A Near Murder of Crows

For the first time in two years, my fingernails have been bare for days. I stripped away OPI's "Feelin' Hot-Hot-Hot" with mango-scented nail polish remover. Of course, the mango is merely an afterthought, an apology for the scourge of pungent chemicals.

A lone fruit fly flits around my bathroom, and even though fruit flies make regular appearances throughout my apartment, for some reason, today, I thought of my father, and the last time I ate dinner with him in a restaurant. His eyesight had become so poor that a tiny fly--or was it a gnat?--buzzed lazily around his nose, but he did not notice. When I attempted to shoo it away, I ended up startling my father, who was otherwise calm and content over his plates of appetizers. He kept offering me pigs in a blanket; I kept refusing, with a bothered smile.

I noticed today that the vertical blinds that shield the sliding glass doors in my living room swayed ever so slightly back and forth, even though all windows and doors were closed. This happened all afternoon, as I sat on the couch and wrote and napped and checked my email account eighty-three times (give or take). I had to keep watching the blinds, to be sure I wasn't hallucinating (how devastating it would be if I was hallucinating). The slivers of light between them widened and narrowed, widened and narrowed. I crouched down on my knees, held my hand beneath them and felt a gentle coolness of air seeping in from outside. (Because of our close proximity to the Los Angeles International Airport, these apartments are supposedly regulation sound-proof, and yet, clearly they are not air-proof. No wonder I don't sleep well at night.)

At one point today, out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw a small black creature, the size of a healthy cat, peek out at me from the other end of the couch. When I turned my head to look, nothing was there. But I thought, how entertaining it might be to write a fictional story about someone--a man?--who hallucinates, sees a shadowy figure repeatedly peeking out and creeping back, peeking out and creeping back.

My fingernails are clean and smooth, and only slightly stained yellow, from months upon months of wearing too much polish. They are clipped short, and appear foreign in their nakedness.

I left my apartment just after dark. It seemed unusually dark, because the light outside my door had blown out again. I realized my next-door neighbor must be out of town, or pulling all-nighters again at his USC research lab, because not one, but two morning papers were resting against his door. His lights were out. I thought about last winter, when he had chicken pox, and quarantined himself in that suffocating studio unit with the make-shift kitchen. (He had caught chicken pox, evidently, during his flight back from India, where most of his family still lives.)

I snatched the two editions of The L.A. Times and dropped them, along with the pizza delivery menu that was wedged between his doorknob and door frame, inside my place. (There are thieves here. They already stole from me once.) (I meant to send my neighbor a text message to let him know I have his papers. Now it's too late. I'll have to tell him tomorrow.)

My boyfriend lives one block from the end of the alley (my apartment overlooks an alley, not a street, but I would prefer street sounds to garbage truck alley noise and the clattering of The Night People who rummage through the dumpsters, searching for bottles and cans to trade in for cash). I delivered dinner to my boyfriend tonight--a tossed salad with fresh-squeezed lime juice for dressing and a tomato-mushroom omelet I prepared with crushed garlic and marsala wine. He was there, but I quietly left the containers on his balcony, outside his door, and walked home, by way of the alley. I called to inform him about my delivery.

We never talked about that day again, my boyfriend and I, that day last January in the alley, when he said he wished he had a gun to shoot the noisy ravens, and I wanted so badly to correct him:

They're crows, not ravens.

What I said, instead, was: Maybe they're having fun.

I was thinking: I would rather be one of them right now.

My fingernails are clean and shiny and only slightly stained yellow from months upon months of polishing them too much; and the places where they peeled, well, I filed them down, on the surface, buffing and smoothing away all the imperfections, all the damage incurred from disguising them in elusive hues.