There’s a hawk in the overfull parking lot when I pull in, and it’s glaring, at me, as if daring me to approach one of the few available spots.
I try to give it a wide berth as I roll toward it; try to give it a chance to flee, but it stands its ground.
So I let him win and reverse quietly away, drive farther into the lot and right into a murder of crows, sprawled into a lake-sized splotch on the asphalt at the dead-end of the strip mall. I stop and park, straddling a speed bump and just not caring because there’s no way I’m driving anywhere near that.
And then I wait, shifting my gaze from them to the sky, almost expecting it to collapse around me.
Soon, a car pulls up next to me, the wrong way on this small strip of driveable space. He rolls down his window and says something I don’t quite hear because I’m distracted by what’s dangling by strings taped to the ceiling of his rundown sedan.
Bug spray bottles. Too many to count.
They’re still swaying from his hard stop, some banging into his sweat-soaked mop of hair.
He’s utterly unfazed by this as he yells to me. ‘Excuse me.’
And then I study him. He’s also wearing bug spray, and I don’t mean that he’s sprayed it onto his skin, but that they’re strung around him in a long necklace. Over ten of them that I can see, just draped around his neck, all sizes Off and Deet and Ben’s and Repel.
‘Excuse me,’ he repeats when I can’t find a proper response. ‘I noticed you don’t have the proper protection against them.’
Huh?
His sunshaded face and half-smile intermittently appear among the dangling swaying bottled chemicals.
‘What…what?’ I ask.
It’s the only word I can squeeze past my confusion.
He cocks his head as if confused by my confusion. ‘You can’t get through them without something,’ he explains, pointing toward the bird-infested parking lot. ‘And they don’t make bird repellent, so…’
The hawk is perched on a streetlight above them, as if lording over them, or maybe… controlling them?
‘Heads up!’
Huh? Oompf. I’m struck by something hard. A small bottle of bug spray, of course.
‘Um, thanks?’ I say.
He nods. Smiles wider. ‘Your porch is the only safe place, Miss.’
‘My… porch?’
‘You better hurry,’ he continues without explanation. ‘Sun’s almost gone.’
Okay. I slowly reverse over the speed hump, now more unsettled by the strange boy with sunshades and bug sprays than I am by the crows who seemed to have inched closer to our cars as we talked, like a giant growing, flowing ink spot.
Once clear of the car next to me, I turn around and tear out of this parking lot, out of this story, and head the hell home…
…silently followed by that single hawk and its murder of crows.
Jenny Morelli is a NJ high school English teacher who lives with her husband, cat, and myriad yard pets. She seeks inspiration in everything, including her nightmares. She’s published in several literary magazines including Spillwords, Red Rose Thorns, Scars tv, Bottlecap Press and Bookleaf Press for four poetry chapbooks. Website: JennyMorelliWrites.com
Interesting and well written. Love the cryptic ending!
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