddie in the yard and flew down to where she sat. Maddie could see he had something in his beak. He dropped his offering nearby, then flew back to the bowl of cat food. Maddie reached over to pick up the small object: a pink, plastic, flower-shaped bead. This time, she felt sure it was intentional. The crow had brought her a gift. She turned it over in her fingers and watched the bird pick at the food, skittering back and forth on the railing.

—

Many nights Maddie arrived at work before the sun had fully risen and left as it set. She could almost hear her coworker Linda telling people, “What does she have to look forward to at home anyway?” Her skin burned at this imaginary slight.

Driving home, Maddie realized that she was only a few streets from Edi Hahn’s neighborhood. Something contracted tightly in her gut and she impulsively turned the wheel toward Edi’s house, moving slowly down her street. There were several cars parked in front, and signs in the yard asking “Have you seen Edi?”

Maddie scanned the sides of the road, not sure what she was looking for. A piece of fabric? Some evidence that she had been here? She imagined Edi out on a morning jog. Getting ready for school. Fighting with her mother.

—

Maddie took her wine glass to the back deck with a handful of the dry cat food and scattered it across the railing. She savored the wine, watching the towering raptor perch backlit by the sinking sun.

As she’d hoped, the crow landed nearby. There was another gift for Maddie in his beak, but from this distance she couldn’t tell what it was. The crow flicked his head to the side and watched Maddie with one bead-like eye. They stared at each other for a while. He stood about a foot tall, his reptilian claws digging into the wood of the railing. Maddie stood still, acknowledging the threat that he posed if provoked. She knew this friendship was tenuous. He lowered his head and dropped the thing on the railing, stopping it with his beak as it tried to roll away. He watched it for a moment, then took off, cackling.

She moved toward the small lump the crow had left her. It was about an inch long, dirty and bruise colored, and puckered on one end. She reached to pick it up; it felt waxy. When she turned it over, she flinched, dropping her wine glass to the ground and shattering it. Only then did she catch a whiff like the rotting stink of a gangrenous pork chop that had been left for too long and gone to slime.

She had seen glitter polish on what was unmistakably a fingernail.

Maddie stumbled inside to get a something to clean the broken glass, then squatted next to the mess, shaking. The bloodred wine had started to seep into the wood and stain the deck. Trying to avoid eye contact with the finger, she held the broom close to the bristles and swept up as much of the glass dust as possible, then stood up, feeling dizzy, and took it inside to toss.

What was she going to do with it? She tried to deepen her quick, shallow breathing as acidic bile filled her throat and made her gag. Desperate to find a container, she went over to the hall closet and felt around the shelf above the coat rack for a small, lacquered box that she kept tucked to the side. It had been a childhood gift from her mother, one of those little music boxes that opened to reveal a tiny ballerina spinning on a spring.

With a tissue, she picked up the severed finger like a cockroach and dropped it into the box, snapping it shut to stop the tasteless chimes playing the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy.

She decided to keep it in the freezer for the time being, to prevent it from further decay. She hid the box behind an old container of Italian ice, and had the vague memory of doing the same thing once as a kid with a dead hamster.

—

The next morning before work, she stood staring at the freezer door for a while. Why did the crow bring this to her? Had he found it severed, or had it been attached to someone? She thought about calling the police, but something stopped her. She felt a bizarre obligation to be the one to solve this mystery. This was a rare opportunity. She at least wanted to have some more valuable information before getting the authorities involved. How far did crows travel in a day? Had it come from nearby? Why did the crow even pick it up?

She gripped the door handle; she needed to look at it again. Maybe she could learn something upon closer inspection—she’d watched enough Dateline episodes. She pulled the box from the back of the freezer, then went to the couch and sat with it in her lap for a bit. Her mouth went dry. With a deep breath she lifted the lid. The ballerina popped up and the tinkling sounds of the Nutcracker Suite resumed. She gently nudged the tissue up to reveal the grisly trinket. Luckily the freezing process had masked the smell. Tiny crystals now dotted its darkened surface.

It had been sliced off above the knuckle. It was impossible to tell which finger it had been. The blood had either drained or settled, so the wound was dry. The exposed meat looked grey and shriveled, so she couldn’t tell whether the cut had been clean or not. She rubbed her own index finger, soft and warm in contrast to the stiff, necrotic thing in the box. How strange to see the life drained from something so ordinary and familiar.

She pulled the tissue paper slowly toward her so the finger would roll over, revealing the nail polish that had shocked her the day before. It was an icy blue glitter polish. The type a teenage girl might wear? Her heart beat at the back of her throat. She set the box down on the coffee table and looked at her phone.

Edi smiled at her. Maddie decided she would join the search party that afternoon.

—

They gathered in the parking lot of the drug store not far from the high school. A vast stretch of untouched woodland ran behind the building for a few miles before hitting the highway. Teenagers often came here at night, their cars circled together like a wagon corral, furtively tossing their empty beer cans into the woods.

Other adults might blame them for being irresponsible, but Maddie remembered the tedium of those years. Young and surging with forceful, raw emotions, trapped by strictures to prevent you from acting on them.

The search organizer split them into smaller groups to scour different sections of the woods, which had been divided into a grid pattern. “Go slowly. Try to walk your area side by side, about an arm’s length apart. If you come across something suspicious, tag it. We’ve got some flags for you. You need to be mentally prepared at all times. We don’t know what we’re going to find.”

An electric current buzzed across Maddie’s skin as she clutched her handful of marker flags and memorized the area her group had been assigned. She could almost hear Edi whispering to her.

They moved together into their section of the woods, gliding slowly across the leaves, eyes fixed on the ground as if attached by magnetic force. At the start, they found a staggering amount of junk. Group members peppered the leader with questions. “Is this empty can important? Could it have DNA? What about this cigarette butt? Do I flag it?” Maddie tuned them out to focus on the space in front of her. She didn’t know exactly what she was looking for, but it had to be more substantial than trash.

The sun began to sink, thin rays streaking through the trees. Flashlights flickered all around, scanning the leaf litter, shining into branches. Maddie slipped farther than arm’s length from her nearest groupmate. Then a little farther. She veered right and separated from her group altogether, slinking deeper into the woods.

Save for the dried plant matter crunching beneath her feet, there was quiet. Not even birdsong punctuated the hushed atmosphere. A heaviness settled on her the longer she walked alone. Without a map or compass, she followed the insistent wingbeats in her chest, pulling her in.

A shadowy mass loomed ahead, resting on the forest floor. She hesitated before moving closer or shining light on it, blood rushing in her ears. What had she been hoping to find? Was she prepared to see a body? Despite the finger in her freezer, she held onto the hope of being some kind of hero. She wanted to be the one to bring Edi home. 

The beam from her flashlight landed on a hollow log with turkey tail mushrooms blooming across its surface. She paused, exhaling slowly. A rotten log. She stood still for a long time, admiring the way the fungus had sprouted in spite of the decay. She didn’t notice her group leader crunching through the leaves behind her and jumped when she appeared. She scolded Maddie for breaking rank. They had already searched this part of the grid yesterday.

 —

Maddie crept back to the freezer. The search team definitely would have flagged the contents of her lacquered box. The longer she contemplated the crow’s horrible gift, the tighter her throat clenched shut.

She looked at Edi’s flier again and the phone number at the bottom. “Please call with any information.”

The number almost seemed to be pulsating. The weight of this decision made her limbs feel as tense and sore as they would after a workout. She took a few long breaths through her nose and let them out slowly through her mouth to calm down, then dialed the number.

A woman answered in a strangled voice: “Hello?”

“Hello, who is this?” Maddie’s voice felt thin from disuse.

“This is Olivia Hahn.”

“Are you Edi’s mother?”

“Who is this?” She was obviously crying.

“Could you tell me, what color nail polish was Edi wearing?”

“What?”

“On the day she disappeared, what color was her nail polish?”

“What the hell kind of question is that?” Her voice increased to a shrieking pitch. “Why are you doing this? Do you think this is funny?”

The phone beeped to alert Maddie that the call had ended. She paused in the wake of the violent reaction. Maybe she should have been more straightforward? She hadn’t wanted to be blunt about her grisly discovery with this girl’s mother, but maybe there’s no good way to start that kind of conversation. She pulled up her internet browser and searched Edi’s name.

“BREAKING: Missing Teen Edi Hahn Found Dead”

She scrolled quickly through several similar stories to confirm the facts. Another group had found Edi’s body in the woods. No mention of missing body parts.

Maddie felt dizzy again and sat down.

What to do then with the finger? Would sharing it now be suspicious? After her breathing calmed, she picked up the box and headed outside. She grabbed her gardening gloves and a spade and made her way down the hill to the garden. She knelt in front of the okra plants, set the box to the side, and started digging.

She couldn’t even be sure that it was Edi’s, but she wanted to do this, to have control over this one little thing. She tipped the box over and dropped the finger into the hole. The ballerina spun to the sounds of this cheery funeral dirge. She filled the hole with dirt and then pressed her weight into the mound, like she would with a seed. She stayed like that for a while, her hands on the dirt, the sun rising in the sky, the shadow of the raptor perch across the garden, the music box tinkling its tune. The frost on the finger would melt, and the worms would come, and the okra would be fertilized, and this thought brought a modicum of comfort.

—

Maddie went outside that evening with a glass of wine and sat on deck chair, looking out at the okra plant. The faint smell of burning leaves hung in the air. She didn’t notice the shadow on the raptor perch until a squirrel darted across the yard. She watched, fascinated, as the hawk pinned it to the grass, jabbed its beak into the squirrel’s belly, and pulled out a string of viscera.

Originally published February 2024 by Iron Horse Literary Review