The rustling and the squeaking had been happening for weeks: around my bathroom, the hall outside the bedrooms. Only when my roommate finally announced that she heard them reverberating in her boudoir did I acknowledge it was not a figment of my imagination and portentous of my sanity. We first thought they were hapless squirrels trapped inside the hollow of our walls. How they got there we could only speculate. A friend enthused it could mischievous chipmunks. Whatever they were the thought of (Disney's not Gaiman's) Snow White's friends dying with our apartment walls as their coffin,didn't sit very well, not to mention the thought of the stench of their rotting carcasses permeating throughout our pretty little pad - usually smelling like pretty bachelorettes, sweet little girls, stabs at homecooking and neuroses- that no amount of incense could mask. I'd considerred calling maintenance while trying to prepare what I was going to say without sounding like a flake. I've also opted out letting my John Malcovich door open inside my closet for the apparent reason that it happened to be behind my underwear drawer.Meanwhile, the rustle had become more vigorous and seemingly frantic, the squeaks to squawks almost like cries of help torturing my conscience.
My roommate found out today that they turned out to be birds, yes birds. She saw one trying to make it's way out of the oven, yes the OVEN. She opened the oven door and the kitchen window and one eventually flew out. There was still noise in there echoing through the dishwasher and the aircon vents. While my roommate was asleep in her room, I opened the oven door again and eventually another bird hopped out. It was a baby crow.
I loved The Crow as a college kid undergoing a quasi-goth phase. I thought it was the friggin' most romantic movie ever made. I was going to marry a man like Brandon Lee. Good genes. Rock star. Artist. Poet. A love that would come back from death to avenge yours. Blurred the lines between fiction and the mundane. It was the first movie that ever made me cry and pull me out teenage apathy. It didn't help that the sequel, although it didn't quite live up to the original, featured Vincent Perez, the man whom I vowed to be the father of my children. The sight and sound of such birds would always make me smile, like I received a secret message from a lover, comforting. Ah, adolescent obsessions.
It took a quick tour of the kitchen, hopped unto the stove trying to sample our precious leftovers, nonchalant of me trying to shoo it towards the open window. It gave me a look and flew out until I lost sight of it. On the microwave and on my roommate's fancy coffemaker, it left souvenir droppings, the thanks I get for letting it out into the world.
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