2.

One day at recess, alone behind the jungle gym, the boy spots a crow perched on a low pine branch. He is used to seeing entire flocks in this tree. At dusk dozens will gather together on its branches, visible from across the playground as a cloud of black specks. They dot the treetop then, like ticks in a green flank. Even at that distance he can hear them cawing, a dark sharp sound that they seem to draw from deep within the tree itself, their black bodies growing engorged with it. After school each afternoon, waiting for his mother in the parking lot, the boy will watch them, listening. Today, however, there is only the one crow, and although its beak hangs open, it does not caw. It is perfectly silent. It just sits there, cocking its head and blinking its beady eye in profile. The boy keeps expecting the crow to caw, to let the tree speak through it, in a voice infinitely older than it is. But its beak gapes and no sound comes out. If the boy listens carefully, he can distinguish the rustle of a breeze, some wind in the needles. And then it is possible to imagine that this hissing is emanating from the bird’s beak, in steady crackling waves, like static from a broken radio. That is the closest it comes to cawing. Maybe, if he startled it, he could get it to caw, the boy thinks. He kneels at the base of the tree, palming a pinecone from the ground. It is pear-shaped, and imbricated with brown scales, like a grenade of shingles. Rising, he readies the cone at his shoulder, the way a shot-putter would. The crow keeps cocking its head back and forth in its branch. Its beak never narrows. The jaws’ twin points remain poised at a precise and unchanging angle, as though biting down on something that the boy can’t see: an invisible twig, or tuft of grass. Materials for its nest. The boy waits for the crow to blink, then lobs the pinecone. It misses by a foot, crashing through the foliage and landing behind the tree somewhere. The crow is unfazed. It retracts its head on its neck slightly, but it doesn’t caw, and it is careful neither to widen nor narrow its beak. It really is as if there is something in its mouth, something that it is determined not to drop. But its mouth is empty, and so the boy imagines that it is this very emptiness that it is bringing back to its nest: that it is building a nest of absences, gaps. The way it jealously hoards this absence between its mandibles, like a marble. Its beak must be broken, the boy decides, broken open. Or else, no: the bird is simply stubborn. It could caw if it wanted to. It is resisting only to spite him. He gathers four more pinecones. The longer the crow refuses to caw, the louder its silence becomes.