The Crow Highway

Thanks again to Dan Mader and his Friday flash fiction challenges. Here is the latest two minutes-worth of strangeness to be dredged from the dank recesses, in which Ted Hughes meets Iain Banks, maybe? Along with something far less savoury.

Exercises like these force you to not think about your writing, to allow the words to emerge largely unedited and unfiltered, stream-of-consciousness style, which makes them interesting on a psychological and a literary level. Not sure what they reveal. Not sure I want to know. Although I suspect Crow knows.

I live on the crow highway. We all do. Crow wants us to bleed. Crow wants us to smile and reveal rotten teeth. Crow himself smiles as he hears us moan in our sleep. As children are beaten. As wives are punched. Crow doesn't smile because any of this makes him happy. No, crow smiles because he knows all things find resolution somewhere along the loop and that a predatory beak stab here will become the tugged, torn earthworm there, and that the once-assailed will be the assailant, somewhere along the crow highway.