The Crow Waving Through a Window
By Lilia Mahfouz:
Day One
The wind blows. The curtains shiver. The gaps stay hidden. It is too early. I pull the sheet over me.
The machine’s alarm beeps as it backs up. It moves forward, then back again, tearing down the abandoned hangars, the walls around them, the metal roofs folding in on themselves. I cover my ears.
I think of the small shrub that once grew there, through a break in the roof. I could see it from my window. Crows sometimes perched on it.
Day Six
The wind cracks against the roof. I live on the top floor of the oldest tower in the projects. One day it will be torn down too.
My windows tremble. A thin gray dust coats the glass. I cannot trace anything in it.
The yellow bulldozer moves through columns of dust. It grinds metal, stone, concrete, its sharp beeps cutting through everything.
I took a sleeping pill. An antidepressant.
They said it would be better after. New housing. A parking lot. A daycare. Even a playground. After. In two years.
The site is wide open. Nowhere to go.
Day Fifteen
All of them are running now. Loaders. Excavators. Backhoes.
Hell has dropped beneath my windows. The air will not go into my lungs. I shake sometimes. From cold. From anger.
Nowhere to go.
Day Twenty-Five
A lull at noon. The workers are gone. I open the windows.
Dust rushes in. I cough. I swallow another pill with water.
Below me, the site is a pit of gray earth. Uneven. Dull. Deep. It holds me there.
The wind rises in bursts. It pulls me toward the dark. I turn in the air, a dust particle.
A crow crosses my path.
I had never noticed how blue its feathers shine.
Lilia Mahfouz is a French author based in Paris. A recipient of the Society of Dramatic Authors and Composers Writing Prize, her work has appeared in numerous French literary journals, including Zone Critique, Marginales, Rue Saint Ambroise, and L’Encrier Renversé, as well as in a range of American and British literary magazines such as Ink In Thirds, Fiction on the Web, Quail Bell Magazine, In Parentheses, The Literary Hatchet, MoonLit Getaway, Hidden Peak Press, Grey Sparrow, Wild Greens, Skipjack Review, Lit Shark Magazine, and Fjords Review, among others.
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