flash friday 1-31-2014 write a flash about a man of steel in Flash Friday

She would talk to crows; not at them, with them. She would not talk to Purple Martins, not Owls, not the bright red cardinals or the dull dusty cardinals, not jays, or robins; she would talk to crows. I saw her doing it. Everyone who watched could see her doing it. Some, like me, would even ask her about it. Typically she would dismiss these people. I don’t know why she talked to me about talking to crows. Though I know the difference between me and everyone else I don’t expect others to recognize it. In the broad sense; I am I and you aren’t. That’s the difference. It’s not unique, just exclusive, the being of me.

She would talk to crows even when she swallowed her anti-psychotics, SSRI’s, and various other things western asylums use to make it easier to herd crazy people. It might be true of eastern asylums, I wouldn’t know. It might even be a reasonable strategy. I have opinions, but, like my identity, I recognize the difference between mine and yours. I worked at the place. I wrote once, for some reason or the other, when I was in the service of my country “… the dead whose limbs can be counted and the not dead whose limbs cannot …” I don’t know what I meant, but it’s that way with crazy too. You don’t know how crazy you are until either someone tells you or the story is over.

She told me that crows gossip a lot and often they aren’t any more interesting than people. I had waited for that thought to finish. That’s all there was to it, so I asked her why bother. She was quiet for a few minutes sometimes that meant she was thinking, sometimes it meant a dismissal. She asked me why I talked to her. I started to answer, she held my eyes, so I stalled my pat guy-who-works-at-the-nuthouse- answer and thought about it. I thought about it in context.

“Because you say things other people don’t,” imprecise I thought for a moment more, “Because you talk to crows.”

“yes,” she said with the patience of a grade school teacher letting the slow student spell it out, “and crows, gossipy and shallow as most might be, they fly, they go places I can’t, and whether they articulate it or not, they see the world like a … crow.”

Later I was at a bar with some of the guys I worked with. I started up a conversation with a young woman. Her friends joined me and my friends, and when it was time to leave she came home with me and we had drunken sloppy sex. I made us coffee in the morning. We both tried to be brave, civil, and unembarrassed.

“So, tell me what you do,”

“I’m an orderly at the Beekman center.”

“Oh, wow, that must be interesting.”

I fought off the urge to caw.

Prompt

engage the reader intimately