Down on the banks of the bayou stood a wondrous weeping willow teeming with a murder of crows. They possessed an eerie stillness, as if waiting for something, as though movement itself were a Sisyphean task. One might think they were holding court, with the fireflies and mosquitoes serving as the jury.

Along the banks a man walked, watching his dog run ahead. But when the dog drew near the willow, it stopped, sniffed the air, and cocked its head to the side, evaluating thesafety of the path. The man chuckled silently at the dog’s hesitation as the animal gave the tree and its silent inhabitants a wide berth, treating the sand as if it were lava.

As the man followed his dog past the area, a glimmer caught the corner of his eye. It was akin to the wavering heat haze of summer, even though the temperature was sixty-five degrees at the most. The closer he stepped to that unusual haze, the sicker he felt. A gnawing dread bloomed in the pit of his stomach, urging him to stay away. A strange, sulphurous smell seeped from underneath the weeping willow, its branches draped like the uncombed hair of a voodoo priestess refusing to look away from what she guarded. By now, the dog had given up barking entirely, retreating to the perimeter where it stood shaking. Not wanting his companion to suffer, the man decided to move along.

The next day, however, he found himself drawn back to the willow. The murder still infested the branches like ornamentation tangled in swaths of dark hair. If he wasn’t mistaken, there were even more crows today, yet they all held the same paralyzed positions. Watching. Waiting. Whether they did so with fear or anticipation was impossible to tell. They were still just birds, after all.

While the man was no ornithologist, he knew this was anomalous behaviour. He used to date a woman who fancied herself a witch and an amateur birdwatcher; she would have been in rapture over the event. He remembered a picnic where she had spent the day collecting rocks and carcasses while reciting superstitions about corvids. Of all the tales tied to crows, one stuck distinctly in his mind: When crows gather in a tree and fall utterly silent, someone has died who does not yet know it. A noisy murder brings a warning. A silent murder brings the thing itself.

A violent shiver ran through him, the kind people said came when someone walked over your grave. He looked around, suddenly wondering how long he had been standing there. It was already nearing nightfall. Confused, he turned and made his way home.

By the following afternoon, he was back in the exact same spot, contemplating the shadow under the weeping willow as if it might whisper the secrets of the world to him. Something had changed. The ground looked wet, stained with what appeared to be blood, but when he blinked, the color vanished. He searched around the perimeter of the tree, never stepping closer than the lowest hanging branch. He felt an intense, heavy fearpushing him back, balanced against a desperate hope to find anything that would explainthe missing blocks of time slipping away from him.

He heard his dog in the distance. Looking up, he saw the golden shepherd running toward him, yet the animal never seemed to get any closer. The man noticed that there was another figure standing near the shore. They didn’t turn their head to acknowledge his or the dogs presence. Instead, they kept their eyes trained on the distance as a single tear rolled down their cheek.

A powerful gust of wind blew through the bayou. A straggly branch of the weeping willow caressed his arm, almost gently, and a memory burst to life.

Running along the bayou with Max, his beloved golden shepherd. The sudden, terrible accident that followed. Reaching out, screaming in the hope that someone would help them. But he always ran so early in the morning. There had been no one around to hear
him. He had bled out underneath the willow tree, holding Max in his arms until all hope and life were gone.

The man turned back to the willow tree. The oppressive dread was replaced by an emptystillness, right next to a softly glowing portal. The crows shifted, staring at him all at once as if urging him forward. The figure in the distance was suddenly right in front of him, crying silently, holding an urn to scatter the ashes into the bayou.

Some still tell this story on storm-filled nights. Others swear they can still hear false screams of hope when the wind blows just right through the hollows of the trees. Though the crows are long gone now, every once in a while, a single bird returns to the willow branch. And waits.