The Ultimate Crow of Antigravity

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The white fritillaria were taking over the room.

They had started politely enough, a few white flowers standing in a glass like little chandeliers that had forgotten electricity. But by midnight they were everywhere, climbing toward the ceiling, occupying corners, quietly discussing real estate.

She dressed like a bat.

Black clothes, black shoes, black enough to make darkness look slightly underdressed. Around her neck hung a collar of euphorbia berries, red and luminous, as though somebody had made jewelry from the punctuation marks of a poisonous sentence.

There was belladonna in the room.

I could smell it, or imagined I could, which is sometimes the same thing after midnight. My pupils dilated until the world entered them without knocking.

Everything became a dark Impressionist painting.

The furniture dissolved first. Then the walls. Then the difference between the window and what was beyond it became merely an architectural rumor.

Outside, crows were flying across the northern city.

They passed through the lights and disappeared.

A crow would enter one side of the night and simply fail to come out the other, as though darkness had been waiting all evening to collect it.

The city stretched beneath us with ten thousand windows burning in apartments where people were washing dishes, making love, worrying about money, feeding cats, dying, being born, or standing in kitchens wondering why they had opened the refrigerator.

Farther away, those lights became smaller.

Then smaller still.

Until suddenly there was no sensible way to tell where the city ended and the constellations began.

Perhaps that is the secret purpose of cities: to practice being stars.

She sat beside the window while the fritillaria continued their bloodless invasion.

For a moment her red necklace looked like a tiny constellation orbiting her throat.

Then I understood something completely useless and therefore probably important.

The night sky was not empty.

It was a gigantic crow.

We were living inside its feathers.

Gravity was merely the bird holding us gently against itself while pretending not to notice.

And somewhere beyond the last streetlight, beyond the last star we had bothered to name, the ultimate crow of antigravity opened its wings.

Nothing fell upward.

Nothing fell down.

Everything simply disappeared into everything else.

The fritillaria knew this already.

Flowers usually do.