Water the Country

Water the Country

A short story by Kimber London

My mother’s funeral service was to take place in two and a half hours.

The only problem was, we still didn’t have her body.

I had less than three hours to uncover her disappearance and alleged death. Tearing apart my room I tossed clothes and books to the floor in search of her diary—as it was not locked up in my desk. I had confiscated it from her a week earlier when she had been going through an intense episode. I wondered if someone had gotten here before me until I discovered the tattered notebook underneath my mattress where I must have stashed it the night before. It wasn’t the first time I had blacked out with no alcohol. I flipped through the stained pages to find the entry I was looking for.

1-13–2020

12:34pm

It is Friday the 13th and the crows have come. A murder of 13 have gathered on the back fence. They are here to see the show, the theatre of my life watching my every movement, predicting my impulses, purveying my soul. And they will not leave until the arrival of their leader. The one who signals in the dark, the terror of the forest. I have heard its cry in the night.

It is coming for me.

The heart rate monitor on my smart watch notified me of acceleration. I had read this entry the night I had taken the journal from her and thought nothing of it, just more musings from my clinically deranged mother. I got up from the bed and walked quietly over to my window, scanning the grey blanketed sky stretching out over the fields behind my house before swiftly closing my curtains. Chills running down my aching spine.

Do you ever get the feeling that you’re being watched? Some call it “intuition” or “premonition,” or in extreme cases “paranoia.” I get it a lot but that’s probably because it’s genetic. My mother was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia at the age of 26, a year after I was born. Some of my earliest memories growing up involved her mental illness. From erratic behaviors and unpredictable mood swings to pathological lying, chronic mania and paranoia I never knew which version of her I was going to get. Some of the stories she would tell me of conspiracy theories and covert CIA operations still give me nightmares. 9/11 was an inside job, the movie industry is run by pedophiles, vaccines contain nano technology to change our DNA and Reptilian shapeshifters, aliens, and other extra terrestrials, or “star citizens” as she referred to them, have infiltrated world governments. I thought my mom was the smartest person in the world and I believed every word she said. Until I developed dissociative personality disorder in my third grade and went on medication. As I grew older I learned to tune out the madness and see my mother for who she truly was: a scared little girl afraid of the world and the possible reality than it was all meaningless and nothing was connected.

My mother believed a lot of things whole-heartedly. She even told me once that Princess Diana was alive and well living on a private island in Canada and that she and Michael Jackson and John F Kennedy Jr., who were also still alive, were going to reveal themselves when the time was right. But by the far the most firmly held belief she had was that the United States government had murdered all birds in existence between 1959 and 2001 replacing them with surveillance drones. “Operation Water the Country” disposed of millions of living birds with poison gas dropped by airplanes and now we were all being watched by these avian spies. I heard about it every day. She always said that’s why you’d see them all gathered on a power line together because they had to recharge.

I got expelled from school the day I murdered a pigeon on the playground. There were always so many of them at my school, walking around and especially sitting overhead on the power lines. So I set a trap to find out the truth for myself. My mother had been going through a psychotic episode that week and I remembered her saying something about pigeons being the most common decoys. I was devastated to find only a tangle of intestinal tissues and warm organs when I gutted the creature with my pocket knife.

Far from believing in conspiracies my mother lived in a world of different realities than the one I experienced in school and in my social life outside of my unstable household. My friends didn’t think it hurt my feelings when they called would call her a freak. Probably because I just laughed along with them. I was afraid of the part of her I related to, the part that made me question everything. Eventually her psychotic episodes became too much for my father who left our house one night after they’d had a particularly heated fight about some barn owl hanging out on the fence in the backyard. When he never came back she attempted suicide multiple times and was committed to a psychiatric facility. I became a ward of the state and was placed in the system when I was eleven years old, moving around until I dropped out of high school at sixteen.

For years I hated her. Hated what she’d done to our family, to herself, to me. I didn’t even go visit her for the first few years we were separated. I learned to raise myself. I took my pills and for the most part stayed sober. I got my GED and went on to study Clinical Psychology eventually becoming a Mental Health Specialist. I had a scholastic and experiential understanding of her illness and I developed the tools to help many others in similar situations. I didn’t want any children to grow up the way I did. Even when I learned to forgive my mother and did my best to understand her I have come to realize there will always be a piece of me deep down that resents her and the genetics she passed down to me. I ended up moving back into my childhood home with her to be involved in her daily care. Even though it wasn’t the easiest to be around her again, I realized how much I had missed my mother and took pride in being able to support her as she tried to do for me so many years ago. Naturally, when she disappeared, my whole world fell apart.

It was around 3:30 in the morning on Friday, December 13th when I woke up to a high-pitched shriek behind the house. I ran down the hall to see my mother’s door ajar, my mother nowhere to be found. Throwing on a pair of her slippers by the back door I ran outside into the darkness shouting her name into the wind. It was snowing heavily but there were no tracks in the snow. When I didn’t receive a response I panicked and dialed 9-11. As I hung up the phone waiting for the police to call, something white caught the corner of my eye out on the northern perimeter of the fence. Moving a little closer I began to distinguish the shape of a large bird, perched, looking directly at me. I froze in my tracks when it suddenly fell off the fence, landing on head first on the ground. Turning on my phone’s flashlight I ran. As I approached the fence I could see that it was a white barn owl and it appeared to be split down the middle. Looking closer I froze in my tracks when I saw them: dozens of colored wires sticking out of the bird, frayed from what appeared to be electrocution.

Police sirens in the distance startled me and for some reason I covered the owl in snow before returning to the house. Police said they found me passed out on the back porch. A missing person’s report was filed 24 hours later when my mother still hadn’t shown up. I started blacking out, losing track of small chunks of time, and I started hearing voices. At first it was my mother’s voice, telling me the terror of the forest was coming for me. And then it was other voices entirely, telling me I was being watched, that I was going to be hunted. I increased my medication and forgot about the bird in my backyard entirely.

A month passed and my mother’s case was closed. It was ruled a suicide connected to her history of mental illness even though they never found a body. I knew my mother had been suicidal, but for some reason I couldn’t accept that it as the cause of her disappearance. My mother was a drama queen and an event like that would have occurred in a manner accordingly where everyone could find her. My grandparents scheduled a funeral after she had been gone for three weeks, despite my attempts to convince them to wait until more evidence was found.

Breathing heavily I looked down at notebook in my lap, her last entry haunting me as I re-read the last line: “The one who signals in the dark, the terror of the forest. I have heard it’s cry in the night. It is coming for me.”

Slamming the journal shut I threw on my bathrobe and raced downstairs and sprinted into the backyard. The snow had melted since the night of her disappearance but despite looking everywhere I could not find the mysterious white owl I vaguely remembered fall from the fence. I began to dig up the earth, clawing at the ground with my bare hands, ripping up grass and turning over leaves. Dirty and distraught I looked up at the fence looming before me and paused as I heard a buzzing sound. I walked up to it and the sound became more distinct until I realized it was coming from an electrical wire running along the backside of the wood.

A crow screeched above my head, flying low as two more appeared from the trees. In a matter of minutes a whole murder of them were circling above my head, cawing in a specific pattern, over and over. The same tone, the same cadence simultaneously. As I stood there, frozen, unable to look away I heard a car alarm go off in the distance. All of a sudden the crows stopped and began to mimic the exact sound of the alarm and then flew off back into the forest.

My watch was beeping. I looked down to see my grandmother calling as the last crow froze in midair for several seconds before disappearing behind the trees.