April Flash #15

based on prompts by:

Amygdala: properly functioning, morning, girlie; there are more blackbirds than people in this country

Haredawg: brown recluse, cotton mouth, albino gator

There were more blackbirds than people in this country, I swore to god. Every time I turned around there was another incarnation of one of the pesky beasts – either pecking time on my balcony railing, cawing at me incessantly as I tried to step around them on the stoop, or watching me in that intensely bizarre way they had – head cocked to the side, eyes wide and unblinking. It felt like they were spirit shadows manifested in feathery shades, carefully noting my every move.

“Morning, girlie” the boy said as he picked me up in his old chevy truck, driving down to the outskirts of town, towards the wild of the bayou, out to the swamps. It was critter counting day – which means we had to take an inventory of potentially deadly manifestations of nature. Fantastic. It was always a crapshoot with me – death by brown recluse (or maybe just a chunk of skin missing from a limb that got too close) or a cotton mouth, slithering around the water – maybe I’d get lucky and get bit by a damn albino gator that I should have seen coming, but didn’t. I was obtuse sometimes that way.

“good morning” I muttered, wrapping my chilled hands around a warm thermos of coffee, curling up on the passenger seat and staring blankly out the vast expanse of windshield.

“You ready for today?” He was half turned in the drivers seat, his foot mashed on the gas, digging in the back for his back of equipment, casually glancing at the road before turning around completely in his seat, like it was common-place. He was anything but ordinary.

“ready as I’ll ever be” I smiled then, in a little private moment of awareness, seeing the beauty of my life for what it was. As much as I complained, ranted and raved about the lunacy of what life could be, it was a reality check of the wonderful. The blackbirds scattered in front of the careening truck as we plowed onward. After all, gut checks like that are just signs that everything is properly functioning, before returning to the happy state that reality can be.

new prompts: my train of thought left the station and I wasn’t on it; I missed a lot of moments, that year; in retrospect