I’ve been waiting for weeks now. They say it happens shortly after you’ve received a visit. A day or two at most. Then you’re gone. Step off the curb without looking, miss the first step going down the staircase, release your last breath as you sleep at night. However it happens, it does, and it’s always after a crow visits you.

The birds used to be more common. You’d see them on telephone lines or poking around garbage bins. You’d hear them caw at each other and think nothing of it. Might even throw a scrap of food to one if you had some to spare. That changed somewhere along the way and soon they just weren’t around anymore. And that wasn’t so noteworthy either. Nobody really minded the crows, so nobody really minded when they were gone. That is until ole Timothy Wincrop came into town reporting seeing one that morning. Said it was perched atop the roof of his car like it had spent a long time waiting for him. Looked him dead in the eye and gave him a piercing caw before flying off into the trees. Tim passed that night. They found him at his kitchen table with his face buried in a bowl of soup. Heart just stopped.

And so the stories went. Anyone who spoke of seeing a crow after that wasn’t around anymore. Which is why I called up my mother and sister and told them I loved them a few weeks ago after seeing one myself. I even visited pa’s grave, something I hadn’t done in a long time. Told him I’d be seeing him soon. Then I went home and waited. I put on a Bill Evans record, poured some Scotch and lit a cigar. Maybe cliché, but I didn’t care. I was going to die anyway. Except I didn’t. I woke the next morning with the cigar between my fingers and an empty scotch glass in my lap. The next several evenings were quiet. I didn’t go anywhere and I didn’t have any desire to dramatize my demise like I did on the first night. I simply sat and waited.

It’s been this way for weeks now and I’m struggling with an unnerving idea that occurred to me on one of these stretches of nothingness. What if I had died? Sometime soon after the crow visited what if I crossed over to the other side? Woke up dead, as they say. An obvious solution would be to breach the tomb I’ve encased myself in. To venture out and validate my existence with another, but what if that action is the one that truly ceases me? What if leaving is the catalyst for the final swing? The event that erases me completely? Paralyzed, I’ll wait longer and see. My dad hasn’t come by, and I’ve not seen any folk such as Timothy Wincrop, but I can’t remember the last time I ate anything or had the urge to either. Funny to not distinguish whether you are alive or dead.