Green died and then hedidn’t.
He twisted his ankle and toppled off the curb. Pain flashed as his cheekbone hit the blacktop. Twenty feet away, the crushing mass of a city bus rolled toward him.
Cheek on the pavement, he watched the zigzag tread of a bus tire, ten, nine, eight feet off and closing.
Brakes squealed. Too late.
At the office, ad copy for a new psoriasis medication sat half written next to a wilting pothos plant. At home, a shadow box diorama of an old Model T car made from salvaged clock parts sat unfinished next to a sewing box full of tiny gears, springs, and minute hands. He was less than a breath away from the lesson that lives are not finished, they are concluded. That lesson was arriving at thirty-five miles per hour.
The black tire filled his vision. No time to scream.
One final thought.
No, this isn’t how it happens.
Then, he was back, standing on the sidewalk as if someone else’s life had been roughly spliced atop his own.
It was a crude edit, his death overwritten. The bus roared past, stinging his eyes with grit and a wall of warm, displaced air.
He might have wept or collapsed, but before he could a sound sucker punched him like a thunderclap. It was a caw that sent him stumbling backward, knocking a rolling suitcase from an elderly man’s grasp.
Time moved sluggishly.
The man shouldered Green aside and retrieved his luggage, muttering something vicious that Green didn’t catch. A bystander with graying dreadlocks looked up from his phone, then back down.
Green saw the crow.
On a nearby No Parking sign, a black bird the size of a golden retriever was croaking and chittering, punctuated by caws loud enough to rattle storefront windows. The sounds kicked over something inside Green’s guts. The looming creature paused and looked at him as if waiting for an answer.
No one else stopped. No one else looked at the crow.
A final corvid cry inexplicably sent Green’s hand to his pocket.
There was something new there. He pulled it out.
An acorn the color of coffee with cream sat on his open palm. It was a commonplace object that menaced him with its simple presence.
The crow was gone.
His old life was gone with it.
Not finished. Concluded.
Beyond Green’s awareness, somewhere in the Catskill Mountains, a peculiar patch of woods and the things that hunted there were waiting for him. Already, the thread-thin roots of a place he had never visited were reaching for his future. New pathways sprouted from the moment like mushrooms after sunset.
In the dark soil at the edge of his perception, dangerous ideas were growing.
Green steered his indigo ToyotaPrius around another switchback, stitching his way into the mountains. He willed himself to stop clenching his jaw and try to enjoy the beauty of the landscape, raising his thumb to massage a knot of muscle just below his ear. It was no good. Fifty miles ago, the approaching mountainside wilderness looked beautiful. Now, as cell service became spotty and the sun sank low, beauty shifted to threat.
The one comfort of Green’s drive into the wilderness was that he could not be lost because he didn’t know where he was going.
The acorn rested in his pocket, its figurative weight transferring through his leg to press on the accelerator. That strange little object drove him forward. Only habits and memories drew him back.
His condo in the city was sold.
His resignation was accepted in a neutral, businesslike manner.
His uncle in Columbus didn’t object to being his forwarding address while he “shopped around for a new town to call home.”
