The bird waited for a day, watching through a window. The box was found. The bird observed the shouting, the brief, three-stroke whipping the boy suffered, saw the tears and felt the boy’s sense of injustice, aimless.
That night, the bird moved the medallion to the boy’s keepsake box a second time.
It didn’t stay to watch this time. It was a little bigger, a little stronger than before.
With that strength, the bird took up a pen, and visited a letter. One woman’s name was erased, ink drawn from paper to pen, another woman’s name written in its place, with the same ink and the same penmanship.
This, the bird stood by to watch.
It wasn’t a dramatic incident. The hurt and confusion were profound and quiet. The man’s wife was too proper to speak of the subject, or to even confront her husband, but it hurt her as if she’d been stabbed. Her husband loved another woman?
He did. His own doubt ate away at him. The bird watched him twist and turn.
It took four more pushes, four small incidents and well placed items. A flower favored by the woman he wasn’t married to, on his doorstep. A trace of her scent, tracked onto his pillow while he slept.
The man made his advance the day he heard her name whispered in the wind, conjured by the crow’s beak. He was turned down, and broken with shame in the process. His object of affection hurt, his wife wounded deeper still.
With every act, the crow spent little and gained much. Every reaction was a form of worship. It grew.
In two year’s time, it was able to take the form of a child, in addition to the shape of the bird. It worked connections with more violence.
A small boy, Algonquin in appearance, went largely unnoticed amid the playing children of a new town. When attention started to move in his direction, he sidestepped the forming connection.
A girl sat on a bench, watching the others kick a ball around. She glittered and glowed with connections. Everyone knew who she was, as she was the daughter of a community leader. She fit in well with the flow of things, the natural course of events. When she spoke, the spirits knew, she spoke true. She remained innocent.
But the crow cared little for innocence.
A boy, forced to stop playing by the nearby teacher, sat on the far end of the same bench. He was known to many, but not in a good way. He carried a weight, the imprints and echoes of other spirits and events. His father, in particular, radiated such negativity that the boy could only carry it. The boy was a liar.
The crow found the connection between them, a thread, and touched the middle of it. It pulled. The two wouldn’t topple over the back of the bench, but they would follow the path of least resistance. Drag a string with a weight on each end, and the weights would touch.
The actual events were more happenstance. More girls sat on the bench, and the girl that had sat there shifted position to give them room.
In that same moment, the boy lay down on the remaining section of bench. In the doing, the top of his head made contact with the girl’s dress and hip.
Simpler, dumber spirits contrived to tidy up the mess of the unruly connection.
The boy experienced a moment of electric shock, running straight down the core of his body. Ever restless, he froze, not daring to move.
She noticed too, but she was striving to get along with the other girls who occupied the bench, and didn’t want to move away. She pretended not to notice.
It was, as things went, innocent. Happenstance physical contact. But it was a beginning to something.
The boy did everything he could to transcribe the event to memory. He closed his eyes, sun warm on his face, and the whole of his attention was concentrated on the coin-sized area of his head that was in and was keeping contact with a beautiful girl.
The girl looked down, and she saw his face, imagining him asleep.
It struck her that she’d never seen him so at ease. When he stopped acting the troublemaker, he looked nice.
The crow cawed and swooped past. The boy’s teacher saw him occupying the bench, and shouted at him, ordering him to stand by her side.
He loathed his teacher in that moment.
He looked back over his shoulder as he got up from the bench, and met the girl’s eye.
The touch of pink on her cheeks… that was more than a beginning, to him.
It, she, gave his life meaning.
Had the crow wished, it could have let her heal the boy of that which ailed him. The abusive father, the propensity to drink, the anger and restlessness. The boy might even have found that peace, as well as the strength needed to prove himself in the small town and become someone respectable.
The crow did not wish for this.
In a way, the boy and the girl were happier in the short term. They grew up a little, and enjoyed their romance. But romance, as these invaders called it, was a mysterious, fleeting thing. It was not true love. It inveigled.
A stolen kiss behind the schoolyard, the pair being caught. The girl spanked by her father when he heard. The pair were driven together by hardship.
The girl became a liar.
The girl found the boy’s restlessness and anger and made it her own.
They stole away from their respective homes and found each other in the woods, late at night, hearts pounding as they embraced.
The crow planned a tragedy that would darken the hearts of everyone in the little town.
It did not do so unimpeded.
Though his guess was off target, the girl’s father openly voiced his suspicion that something darker was at work. He spoke of devils working their way into his daughter’s heart.
He called for help, and help arrived.
A man of the cloth, who took an immediate dislike to the local minister. A stern, strict man, who knew things.
He was wrong about what the crow was, but he still managed to capture and bind it.
He sent it back at the ones who had created it, with a touch of added power, hostility, outrage, given freely, and the compact of the Invader’s ways of dealing with spirits. A seal, which made the crow both less of what it had been and more a part of things. A different manner of things.
The crow flew. Then it walked.
It arrived at the outskirts of the area, and it found its creator waiting, an old man.
“I knew you would come back,” the old man said, in a language the crow hadn’t heard for some time.
“They’d have me harm you,” the crow responded.
“Yes.”
“Let me. You’re old. It won’t hurt many.”