My daughter and I were filling one of the bird feeders in the backyard when our new neighbor knocked on our fence. It wasn’t a privacy fence, just a few horizontal boards at waist height to delineate property lines, but he rapped his knuckles on the wood to get my attention. I suppose that was polite, but I didn’t feel it.

He was short and muscular, the kind of body built in gyms. He wore jeans and a tight black t-shirt to show off what he obviously worked hard to achieve. He introduced himself.

“Howard Johnsen, with an e,” he said as though I might mix up the man with the motel chain. “I see you like birds.”

“Yes, well, my daughter is the real ornithologist,” I said, walking over to the fence. “I’m just the birdseed buyer.”

“Do you have a key to my house?” 

I hadn’t even had a chance to introduce myself yet, but thought I recognized a specific desperation in Howard’s question.

“Oh no,” I said, “did you lock yourself out?”

“The previous owner said she gave a set of keys to the neighbor.”

“Maybe you can get in through a basement window?”

“I’m not locked out.”

“Oh.”

“She said she gave you keys to feed her cat while she was away.”

“Oh, the poor dear, her cat died a couple of years ago. Such a sweet woman, but she obviously couldn’t live on her own anymore, and her sons were... “

“Do you now, or have you ever had keys to my house?”

I was taken aback. My new neighbor sounded curt or at least direct, like a military man or maybe a cop, so I responded as I would to a traffic stop.

“No,” I said firmly. “No keys.”

Howard stood eyeing me, arms crossed in front and slightly away from his chest, the way ten-year-old bullies do to make their biceps appear bigger. The silence between us stretched to awkward. Had it been night, we would have literally heard crickets. As it was, there was only the chattering of chickadees.

“Man, those birds,” he finally said. “They’re driving me crazy!”

“The birds? Really?”

I understand when people don’t like crows because they are bossy and noisy. But the crows hadn’t taken over yet. We had nothing but songbirds when Howard first moved in. I wasn’t sure how to respond to his comment, and didn’t need to. The birds were just Howard’s jump-off point for a litany of complaints that followed. The neighborhood was noisy. The street was busy. The schools were dicey. I didn’t point out that I worked hard to afford the neighborhood he so casually disdained. People say things without thinking. I wanted to give Howard the benefit of the doubt. Besides, I couldn’t get a word in edgewise.

“I had to sell my five-thousand square foot house in the hills for this pit thanks to my ex,” he said.

Ah, and there it was, the reason for his bitter diatribe, that sharp-bladed scythe that makes short straws of half of all marriages; divorce.

“Sorry,” I said. “The first year is rough.”

“My bitch ex is making it rough!”

I glanced at my daughter, Francie, hoping she hadn’t heard. I could tell by the way she was suddenly intensely interested in the grass under the bird feeder that she had. 

“She sold my virgin scratch-offs,” he said in a can-you-believe-it tone.

“Virgin scratch-offs?”

“I had two from every state that has a lottery, and I come home to find out she sold them on eBay for next to nothing,” he said. “They were in vinyl sleeves to protect them and then — pouf —gone!”

“You collect unscratched scratch-offs?”

“Limited editions,” he said, “highly collectible.”

“OK,” I said, kind of laughing, “I’ll have to trust you on that.”

“You sound like my bitch ex.”

I’d had enough of Howard. I excused myself to see to my daughter, but, hoping to end on a positive note, officially welcomed him to the neighborhood.

“You might find you like living here,” I said brightly.

“I suppose you can get used to anything,” he said.

The next day, Howard replaced all the locks on his doors.

I wrestled the bag from the trunk of the car. Francie had convinced me to buy the twenty-five-pound sack of birdseed. A few crows had discovered the feeders by then, and they ate a lot. “They need fuel,” Francie said. “It’s going to snow.”

I silently tallied how much I’d spent since my daughter fell in love with birds. There was the seed, the books, three feeders from the Audubon Society gift shop, and $65 on a metal locker for the seed to keep the squirrels out. I bought an old gym locker from Francie’s middle school. They auctioned them off as a fundraiser for the drama department. My daughter was a self-described “theater nerd.” She wasn’t one for the spotlight but liked the machinations of backstage.

“You get the locker door,” I said, struggling under the weight of the seed bag.

I’d spent an additional ten bucks for brackets and screws to keep the thing from toppling over every time it was opened.

“Ready? Watch out,” I warned, then dropped all twenty-five pounds onto the metal floor. It thundered like the sound effects of The Tempest. Francie had banged thin sheets of aluminum backstage for the school production. Another kid flicked the overhead lights off and on for lightning.

Francie’s phone rang. It was her dad. Winter break was coming up, and they needed to make arrangements. I nodded for her to go ahead while I finished up in the garage. My head was still half in the gym locker when a voice boomed from behind.

“More birdseed? Are you kidding me?”

I turned around. 

“How are you doing, Howard?”

“Not so great because of those damned birds,” he said. 

He stood under the raised garage door, silhouetted by the fading daylight. He was just a loud voice and a shadow of complaints. The birds woke him every morning, he said. They pooped on his car. They teased his cat.

“They tease your cat,” I echoed his words, hoping he would hear how ridiculous he sounded. “The birds do that?”

“They do!”

I laughed. I shouldn’t have, but I did.

“You and your goddamn birds,” he said. 

I apologized for laughing, which only made things worse. That’s when Howard totally lost his shit. He said birds carried disease and lice, and mites. He claimed he got chiggers from the wrens. He threatened to call the county, something about the plague. I stood in silence while he ranted on. Finally, having exhausted himself and his vocabulary, Howard resorted to a terse “fuck you” and stormed off. Had I at any point before then pushed the button for the garage door, it would have come down smack on his head.

                                      

It snowed overnight. I woke to find Francie elbow-deep at the kitchen sink. We didn’t have a dishwasher. I hung a feeder by the window so Francie could watch the birds while she washed, but she put the dirty mugs and cereal bowls on pause.

“Look,” she whispered.

A crow had landed on the windowsill. It strutted back and forth on the narrow ledge, leaving little tracks in the snow. He looked hilariously proud. He cocked his head as though trying to make sense of what we were doing on the other side of the glass. Francie watched him watching her. After a while, he flew off.

“That was cool,” she said.

We marveled at how curious he appeared. A minute later, the bird was back. He held something shiny in his beak. He hopped over to set it on the window ledge closest to Francie: a foil gum wrapper.

“I think he likes you,” I said.

A few days later, Francie came home from school to find a small silver heart on the window ledge. She showed me the moment I walked through the door.

“Another gift from the crow,” she said, holding out her palm to show me. “It must have come off a charm bracelet.”

“No, that’s a milagro, a sacred heart,” I said, hanging my coat.

I spent twelve years in Catholic school and a lifetime trying to sort through the damage. The one thing on which Francie’s father and I had effortlessly agreed; no religious education for our daughter. We wanted her to find her own way, and she did. Francie discovered her God in the earth and the sky and the animals.

“I want to keep this,” she said, then disappeared upstairs. 

I heard her rummaging around the linen closet. I checked the fridge for something resembling dinner. The veggie burgers I’d bought when Francie tried to go meatless had freezer burn. I wondered if I could doctor them with bacon and make them edible. Francie came back down to the kitchen carrying the pink jewelry box her grandmother had given her for her fifth birthday. She lifted the lid. A plastic ballerina on a spring popped up. 

“I finally found a use for this,” she said. 

In one of the pink velvet-lined compartments meant for jewelry, she’d tucked the tiny silver heat.

“If the crows bring anything, save it. Even gum wrappers,” she said, because I’d thrown the first away without thinking.

“Sure.”

Then Francie did something she hadn’t done in years; she turned the key on the back of the box. A plinkity-plink rendition of My Favorite Things followed. The two of us stood watching the plastic ballerina pirouette in front of the mirrored lid as though it were really something.

In the following days, more gifts appeared. Francie said it wasn’t just one crow but several that took to leaving tiny shiny treasures on the windowsill. Sometimes we saw the delivery. Other times, we’d come home to discover bits of broken glass, a silvery dime, or a fragment of copper wire placed just so on the snowy ledge. Francie, never one to anthropomorphize, surprised me by saying she thought the crows were leaving us thank-you gifts for keeping the feeder full.

“Let me see, twenty dollars worth of birdseed for one metal pull tab off a Coke can,” I said. “I think we’re getting ripped off.”

Francie knew I shared her fascination with the crow gifts. For her birthday, I gave her a pocket-sized Moleskine with crow-print endpapers. She decided to use it to record dates and descriptions of each item left behind. Her handwriting was tiny, the letters meticulously shaped.

By March, the snow had retreated to the shadows on the North side of the house, and the crows dropped off newly uncovered treasures: a penny, a bit of tinsel, a strand of metallic curling ribbon. 

One Saturday afternoon, we pulled into the driveway and Francie jumped out to see what gift awaited her on the windowsill. Howard was in his backyard removing the thermal cover from his barbecue, one of those stainless steel gas ones that cost more than my stove. 

“Didn’t your mother ever teach you not to touch disease-ridden crap?” he asked Francie. “You’ll get bird flu.”

My daughter, normally pretty placid, deadpanned, “I’ll take my chances.”

I stayed behind the wheel of the car, pretending I hadn’t heard their exchange until Howard went inside.

       

A reporter from the Town Crier phoned. The woman said a reader called to suggest an op-ed on the health hazards of feeding wildlife. “But the more I learned, the intrigued I was by the little girl who fed crows,” she said. “Is it true the birds bring your daughter gifts?”

I told her Francie kept a detailed record of each crow delivery and stored the trinkets in her ballerina jewelry box. 

“How sweet,” she said. “I would love to interview her.”

Much to my surprise, Francie agreed. She considered crows to be greatly misunderstood.

The day the paper arrived on our doorsteps, Howard was in his backyard spraying the spring lawn with something indisputably toxic. Even from a distance, the smell caught in my throat. Howard didn’t seem bothered by it. He wore a plastic container of weed killer on a strap slung across his body like a weapon. Bent at the waist, he searched the ground for signs of the enemy, spray nozzle poison at the ready.

“Did you see the article?” I asked.

He had. Howard pumped the plastic plunger on his weed killer to get more juice flowing.

“You know what a flock of crows is called?” he asked, “A murder.”

“I know! A murder of crows! Isn’t that hilarious? Who names these things, Edgar Allen Poe?”

Howard didn’t even crack a smile. He pumped a few more times then turned his back to me, aiming his wand at some imagined evil lurking in the grass.

My Wednesday meeting ran late. Francie understood that these things happen. I texted her, said I’d pick up something on the way home. Pizza? Chinese? Her response: Just come home! Maybe she’d made dinner for us. Her specialty was mac-and-trees: a box of Kraft macaroni with sprigs of frozen broccoli stirred in. Anything, so long as I didn’t have to cook. We could light candles and celebrate something. We were good at making up fake holidays.

By the time I rolled up the driveway, it was almost seven. Francie met me at the back door.

“Sorry! My boss is such a...,” I stopped when I saw her eyes, pink and swollen. “What is it?”

“They’re dead,” she said.

“Who?”

“The birds.”

She’d found them when she got home from school, a half-dozen crows on their backs on the ground, feet up. 

“One was still alive,” she said, “barely.”

Then she started crying again. All I could do was hold her. She felt as fragile as a broken bird.

Francie didn’t want to go to school the next day. I called in sick, too. The dead crows, still scattered on the grass around the bird feeder, were visible from the kitchen window. I knew Howard had something to do with it. I had no proof and no doubt. I pulled the curtains closed before Francie came downstairs.

We had breakfast. We talked about the birds. She wanted to bury them. She didn’t think it was right to toss them in a mass grave.

“Separate holes,” I agreed. 

She cried some more. I held her close. I worried. 

“I’m fine, Mom,” she said.

I knew she wasn’t, but I knew she would be. 

Francie went up to shower. The kitchen was a mess. I cleared the dishes, wiped down the counters, and swept the floor. I filled the sink with hot water and too much soap until the bubbles spilled over into the adjoining basin. Then slowly, ceremoniously, I submerged each bowl, cup, and plate one by one, like burying sailors at sea. I stared out the window, following some faraway fragment of an idea until a sudden swoop of black brought me back: A crow. The bird was about to land on the window ledge when it startled to see me. It turned sharply skyward and, in doing so, dropped something sparkly from its beak.

I considered calling my daughter. Instead, I slipped outside. A fat crow sat on the low fence between Howard’s yard and my own.  I took slow baby steps down the back stoop stairs. The grass felt cold on my bare feet. In a few weeks, I’d need to mow. Tulips would bloom. With my eyes on the crow, I toe-combed the lawn until I felt it. Slowly, I crouched down to pick up this latest gift: a single key on a shiny silver fob. The raised HJ monogram glinted in the sunlight.

About the author:

Vivian McInerny is a journalist and fiction writer. Her short stories are published in several journals and anthologies, including 805 Lit+Art, Vocal 25, and Skive. An excerpt from her unpublished novel is used in the curriculum of Los Angeles high schools through the Locavore program. Versify HMH, now HarperCollins, published her 2021 picture book. It earned an American Library Association starred review, Amazon editors' pick, and was a Bank Street 2022 selection of the year's best books. She is working on a memoir about backpacking the Silk Road at age eighteen.

@VivianMac