I know I am approaching burnout because when the crows land in our front yard, it reminds me of what it was like to be young and drunk. To be buried in a mess of limbs, slick with glitter. To be carried by the music, by girls you knew and girls you didn’t, everything blurry and iridescent.

I see the way the light catches the crows’ black wings, the way they shimmer gold, just slightly. The way they dance with one another, the way they scream.

When my husband leaves for work, I put out a plate of walnuts and wait. One comes, hesitant, at first.

“Bird,” my two-year-old says. His hair is a blonde hurricane of curls, tiny wads of neon pink playdoh speckled throughout.

The bird hops up and down, closer, then farther away. Closer, again.

My husband pulls back into the driveway and it flies away. He forgot his water bottle.

“You shouldn’t feed wildlife,” he says. “It’s not good for them.”

I’ve heard him say this before when I let Bub feed ducks his leftover crackers at the splash pad.

“But these are nuts,” I say, by which I mean, they’re natural, they’re not processed, they’re gluten free!

“You’re going to make them dependent on humans,” he says.

I watch Bub watching my husband. Watching me.

“But if we only give the crows a little,” I say to Bub, clearly to Bub, because my tone goes up an octave, “it’s okay.”

“It’s not okay, but whatever,” my husband says.

Sometimes I try to overlay the man in front of me with the man I met in college. I try to remember the smell of his dorm room. The Phish posters. The menagerie of glass bongs on his windowsill, each one with various levels of brown water. Little stoner science experiment.

I assume he does the same with me—tries to find the old me buried underneath the now.

In college, I was all lace camisoles underneath fitted blazers. Four-inch heels, always. Even to class. Straight blonde bangs covering my left eye, smelling of Herbal Essence and a too-hot straightening iron.

Two shots of whatever I could find, and then it was body rolls all night long. I’d perfected it, the undulation of my hips, in the mirror on the back of my bedroom door during the summer. It became my party trick.

A way to get everyone to look at me, yes, but also a way to fly.

To be my body and to be as far away from my mind as possible.

In the middle of the night, I hear tapping on the window across from the bed. I peek through the blinds, expecting a crow. It is not a crow.

It is a woman.

The woman has long blond hair and kohl smudged all around her eyes. Her collar bones are sharp. Her navel pierced.

She looks like Shakira.

Come, she mouths to me through the window.

She looks like 2006—young and hollowed-out. Low-rise pleather pants and a tube top.

A crow lands on her shoulder.

Come, she mouths again.

Fuck it, I think. Why not follow Shakira with a crow on her shoulder into the darkness of the yard?

I quietly click the lock on the sliding glass door and slide it open.

In the yard, Shakira is a black silhouette. She takes me to the fence, where one of the boards has come loose. She moves the board aside like a curtain.

Beyond the fence are not my neighbor’s dying grass and inflatable pool. Instead, there are neon lights and what appear to be sticky hardwood floors. The grass beneath me begins to vibrate with bass.

“It looks like Thirsty Chad’s in there,” I say.

“The one and only,” Shakira says.

“How do you know about Thirsty Chad’s?”

She smiles at me, looking me up and down. “I know everything.”

“I can’t,” I say.

“Why not?”

I jut my chin back toward the house. Hello, this is my life now.

“Suit yourself,” she says, and slinks through the fence like a cat. The crow squawks at me before following her into the pulsing lights.

Thirsty Chad’s was the place the girls and I went on Thursday nights for dollar jello shots and a DJ who sat on the stage with a laptop, speakers stacked around him. There was shuffleboard, a dance area, and a two-stall bathroom with floors that were always covered in toilet paper and crying girls.

“Do you remember Thirsty Chad’s?” I ask my husband in the morning.

“The shitty college bar?”

“It wasn’t that shitty.”

“It was.”

Okay, it was. But it was shitty in a beautiful way. I try to conjure the feeling of gulping at a Red Bull vodka, of laughing with my head thrown back, of screaming and running to dance when the perfect song came on—the one about milkshakes, windows and walls, or gold diggers, or taking it to the bridge. Forgetting to close out the tab. Having someone buy me a grease-dripping slice of pizza. Puking in the bushes. Blacking out. Having it all be okay in the morning. Having no one to nurse but myself.

The backyard is covered in crows. I catch Bub trying to count them. He gets to five and starts over again at one.

My husband insists on grilling chicken for dinner—he’s bought a whole one from the store himself. Bub and I watch him as he shears through the breast and breaks the carcass’s back.

“Spatchcock,” he says.

I watch Bub carefully as he watches his father.

I watch for the tiniest speckle of trauma, ready to whisk Bub away when he makes the connection between the carcass in front of my husband and the crows that are now lining the fence.

I gag when my husband places a breast on my plate.

I hide the gag.

I swallow the gag.

I say, mmh. Like a good girl.

I steal the bag of innards from the trash when my husband is busy giving Bub a bath. I wash them with the garden hose and find a perfect stone—smooth and gray—to lay the offering.

I’m only married to him, I rationalize silently to the crows, pretty sure they can read my mind. Please don’t judge me.

I place the offering next to the broken fence, hoping to call forth Shakira and Thirsty Chad’s. I take a peek beyond the fence. Nothing. The dead grass and pool are back.

I can hear Bub crying through the open bathroom window now.

“Hold still,” my husband says, “just hold still.”

Bub’s got soap in his eyes, I am sure of it. It’s the way the cry turns upward into a shriek—or it’s telepathy, I don’t know.

“Babe?” my husband says. “Babe?!”

I stay silent, my back against the fence.

There are even more crows than earlier. I get to thirty and then lose count. A large one, their queen maybe, hops sideways towards the innards. She pokes at them, testing them, testing me, then takes one in her beak, turning her head to the sky, and swallows it.

The crows shriek in response.

It is deafening.

And then they go silent. Their black heads turn towards a little figure on the edge of the patio wrapped in a towel. Bub. He drops the towel and runs over to me.

“Where’s daddy?” I ask because we agreed he’d do bath time and I could have time alone, because I’m touched out, because I’m tired, because I haven’t slept, really slept, in two years, because I need to be alone like I need to breathe.

The birds’ heads follow Bub. They’re staring at him, waiting for his next move, and for a second, I am afraid. For a second, I think they will attack.

But I see that Bub is not afraid. He lifts his arms like wings, and the birds lift theirs in response.

Bub laughs and the crows caw in response.

“Mama!” Bub says, and he doesn’t have to say the whole sentence because by now I know what he means—join me, be here, please, in the moment, just be here, just be a bird with me, fly away—so I stand, and when I do, the birds begin to take flight, but they do not fly away, instead, they circle us, me and Bub, around and around, all of us dancing, all of us caught up in the delicious movement of our bodies, and there is still a part of me that looks over my shoulder, still looking for Shakira and Thirsty Chad’s and a version of myself that no longer exists, but my arms are flapping now in time with Bub’s and in time with the crows’, and it really does feel like flying.

Anna Gates Ha earned her MFA at Saint Mary’s College of California. Her work, nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize, has appeared most recently in Already Gone: 40 Stories of Running Away, edited by Hannah Grieco and published by Alan Squire Publishing, as well as in Longleaf Review, Fractured Lit, and The Citron Review, among other literary journals.

Conjuring 2006, by Anna Gates Ha

My Pretties, by K.C. Mead-Brewer

What’s That Smell?