Free Fiction Friday!

The Crow Prophecies (excerpt)

by Michael Yoder

copyright 2021 Michael Yoder

1.

The bookstore was quiet. Phillip liked it when the store was quiet; there was no one to bother him.

He’d been working in the store for the past seven years, almost too long, his mother would complain.

‘Why no woman in your life?’ her voice muttered in his head. ‘Why don’t you get a better job that pays you what you’re worth?” the nattering continued to haunt him.

Up and down the rows of shelves piled with the dusty remnants of other people’s lives, cast off and forgotten, Phillip roamed, picking out the volumes that intrigued him in the moment. He was a tall, slender man in his late forties with thinning hair and round-framed spectacles that perched on his nose like an elderly church woman. His voice, when he spoke was insecure and stuttering – not a real stutter – simply that of a man who was not certain about his own place in the world.

Phillip Hodge did not fit, except here in the musty bookstore that allowed him to escape most human contact. When he did have to deal with customers, annoyingly announcing their arrival by the bell that clanged as the door was opened, he was quiet and polite, but not outgoing, not engaging.

The owner of the store accepted that about Phillip, but did not like it. Phillip’s lack of ability to sell books was matched only by his lack of ability to converse. Nonetheless, the shop owner truly liked the man and when Phillip was not at work, the store was much more a place of commerce than a morgue.

This day, however, the old, dead corpses of authors long-passed were the only personalities with which Phillip had to contend. And he liked it that way.

Wandering along the heavy, brown shelves, he picked out the Dickens novel “Hard Times”; and in the dim light cast through the front windows of the store he began to read. Phillip had always thought that if he could get through the first chapter of any Dickens novel he should be able to manage the rest. He liked Dickens, but found his language thick and cumbersome: not light reading by any stretch of the imagination. The Victorians, while brilliant, were verbose.

He read for a while and having finished the first chapter, set the book down and walked to the back of the store to get a cup of coffee. He was to be at work until six that evening and it was only just turning three o’clock. The coffee was old and stale, but he poured himself a cup and topped it with milk.

As he turned to head back to the front of the store and continue reading, he stopped suddenly. A noise above him startled him. Looking up toward the dirty skylight he saw a shadow pass and a small “tink” on the pane of weathered glass.

‘Crow,’ he whispered to himself and continued walking through the dark aisles.

Again, he heard the same “tink” on the skylight. He stopped again and looked up, squinting, straining to see what the bird was doing: dropping a shell on the glass, or skittering to catch a mouse, perhaps? There was only the shape of the bird, its wings and the tinking that it made.

The sound was insistent for several minutes: “tink, tink… tink, tink, tink.” Over and over the crow continued on the skylight, something in its beak beating on the glass pane. There was no real pattern to the sounds, the randomness intruding on the quiet of the bookstore.

Then, as soon as it had started the sounds stopped. In the distance, he heard the crow complaining the way they do. Phillip guessed something startled the bird and it flew off into the grey, autumn afternoon.

And after that, there was only the silence of the books and the gentle ticking of the old clock.