Wake up at four to the whine of the alarm.
Fuck. You. Clock.
I slap the alarm button like it insulted my wife.
Roll out of bed, half stumbling to the closet. I turn on the light, and everything looks like it’s under water.
Damn it.
Use my hands to feel where I put my glasses on the window sill. I find them, but not after rubbing my fingers all over the lenses. I’ll have to wash them later. I put my glasses on and blink to bring the world into focus.
I go back to the closet, this time able to make out color and patterns. I grab my set of clothes for the day and tip toe to the bathroom. Undress and shower. I’m tired so I try to use the pumice stone as soap… again. It makes my chest bleed… again. I curse under my breath as I finish rinsing my hair because the pumice cuts sting when I dry them.
I shave, drawing my upper lip down over teeth as far as I can to get every last patch of hair. Around the neck. I smile at myself in the mirror, turning my face from side to side to make sure I’m clean. Nothing I hate more than a rough patch.
At about five o’clock after I’ve had a light breakfast, I’m out the door and walking a mile to the bus stop.
It’s my sophomore year of college, I’m twenty, I live at my Aunt Debbie’s house, and my commute each morning is an absolute bitch. I will walk one mile to the bus stop, where I will then ride for thirty minutes to the park and ride. Once at the park and ride I will wait ten minutes for my other bus to show up. This bus will take over an hour and a half on a good day to get me to the University. But before I can ever do that, I have to walk. Alone through the country road. And on this particular morning it’s winter.
I’ve got my iPod in, listening to something upbeat. Bopping my feet. Trying to ignore the shadows in the trees around me, because they’re scary as all hell even if I don’t want to admit it. This is coyote country and even though I know coyotes don’t attack people, I don’t really believe it down in my bones. I’m swinging my briefcase to and fro as I walk, reminding myself of its comfortable heft. It’s pitch black out here. No lights over my head and nothing but dirt under my feet. I can see the full moon in the sky and the stars of Orion ahead of me. I wonder idly if you could kill a coyote if you kicked it hard enough. Doubt it. They’re made of tougher stuff than that.
What am I listening to? I look down at my iPod but all it has is a track number from the CD I uploaded. I’m up and moving but I won’t really be awake until the sun manages to crest over the horizon. Something upbeat. Trying to remember the name of the song. I’m turning my head up to think when I see it. A dark silhouette barely distinguishable from the greater dark behind it.
My eyes go wide. My heart stops. It’s diving. It’s diving right at me. Fuck fuck fuck. Fucking coyote with wings!
I don’t know how but I put my brief case up in time to intercept it. Fuck oh dear it’s big. Fuck me. It’s got a six foot fucking wingspan. It collides with my briefcase hard enough that I am driven backward. I almost fall, but catch myself. I don’t want to be on the ground with this thing flapping above me. It’s so early that if it brushes on hairy wing against me I know I’ll scream so loud that I’ll never be able to stop. I hear its talons or… whatever it has… running across the surface of my briefcase, and then it pushes against me and careens back into the sky.
Over and done with in the course of a couple of seconds.
I stay a moment too long behind my brief case to track its course. It’s lost in the night sky again. Somewhere out there in all the black. I look from side to side, because something like this needs to have witnesses. There is no one. There is nothing. Nothing but the dark and the trees and the dirt road.
“What the fuck was that?!” I shout.
No one can hear me this far out. Not even the Palestinian man who raises sheep at the next farm I pass by. I take out my earphones and watch the night sky as I continue to the bus stop. I keep my ears and eyes open for flapping wings.
“What the fuck was that?” I ask myself again, once I’ve reached my destination. I can see the faintest scratch on my brief case that lets me know it wasn’t my imagination. But I never find out what it is. Never. It was just a monster of the magic hour between five and six. Just a monster that went away before it could be killed off by the breaking of the dawn.
But still, I don’t feel quite safe until I’m sitting on the bus.
In six months when the Palestinian farmer gets a bull and it chases me for a quarter of a mile, I still won’t be as scared as I was in those few seconds with the winged monster. I know what a bull is, I know what a bull can do. But I don’t know what the winged thing was, and I don’t know what it wanted. That’s the thing that really gets to me. What did it want?
