The Dead Crow

There’s a dead crow lying on the ground right next to where I park my car. It’s been there for the last week looking for the most part intact and unharmed. No blood or torn wing is showing. No hole where he might have been shot. The garage at work is covered and I have to use a key to open the large doors that let me inside.

Next to where I park are a couple of full trash cans and a wheelbarrow full of rotting gypsum that fell when the roof leaked. People clean their cars out and leave it all around the cans. I don’t remember the cans ever being cleaned since they appeared last spring after the heavy rains flooded the building. A mound of fast-food paper bags rise above the trashcan like an installation titled,  America Eats Itself To Death.

I don’t know how the crow got there, how he died or anything. I suppose he could have flown in, in the brief moment the large doors were open. I suppose that’s the way it must have been.

Years ago when I was in school I had a roommate who would boil the flesh off of recent road-kill birds to study the bones. He was there as a part of an ornithological exchange program from a school back east. He and his partner, giddy as children, would take whatever dead bird carcass they could find and boil it in a pot on the stove of our little kitchen.

I look at that crow and think about that. About that smell and those little model skeleton statues he built. About the little plastic bags of dead birds he kept in the freezer. How he staged them in his room like an exhibit at a Museum.

His crowning glory that semester was a barn owl found with its neck broken on Schuster Parkway.

Every morning on my way to work I park next to this dead crow. I struggle with the thought of throwing him away before he starts to rot: What will I do if he starts showing signs of decomposition? I think about what old roommates are up to. I wonder about this crow’s death and my youth and this town.

Then I take my coffee, close the big doors of the garage and head into work. I try not to think that in just eight hours I’ll turn around and go through this whole process again.