At the age of 12 my first and only chain letter arrived in the mail from one of my friends. Reading the letter was a strange experience, seeing something that “serious” written in another 12 year olds best cursive was laughable. The letter instructed me to hand copy (seven times) the contents of the letter and mail those copies to my other friends. If I failed to do so in the allotted time (seven days), seven years of bad luck would befall me. There were many stipulations including; use only white lined paper, no Xerox copies, and no repeat recipients. The list of the people to whom my friend had sent his copies (so there would be no mistakes in my addressing) dutifully followed as an addendum to the main body of the letter itself. I could not help but think how much time the seven-page letter took him to write, even if he was just copying. I never went through the trouble to find out, I told my friend he was an idiot.

Now we have e-chain mail letters, which are worse than their post office counterparts because all you have to do is forward them to everyone in your address book, no time, or postage required. Amazingly, the actual form of the letter has not changed much since my youth. Although the first paragraph usually contains a small preamble to the “original letter” and the customary letter opening of “Dear (your name),” has been removed. Some common e-chain mail preambles:

I thought this was just another bogus chain e-mail forward but…

This is cool…

And then there are the testimonials, thank you Ron Popeil.

“I thought the letter was bull and just deleted it like it was spam, and as soon as I did my hard drive crashed, can you believe it? I lost my doctoral thesis and now I won’t graduate for another two years…if only I had just forwarded on the message”
Joe M.
Portland, OR.

“I was so glad I forwarded on this message to all of my friends, I always thought the messages were kind of crap, but hey you never know right and when you have something on the line why take a chance… I won 277 million dollars in Power Ball that very night.”
Peggy T.
Walla Walla, WA

Make no copies of this and send them to yourself. This letter has been copy written and is intended for the private use of the addressee. Reproduction and/or making of chain letters out of this letter or it’s contents is strictly prohibited. This letter has been around for 70,000,000 years please break the chain if you do not many years of bad luck will come upon you.

In the closet:

Under your bed:

Jamie Sampson, age eight, was hit by a car at dusk on a Thursday. His bicycle, the angular frame bent and splashed with blood, ended up in the shrubbery that edged my mailbox. He did not wear a helmet, and his brains and bits of hair and scalp spread across the pavement casually, almost as though they had always been there or belonged there or had finally come home.

They did, in fact, create a stain that no amount of water seemed to wash away. After the accident, my husband and our neighbor spent hours with the garden hose pointed at the street, drinking beer, shooing our son away as the sun set and the moon rose. They still wore the funereal suits they had left the house in that morning. They stood like gatekeepers over the spot and glared at drivers who passed the house and dared to linger a bit too long.

I should tell you that my son saw everything. He and Jamie were playing some game, a game invented by boys, and if you asked him the rules he would shrug and glance at the ground. “Bikes,” he said, when I questioned him. “We were playing bikes.”

Later, I held him in my lap when he told the cops and Lisa and Alex Sampson, “I don’t remember.” He did not cry, and tried to slip out of my arms. He kicked me in the leg and I pinched his side, harder than I should have. “One minute he was riding and then he wasn’t. There was a car. It was white. I don’t remember.”

He would repeat this, as would I, for neighbors and teachers and aunts and uncles until it became the truth and took its place in the mountain of facts about a dead boy. It became something else for us to bury.

I tell no one, but every night I dream that Jamie is resurrected from the pavement. He walks up the driveway solemnly, with purpose, and I know he means to take my son back with him.

It has been years now, but time means nothing, you realize. Time is just a vehicle, really. It propels us forward and sometimes all we can do is watch helplessly as the world builds and collapses and builds itself back up again.

Each night, I rush and lock the doors, each one of them, just in time. I then lock the windows while Jamie stares at me with what used to be eyes. “Let me in,” he says. “Just for a minute. I promise.” I tell him no and to go back, but sometimes, I open the window just a crack. Sometimes, I let him slip his hand or his arm or half his body across the windowsill before I change my mind, push him away, and slam the window shut.

His fingers curl into sharp claws and he scratches deep gouges into the wood and the glass. “Please,” he says. “Please.”

My dream self smiles and says, “Maybe next time, Jamie. Come back tomorrow.”

The scraping noise, dragging across the kitchen counter, makes my heart bounce. I can feel it inside my ears. It’s not helping at all that I’m hiding under the table, hoping that the drop will kill it.

The monster, I mean.

My name is Alice, and I’m nine years old. I like green ribbons, and little plastic elephants, and playing with Matchbox cars in the dirt in my backyard. I hate sunburns, Jessica Chance at school, and Spam.

I used to like my cat, Jinx, a whole lot, but he’s laying down on the floor now, and I think he’s probably dead. This is also why I hate Spam.

The scrape comes again, followed by a little squelchy squishing sound. Peeking out from under the lace tablecloth, I can’t see the boxy tin can moving across the counter, but I can tell that it’s getting closer.

Jinx is definitely not breathing. I don’t know what that thing did to it, with its pink ropy arms, all slimy with fat, but I’m not sure I want to find out. His head is kinda twisted around, and he looks a little shriveled.

Mom would say his name was ironic. But then, if she hadn’t left me a can of Spam to make myself lunch today, my cat wouldn’t be dead. I’ll never look at a can the same again. I’m not sure what ugly, slimy things are waiting to jump out at me from the chicken noodle soup in the cupboard, or maybe even the box of condensed milk Mom keeps behind the flour and the sugar.

I had only just barely started turning that little key, to peel the top off, when the whole can started shaking. All I could think to do when it poked its little greenish-white eyeball out the top was to run and hide. Jinx hissed at it, and there was a snapping noise. I looked back over my shoulder, and saw the thing—the can was bulging at the sides, and the top had been ripped clean off.

I sneak another look under the snowflake lace—the scraping much, much closer—and catch a glimpse of the Spam Monster. It’s all pink skin, fat little squid-arms dragging its can like a hermit crab across the counter. I imagine that there are a whole bunch of teeth in there, somewhere. Pointy ones.

It looks right at me, and I swear that it’s drooling. I let out my most blood-curdling scream, well-practiced from having three older brothers, and the thing freezes.

The front door slams.

“Honey?! Is everything okay?” Her heels click-clack across the floor in the hallway, too quick.

The click-clacks stop in the kitchen door, and I catch her eyes. I see them go from the pink, gooey streak spread across the counter, to Jinx lying motionless on the tiles.

I am in so much trouble.

Jinx hops up, from floor to chair to counter, no longer content to play my game. He starts lapping at the Spam, in its carefully laid out path leading to the open container. My sculpture, my masterpiece, the Spam Monster, stands motionless as Mom watches Jinx lap at its face. One of its eyes, a peeled grape with a raisin shoved in the middle, rolls across the floor and stops at the tip of Mom’s shoe.

“Alice Elizabeth,” she spits through clenched teeth. My stomach unwinds just a little. This isn’t quite as bad as it could have been. She’s only using her kinda-mad voice. That’s three whole steps from her I’m-going-to-strangle you voice. “I am going to go upstairs and take a nice, warm bath. By the time I get back downstairs, this kitchen will be spotless, and Jinx will be off of the counter.”

I sulk. I’ve had a lot of practice at that, too.

“Do I make myself clear?” I note to myself that the sulking isn’t helping, as now she’s using her actual mad voice. Sometimes, these battles can’t be won.

“Yes, Mom.” Jinx meows a low little whine, his nose sticky with Spam. He probably thinks he’s helping. He’s loyal like that. Mom’s gone from the doorway, and I slink to the cupboard under the sink.

I have my own set of cleaning supplies, down here, with my name on masking tape in big block letters. I pull out the sponge and soap, and start scrubbing. It’s tough work, but really, how else are my parents supposed to learn that I like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch?

And unless she wants to come home next week to a giant mutant loaf of bread, oozing strawberry blood and peanut butter pus, Mom better cut the crusts off, too.

I awoke at dawn this morning to the sound of crows cawing outside my window. First one, then, from the sound of it, a group of them. I rolled over, and in my half-sleep I thought how strange it was to be hearing them in the middle of the city, to hear cawing from my bed so far from the tree-lined suburbs. My groggy brain muttered “grim portent,” then shut itself off to further thought, and I buried my face between the pillows. And swore at how loud they were.

I fell asleep again though. I know, because I dreamed. It was the end of the world. We had all fired off our bombs at one another, I guess, and the cities were now smoking wrecks, jumbled piles of steel and asphalt and broken concrete. Shattered glass. Dogs roamed the streets in packs, and crows flapped blackly from corpse to corpse, picking out eyeballs and bits of skin, and perching in long, somber rows along the edges of over-turned subway cars.

I woke up as my teeth started falling out, like rain, because of the radiation.

I went to my kitchen to make a bowl of cereal, and glanced out the window, at the fire escape. Perched there on the railing was a single, solitary crow. Quiet now, and alone, but very much there, and seemingly peering in through the glass. I smiled to myself, and whispered “nevermore” as I reached for the milk. The bird bobbed his head, and I realized he must not have been looking at me, but at his own reflection in the window.

Only this, and nothing more.

As I left the building and headed down the street, I heard him. Just two notes, a quick, throaty awk awk, then flapping, then the city’s usual gentle roar. Other than mild curiosity, I thought nothing of it. Why would I? I had other, more pressing things upon my mind. The usual swirl of laundry lists and arbitrary observations and rampant neurosis that accompanies my morning walk. Like how, speaking of minds, one of the most common causes of death among younger people –before the advent of drunk driving and gang violence– was brain aneurysms. And how usually they come as a complete surprise and just strike a person down, like a lightning bolt. Without so much as a warning. Without so much as a harbinger.

Not to put too fine a point on it.

It followed me. The bird. At first, I thought I was letting myself get carried away. I saw a crow on the signpost when I turned the corner. Three blocks later, another on top of the bus stop shelter. As I made my usual shortcut through the park, a crow, or the crow, alit on the granite edge of the empty fountain, just ten feet away, and watched me as I walked by. Stared at me with eyes like onyx, tilting her head sideways to follow my movement. So close I could see her throat pulse as she breathed. All the way to work, I thought I was going crazy. A crow on a building ledge, on a rain gutter, on a streetlight, on the topmost rail of a wrought-iron fence. Sometimes, practically on my shoulder.

At work, in the sane confines of my cubicle, I laughed at myself. Remembered how when I was a younger, more foolish man, and I thought the only people who had got religion right were Indians and Vikings, I would have believed this crow to be my spirit guide. Sort of cliché, though, and convenient, I thought. I winced at myself, and shook my head, and as work piled up, forgot all about it, or them, or whatever.

I left work frustrated and angry, as usual, and didn’t take note of any detail of my surroundings until halfway home, cutting once more through the park. There, twenty crows were waiting for me in silence. At least twenty. Maybe thirty. On my arrival, most of them rose up in a fluttering black mass and flitted about in the branches of the trees, never really settling. A few watched me from the ground or the backs of benches. As I followed the path through their midst, they hopped away from me, but without startling or taking flight, and always staring. Unbreakingly. One in the trees called down to me, like a warning, or more like an indictment. Ac-cuse, ac-cuse. And one, one detached itself from its brothers, and followed me home.

Murder. A group of crows is called a murder.

He or she is sitting on the railing of the fire escape right now, looking in, even though all my lights are off. Maybe two or three of the flock have joined it. I’m not a fool. I know this is not my imagination, and that I’m only barely losing my mind. Just as I know these birds have not come to offer spiritual advice, or to reveal my true nature, or to show me The Way. The guidance they offer is more firm in nature, the path more specific. Not teachers, these birds. Constables. Dark, unforgiving escorts. They are waiting, because they know. I think, maybe, because of the odd winter we’ve been having, they’re just a little off. Arrived a day early.

Tonight, I will go to sleep. And I will be awoken, not at dawn this time, but in the cold small hours of the night. And finally, one of them will speak, not in quaint one-word rasps, like an idiot parrot, but in a calm deep voice, thick and old:

“I’ll give you a head start.”

And I will bolt from my bed and try to run, but my legs will crumple underneath me, and a cold wedge of pain will pierce briefly through the folds of my brain, like ice, like a beak, and then like nothing.

A final sharp severing.

And like a worm, or a plucked eyeball, they will carry whatever is left of my soul, wriggling, to whatever awaits beyond.

On a bright, gray, February Sunday, Gina, Greg and I entered the furnace room of a burnt out brick building in a lawless section of Brockton where Greg has been filming for three years. The furnace room is accessed either through a second room in the building, or through a back door that opens onto a rusted platform grate, beneath which is a six foot drop to the concrete floor, which is littered with trash of all sizes, and feces of questionable origins. Greg calls this place the furnace room because it is dominated by a dormant furnace, which is at least twelve feet high, and can be scaled by use of a metal rung ladder attached to its side. The land this building occupies is peopled by the homeless and witnesses shady transactions on a daily basis.
That Sunday we were preparing the furnace room for a small film shoot. Some of the equipment bags were left on the platform by the back door; the rest was on the floor of the furnace room. It was 11:30; we had been setting up there for twenty minutes. Greg was halfway up the furnace ladder to tie off a string when we heard a clang in the adjoining room. We all paused and looked at the door. A moment later we heard another clang of metal against metal, accompanied by angry grunting. We exchanged concerned glances.
Without thinking twice about it, I hurled myself at the metal platform with an overwhelming sense of urgency. My chest was on top of the grating, but I had difficulties pulling myself up. The clanging and yelling was still going on in the next room. Someone pushed my foot and I scrambled to my feet. Gina came up after me. Our eyes darted to the other door in anticipation and dread of who might enter the furnace room at any moment. Greg handed us the film equipment and we helped him out last. He closed the door and peeked through the crack. “Maybe he’s collecting metal,” he said. We picked up the gear and walked quickly along the chain link fence that runs beside the train tracks, maneuvering through underbrush and junk piles. At a safe distance from the building we stood and stared, the noise was still audible. A few minutes passed, and then a dark figure emerged from the building. He had a sledge hammer, and grunted as he smashed an oil drum on his way out of the lot. “Or maybe he’s just really pissed-off,” Greg concluded.

Every morning at 7:40, she boards the bus, wearing one of two jackets – navy blue and full of down, or charcoal gray worsted wool – depending on the weather. It’s been a mild winter so far, but more than a few days have blown their cold, bitter breath beneath his creaky front door. He only has one coat, a fatigue-colored winter jacket that he’s had for years. The elastic-bound bracelet sleeves are frayed, and the elbows have faded from military green to soupy pea, but he sees no point in replacing it. It still keeps him warm.

He’s noticed that she winds scarves around her neck, under her coats. Here is where the variety lays – nubby white, carrot-orange, or, recently, a richly-hued red which bleeds over her throat. She only has one pair of gloves that he’s seen, woven and black, tucked into her cuffs. He envisions her slipping her hands into its knit before shrugging into her coat and pulling its zipper taut. He can picture her as a small child, being sealed into a pale pink parka before tumbling out the door to play in the snow.

The bus bumps down Broadway with a rhythmic stop-and-go regularity, and he absentmindedly rubs his thumb and forefinger together. Without fully realizing even that he’s doing it, he wonders what the zipper would feel like in his hands, or her scarves against his wrinkled cheek, or her gloved palms pressed against his chest, under his shirt.

Closing his eyes, he rests his head against the bus’s curved windows of shatterproof glass. All the while he sees his fingers making a tight bracelet around her wrist, her skin smooth against his calloused thumbs. He can’t keep himself from imagining the pressure of her hips against his.

Although he knows he shouldn’t, he plots out in his head her route home. He runs though the bus schedule he has memorized, and considers the various possible times at which she might head back up Broadway to her stop at Edison Street. He will ride public transit until he discovers this, and then he will get off at her stop behind her, and follow her home. He won’t touch her. He’ll keep his distance as she walks up the path to her door. He’ll stand across the street, outside the halo of light cast onto the sidewalk by the streetlamp, and watch her enter her house. He’ll do all this, but he won’t ever touch her. It doesn’t hurt to look.