By Prospero Dae
I repaired a birdhouse and built two new ones (with modern plumbing and art deco furniture). I was obviously going to have to up the rent. That’s when the nightmares started. I was a school teacher in a small town and was being watched by crows. It all seemed familiar. Finally, as the birdhouses became vacant, I took them down and burned them in a pyre.
Months later I was fighting with my insurance adjuster over the drapes in my home. The fire might have been revenge, but my insurance company was decidedly crueler than an aggrieved bird could ever be!
Obviously the insurance company did not want to settle because the adjuster found the butt of a stogie near the windows where the curtains hung… probably left there on purpose by Jim Crow (Disney’s cigar-smoking corvus) to get even, and incriminate you.
So many possibilities left pending, in this story, which is perhaps what makes it a most interesting story.
Wow! A very short and a very unique story, I hope to read more stories by this author.
Yeah I echo Marchell reaction, wow Prospero!
Definitely a very unique story, Prospero, and so well written.
But I thought you, dear Cynthia, would have been all over Hitchcock with this one. The birds, the eponymous villains from the movie, were inexplicable, heightening the sense of horror (though not for me, naturally). But you have to admit, insurance adjusters are pretty scary in so far as they are rude and inexplicable.
Insurance adjusters…bah…not only can they be rude, they are altogether too explicable. I saw “The Birds” in a local cinema when it first came out. As with most Hitchcock films (except for “Psycho”) it crossed a line that, for me, put it away from fright and into the ridiculous. So I did not tremble, I laughed. Sometimes inexplicability is maddening, sometimes frightening, and sometimes just plain droll. I seem forced to live— and have come to love— a certain amount of inexplicability. Which is why I love your stories.