By the Dozen

I was walking through the countryside, carrying a box of donuts, headed for a meeting that was going to be held at the town hall that evening. I kept worrying because I had stopped by the side of the road along the way and eaten two of the donuts in a moment of a greedy hunger and now the box was short. There was nothing more embarrassing than showing up with a box that was missing donuts. I kept wiping at the corners of my mouth with the back of my hand as though the glaze and the custard would still be there for everyone to see as soon as I walked through the door.

Around dusk, I came across a meadow overgrown with soft grass. On a piece of high ground in the middle of this meadow, there were two large boulders which marked the gravesite of two twin boys that had recently died of a fever. The boulders were polished but roughly hewn. There was a flat area on the face of each boulder that had been smoothed and cleared for the inscriptions, and the boulders were turned so that the faces of the stones were angled slightly away from each other, giving the impression that the two boys were turned away from one another and sulking like they had just had a fight but still sitting together in peace and silence, still brothers after all.

Sitting on the back of the boulders, bridging the gap between them, someone had left a gift basket that was wrapped in rose-tinted cellophane and tied with a blue ribbon. The basket was filled with donuts. A crowd of black crows had gathered around the basket and they were picking at the cellophane, trying to get at the donuts inside. One particularly sharp crow had climbed on the back of another crow, and he had a piece of the ribbon in his beak and he was trying to pull the knot loose. This was all by design, of course. The donuts had been left there specifically for the crows to eat. By some process of transubstantiation, the nourishment provided by the morsels of dough and sugar would imbue the crows with the spirit of the twins, and they would carry that spirit across the sky and back to their nests as they flew back and forth from the basket until the basket would finally sit battered and empty, picked clean of every crumb.

I stepped forward to have a better look at the donuts. The crows dispersed in a protest of caws and a clatter of wings as I approached. They flew back to the trees and watched and waited. I picked at a loose fold of the cellophane and I stretched it out tight so that I could have a clear view inside. Sitting on top of the pile of donuts, there was a glazed donut and a custard donut, perfect to replace the ones that I had eaten. I set my box aside and I studied the knot in the ribbon, looking for a strand in the binding that I could slip free.

I almost had it loose when I noticed my long shadow stretched out across the rock and trailing off into the waving grass, and I felt the chill of a curse on me. And I knew that if I desecrated this burial site, the curse would be on whatever unsuspecting person ate these two replacement donuts as well. I pulled my fingers back from the knot and I gently bunched up the cellophane in my hands, trying to restore its disordered shape, trying to leave it all the way that I’d found it. I stepped back, treading lightly, barely breathing. I took a wide path around the stones, leaving them be. And when the calm settled back over the site and the crows felt comfortable, they flew back and continued their work on the basket.

Upstairs Room

The whole family slept in this big farm house. It was in the earliest hours of the morning, and the shapes of the house and the fence and the cars parked in the driveway and the tire swing that hung over the worn dirt patch in the back yard were all black against the first red hints of daylight. The family was scattered in beds around the house, my grandmother and grandfather snoring away on a king-sized bed in the master bedroom at the front of the house, and my aunts and uncles in various rooms above. There was a big bedroom in the back off the kitchen that I shared with three of my cousins, twin beds fitted every which way into the corners with my bed right under the open window and the curtains tickling at my ear as I dozed there still half-asleep.

There was a room that was in a kind of nest at the top of the house that I wished I could have had to myself, but my one uncle had claimed it already. I thought about this room as I laid there and heard the muffled ringing of his alarm clock bell going off two floors above. It was a great little room that rose up out of the roof of the house and it had windows that could look out over the land on nearly all sides. It was a cozy room with just enough space for the bed and the dresser where my uncle left his cigarettes and laid out a set of folded clothes for the next day. The alarm bell was cut off abruptly, followed by the crackle and buzz of an electric guitar amp being flipped on. This was what he had to get up for every morning. This was the basis of his claim to the room at the top of the house. I knew I would have to learn to play at least as good as him if I wanted that room, probably better. The first few licks peeled out, breaking the quiet, and I knew he was up there, sitting on the edge of the bed and watching out the windows at the sunrise creeping around the houses and into the fields and the roads for miles around.