I was walking my dogs in the rain one evening in my crow-inhabited neighborhood in north Portland, listening to music or maybe a podcast (I forget) on my wired headphones (this detail is important later), when a funny, dark, and (to me at the time) nearly perfect story just sort of started appearing in my mind.

The story was about a guy who tries to train the neighborhood crows to bring him money, but everything goes nightmarishly sideways and the crows end up taking over his life.

I recorded the story into my voice memo, almost an hour of audio, cracking myself up as I walked home in the rain. At the time I was working on a edits for my second novel, Rainbow in the Dark, so I set the crow story aside...

Months later I opened my voice memos, ready to transcribe my work of genius. But when I hit play, this is what I heard:

SKKKKRTCHHHH...SKKKTCHHHH...SHHRKRTCHHHH

The wired microphone had been rubbing against the collar of my raincoat as I walked. Everything was static. Completely indecipherable. The entire story was lost!

In some weird way, I suspected it was the work of the crows. They had given me the story, and then they had taken it away, in order to demonstrate their power. They wanted to let me know.

Time went by, but I couldn't stop thinking about that lost story. Now, all these years later, I've put it together as best as I can, but what I’ve made is merely a shadow of the original. It can never be as good. But I had to do it. I had tell everyone about the crows.

Sean McGinty in the author of the novels Rainbow in the Dark and The End of Fun, and the comic VampireWitch & GhostWolf

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