“Tally-ho!” startling a murder of crows below the gnarled oak where they’d been perched. The raspy cry carried across the field—half greeting, half warning—but from whom, or to whom, remained unclear— with a scent of earth clung to their girth.
The crows, reassembling on higher branches, watching strangers, from their minaret shouting spirits at dawn rustling a rusted scythe. Its blade half-buried in damp soil. The handle, worn smooth by decades of use, where fingers had clenched too tight for song, and paused.
As they crouched beneath their palms, shifting eyes in unison as their spirits felt the fong of the air with a taste of ozone twitching in cadence of echoes. Unheard with a voice too low for prophesy of an old debt unsettled—
Holding their tongue sharp as a cat’s aye, frayed, but still clinging to the minaret croaking to split the air. To deliberate for the worms to catch with something creeping through the soil awakening an ear. “Tally-ho!”
