The Crows Who Liked to Listen to the Ramones

HAD TO SQUINT TO READ THE BIRTHDAYS because the sun was strong that day. I wanted to see if anyone had the same one as me. I didn’t find anybody, but I did find someone with almost the same birthday: May 16, 1978. One year and three days younger than me. She died in ’94. Two years ago. That must’ve been really sad for her parents.

I walked toward some shade and laid beneath it on my side with my elbow bent and my hand holding up my head. I could see a couple of squawking crows sitting in a tree:

“Hey, you humans are so fuckin’ lame,” said Frank the Crow.

“Yah yah,” agreed his crow buddy, Arnold, in an Austrian accent, “all you humans want to do is fuck your mother!”

“You suck!”

“Yah, depraved motherfucker!” and the both of them laughed.

“That’s a bit limited, don’t you think… I mean, if I wanted to hear shit like that I wouldn’t be skipping school.” I said.

“No, no. It’s true. That’s what Freud writes in The Interpretation of Dreams,” explained Frank, “He calls it the Oedipus Complex.”

“Yah. The Oedipus Complex,” repeated Arnold.

“How do you know about that?” I asked.

“We usually hang out at the university,” answered Frank.

“Yah. At the university.”

“Well, I’m gonna do some reading if you don’t mind,” I said.

“Whatever,” said Frank indifferently.



I brought two books with me. I was about half way through Necroscope by Brian Lumley. It’s about a guy who can talk to dead people and fights vampires. The dead people could show him how to do stuff. One dead guy taught him how to do martial arts. Another tutored him in math. I thought that was a pretty neat, so I closed my eyes and concentrated as hard as I could.

“Hello, anybody there?” I called out.

“Who the fuck are you talking too?” asked Frank.

“Not you.”

“Then who?”

“Are you guys any good at math by any chance?”

“I’m a mathematical genius,” gloated Frank, “but I’m not helping you.”

“What about you?” I looked to Arnold.

“I can count to five.”

“That doesn’t help me much.”

The other book was Naked Lunch by William Burroughs. I don’t know what that one is about, but there’s a part where some guy’s asshole talks. At first, the guy had to put great effort into making it talk. Once he mastered that, the thing started talking on its own.

I thought that it might be nice to always have someone to talk to, so I gave it a try. I closed my eyes and made my asshole clench and then relax and then clench again. I then sucked in my stomach and distended it, but only farts came out. No speech that I could understand. But then again, maybe flatulence is the language of the dead. Maybe it was my asshole’s way of saying ‘hi’ to all these dead people.



Along with a couple of knocked over tombstones, Cigarette butts and broken beer bottles littered the brittle, golden grass of the graveyard. Surrounding the perimeter of the cemetery was a four foot black iron fence with a line of trees planted a few feet inside. On the other side were roads and on those roads, traffic. In my head it all went to crap. I don’t know why it did, but it did. I envisioned head-on collisions. Sounds of heavy steel twisting under the force of impact. Shattering glass. Ambulances. Cars slowing down as they passed.

A couple of insects watched all of this from the sidewalk as they waited for the bus, and made conversation:

“Isn’t it a shame?” said the grasshopper to the beetle.

“Yup, sure is,” the beetle tacitly agreed.

“It’s a shame how these things just happen, ya know?”

“Can I bum a cigarette?”

“Sorry, this is my last one,” answered the grasshopper.

And the beetle, disappointed, scuttled to the next bus stop. After he got out of earshot, he mumbled to himself: “Fuckin’ stingy-ass grasshoppers.”