Illustration by Sully Kiefert

Just before the turn into Sully’s house, I saw a roadkill possum on the opposite side of the road. As I turned the wheel, I kept my eyes fixed on it. Poor thing, I thought. It’ll still be rotting when I leave, only with a new tiremark tattoo across its back and more of its internals leaking out of its mouth. My attention was recentered when I careened onto the gravel, which is always bad for the brain. Hearing all the little stones reverberate through the frame of my car creates so much mental static, it becomes impossible to enjoy the first few minutes of my stay. I tried the Ginsberg method of humming the noise out of my environment, but I accidentally hummed Sully out too. I had started walking up to the house before I noticed him calling my name from the porch.

A few hours later, we were standing on the same porch waiting for a ride to the movies. Looking again to the road, we saw a single vulture picking at the possum’s midsection and dragging it a little further into the way of passing cars. Sully told me that he had been out walking his dog Mazzy a couple days earlier when he looked up and noticed a couple of them circling his house. He had gone inside because of how ominous they made the sky, but he didn’t have any real concern for his animal. 

“At least they don’t eat living things,” he said.

“Oh, they do,” I told him. I know this because the employees at the Weis in Boonsboro feed stray cats behind the building, and every time I leave the parking lot, there’s a line of vultures posted on the fence, waiting for them to skulk by. 

Mark Twain said, “When a man loves cats, I am his friend and comrade without further introduction,” and I happen to feel the same. Thus, I am no friend of vultures. 

But I told Sully that he probably didn’t need to worry about Mazzy anyway. She’s a semi-formidable shepskie; it’d probably take at least a troupe of the nasty things to pick her up off the ground. He nodded and turned back to the road. We watched on silently while it flapped its wings, tearing some more flesh away.

After we got back from the Michael movie, we spent most of the night deep in conversation. At some point, I picked up my phone for seemingly no reason. I was mid-sentence when I heard its preternatural call. Not exactly a siren song, but more like a tolling bell. It wasn’t my jittery dopamine addiction fueling this desire, no… the Holy Psychic Radio was blaring garbled static. I knew something strange had happened. 

The text had been sent by my girlfriend three minutes beforehand. It read, “Trump got shot at again.” From the phrasing, I already knew that it hadn’t been a success, but some Loser’s Sense of Masochism made me check the news anyway. 

Sully and I both knew the video was suspicious. We couldn’t even tell a gun had been fired the first couple times we watched it. We had to turn my computer up full-bore and lean into the speakers before we could hear the flat pops in the background. There were headlines about a champion SS agent who was saved by his bulletproof vest. We watched the video one more time without the sound, paying attention to the President’s perfectly formed ears. How long, O Lord, how long? What will the next reason be? He needed to be shot the first time to be reelected, now he needs to be shot to make us forget about all the children he raped. The implications of this performance were too much for either of us to handle, so we went back to recreating Joe Jackson as a Mii. 

A couple hours later I was asleep on the couch, but I couldn’t be comforted by my subconscious either. No rest for the wicked, I guess; but what sins have I committed recently? We can’t count those unfair tests of character the Lord threw at me over the past week, because those were designed to be failed. Seventeen cumulative hours spent chunk-chunking away on dull Big Band music in the presence of grossly personal skullsuckers would have me flunking any kind of test. What’s the plan, O Creator? What should I have learned?

Ultimately, it was a test of my brain’s own making that really jolted me. I dreamed of a civil conversation that isn’t likely to take place, and a series of kisses that definitely never will. I dreamed of being observed in this treacherous act by very sinister agents, and I felt real paranoia. I had done something I wasn’t supposed to. I knew it, so did they, and soon my girlfriend would too. As I ran to the comfort of a friend, more eyes turned to me. The lips I had just felt so intimately now gawked at me from afar. When I fell into the lap of my confidant, I looked back again and she was even further away, now looking forlorn through the window of a ridiculously large house.

I felt sick when I woke up. I was starting my day with bile already risen to my throat, no cure in sight. I stretched my whole body, shaking, feeling weak and exhausted. I felt my feet push against something plushy, and looked down to find Mazzy laying at the end of the couch. I stretched my arm out to reach her and scratched the soft fur on her thigh. I let my head fall back against the pillow and closed my eyes, trying desperately to not dream again.

And it worked. I woke up a second time when Sully was calling Mazzy to take her out. She tramped over me on her way, but I didn’t mind. I didn’t need any more sleep. Not that I was ready to get up–I rolled on my side and grabbed my phone from the coffee table as Sully took her on a walk. 

I was reading my girlfriend’s dreams when Sully came back inside. I thought it was awfully quick, so I put my phone down and looked up at him with furrowed brows. 

“There are more vultures now. Mazzy wouldn’t go.” He was shaking his head, not looking at me. “She just tried running at them.” 

“Jesus,” I said. “How many more?”

“Three at least,” he said, unclipping the leash from her collar. 

“Well, she’s gotta go sometime.” 

Sully’s eyebrows scaled his face. “She won’t with those fuckin’ birds out.” 

I thought about this for a moment, looking at nothing in particular. Slowly, I started to nod my head. “Alright,” I said finally. “Let’s drive the birds out, then.”

As I tied my blue Chucks in my standardly lame way, I heard wood scraping against wood and turned my head. Sully was drawing up some weird plank of wood from the corner of his room. 

“What is that?” I asked. 

“It’s a cricket paddle!” he said. “I want it in case they try to swoop her up.” 

I shrugged and turned back to my shoes. “I’m not sure they’ll get the chance.”

My belt was already off when we went through the door. I had it looped over itself and was gripping both ends. Pulling it taut clapped the middle together, and produced a short echo. Making this noise from the deck had already displaced two of the birds. Sully walked ahead of me with Mazzy as I started grunting primordially and screaming obscenities at the vultures. 

The two greedheads picking at the possum stood unmoved by my violent cries and leather claps, so I started to charge them screaming, “Fuck you, birds!” and more bellowed gibberish. They flew in two different directions, so I started to spin on the balls of my feet, trying to track both of them. The one perched on a branch far above me, and the other flew to the neighbor’s roof. But just as they relocated, another came flying over our heads. I followed its flightpath on the ground, clapping my belt and vocalizing up at it. It was dreary and overcast that day, so I could look up at our assailants without fear of angering the sun god. 

I stood still for a while, flicking my attention between the original two greedheads. Mazzy was padding around the flowerbed looking for a place to go, and in her provincial searching, I took many opportunities to clap my belt and jerk spastically at the birds sitting above us. The greedhead on the chimney was more edgy, and would flinch at my movements, but the one directly above me wasn’t even paying attention to what I was doing. 

I felt the rage of one-thousand innocent kittens looking up at the wicked thing as it watched the road, waiting for me to leave. It moved its head idly, disinterestedly. I wanted so badly for it to come down from its safety–for it to swoop just close enough for me to slip my belt around its sinister throat and swing it into the gravel. I wanted to brutalize the bastard, then pluck all its feathers and kick it in front of an oncoming car. But then… who would pick his bones? I knew the answer, and I considered this a positive. 

With a continuous stream of vulture corpses to keep drawing more of their kind, I could easily diminish their population in the Boonsboro area. I could probably recruit some other cat-loving friends to take shifts with me, then maybe our friends of the feline persuasion can travel without fear, finding food where they can.

There is no true violence in the world while there are still vultures, for violence only feeds them. No injustice can ever find a vulture. My hatred of these animals is more than righteous, because I don’t think anything could ever be more right. Letting the dead rest is an instinct that most species and cultures can follow without problem, despite the difference in ceremonial procedures. But not vultures. Their only way of life is to disrupt decomposition.

Presently, my hatred was only growing as more and more of the criminal avians came and perched on various trees around the house. Worse yet, they seemed to be populating whichever area Mazzy was brought to. As Sully walked her to the backyard, the giant elm behind the house bloomed with the foul figures. My belt didn’t seem to affect them from that distance, so I dropped to the ground to search for hefty-looking stones.

I’ve never been sportsy, so none of my throws even came close to hitting their targets, but the attack still had its effect. One by one, they started leaving the thin, stilldead branches and casting their shadows over me. I jumped up after every one as they came, clapping the belt and screeching. They continued on far away, past the neighbor’s house, where now even the chimney-perched greedhead had flown from.

“The neighbors are gonna think you’re crazy,” Sully called from where Mazzy was now squatting. 

“I don’t care!” I yelled back. “They’ll understand when they see the birds!”

 There was only one left on the property, pompous and safe on one of the highest bows above us. Looking up at it, I realized I was waging an unwinnable war with nature. The only way for me to feel victorious would be a worldwide vulture genocide, and so far I had lethally struck exactly zero. 

Just as I was feeling defeated and small underneath the last skinny straggler, Sully and I heard a loud BANG from far away. We tensed up and looked at each other. He–ever the optimist–knew immediately what it was, but I was less hopeful. 

“Someone got tired of the vultures!” he said, beaming at me.

I shook my head. “Probably just a car backfiring.” As I started making my way back to the front door, we heard another identical shot ring out. We stopped again, all our tension melting away.

With great resolve, Sully said again, “Someone got tired of the vultures.” 

I looked back up at the elm tree just in time to catch the last remaining bird fly off in the direction of the shots. 

I stayed for another couple of hours, periodically checking the front window. But the vultures never came back. The possum was missing its face, but it could now peacefully remain the roadhazard it was meant to be in death. 

When I finally said goodbye to Sully, I looked on the road with great pride. I didn’t kill any birds, but I drove at least two to their deaths–and that was good enough for me.

As I trod the gravel behind my car, something stopped me just short of stepping onto softer ground. Right before my eyes, laying in the grass, was a single greasy black feather. Even this singular remnant looked crookèd and malformed. I purposely placed a heavy foot on it as I continued on to the driver’s seat.

I started up my car, deciding to ignore my Check Engine light for another day or so. As I pulled out onto the road, I stuck one hand up behind my window, a friendly gesture for the faceless possum. It was ultimately meaningless, but it made me feel better about leaving the carcass unprotected.