Resurrection

When my mother passed away, I abandoned my city centre and relocated myself to a small bungalow on the edge of town. When I was living downtown, every time I would leave my tiny apartment to get groceries, I’d be jostled on every side by sallow-faced businessmen rushing between coffee shops and office buildings, shouting through their Bluetooth earpieces. Just hearing words like “synergy,” “innovation,” and “client-centric marketing,” was enough to make my blood boil. I’d come home and break the eggs simply setting down the shopping bags, as though executing a spiteful and convoluted plot against not just hens, but mothers everywhere. 

Either way, my rage sent me fleeing to the countryside, where the only conversation to be heard occurred between myself and the local crow population with whom I developed an amicable relationship with. I’d read online once that crows are fond of peanuts, so I left a small pile of them on my back porch, topping it up whenever it got low. Before long, the crows began to bring me gifts in return. Nothing of any real value, but objects that were shiny and therefore held value in the eyes of my feathered friends. Mostly they brought me things like spare change and paper clips, but on a chilly midsummer morning, roughly a year after my mother’s death and my relocation to the countryside, the largest of my crow friends, whom I had dubbed Edgar, brought me a watch. It was stainless steel, and while the watch face was cracked, it was still functional. I kept it on my bedside table, so I would look at it every day and remember to get it fixed, but gradually books and water glasses piled up and I couldn’t be bothered to tidy, so the watch got lost. Lost, but not missing. I heard the gentle tick every night as I made another futile attempt at sleep, its quiet song steady as a heartbeat. 

For over a year I lived in blissful solitude in my little house, getting by on my mother’s life insurance and the feeble revenue I made as a freelance web designer. Then, only a month or two after Edgar gifted me my watch, a housing development kicked off down the road. Often, anxiety welled as I felt city life once more encroaching on my peace, but a trip out onto the porch to see the crows eased my mind. 

In the mail one week I’d received a brochure detailing the extensive plans for the development, which included an entire section dedicated to a central roundabout. It would include a so-called “green space” in the centre, which was essentially a plot of land with a bunch of trees and bushes, but it’s not a park, because no one is allowed to go there. You can’t exactly pull over in a roundabout. The brochure went on the explain to me that it would aid with the flow of traffic. This, in my experience, was not true.  

While the housing development had had relatively little impact on my life except for the occasional bought of dread, it did introduce a new, niggling inconvenience to my life. While I had once been able to drive the deserted gravel road straight into the city whenever I needed to run an errand, I was now required to take a winding paved road through the new neighbourhood, and around the brand new roundabout. As though the design was made specifically the spite me, the exit that I needed to take was immediately opposite the expansive central ‘green space.’ The middle of my journey into the city was now punctuated by a few minutes of incessant ticking from my indicator as I made the seemingly endless turn. 

In the same way that fast food restaurants seem to pop up out of nowhere, the housing development concluded almost as quickly as it began, and families started moving in. At first, I only ever encountered my neighbours as we passed each other in the roundabout, them in their family vans and me in my little hatchback. I’d see them through their car windows, chattering away to themselves, either to a kid in the back seat or inevitably, into their unseen Bluetooth earpiece. 

In the second year after my mother’s death, when my savings began to dwindle, my relationship with Edgar and the other crows started to fall apart. The flock of crows that came to my house had grown to excess, to the point where I would need to buy a new jar of peanuts every single day. I didn’t want to say “goodbye” to Edgar, but I couldn’t justify the expense any longer, and I stopped leaving nuts for them. After a couple of days, the crows started pecking at my windows all hours of the day, drowning out the ticking of my long-lost watch. 

Over the course of that second year, I started to see my neighbours more frequently. Since I was running out of money, I obtained permission to place an advertisement for my web design services in the roundabout, which included my phone number. Picking up the phone left a bitter taste in my mouth every time I received a call, but I accepted every job, submitting defeat to the corporate rat race. As I became busier I spent more time at my desk, and consequently, more time spent staring absentmindedly out the window directly above it. The road leading past my house had become increasingly popular for kids and teenagers to ride their bikes along. I’d noticed them gawking on occasion when my blinds were drawn enough that I could see them, but they couldn’t see me. Perhaps it was that my little bungalow was more rundown than the houses of Haven Ridge, or perhaps it was the overabundance of crows, but there was no doubt that their laughter and chiding remarks were directed my way. Between the crows tapping at my windows, the constant ringing of my cell phone, and the teasing of the neighbourhood kids, my house was almost never quiet. 

On the third anniversary of my mother’s death, just a few minutes to midnight when the crows had finally stopped tapping and I could just hear the ticking of my watch, the phone rang. I didn’t answer the phone outside of work hours, and I was too tired to get up to hang up, so I just let the phone ring. After five rings, my answering machine kicked off with the automated message I had recorded for it, prompting the caller to leave a message. A moment of silent static, then the message: 

“Steven, it’s your mother. I wanted to tell you that I’m alive.”

I sprung to my feet and stumbled through the dark to the phone. By the time I picked it up, the line was dead. I couldn’t see in the dark and hit several other buttons before I was able to find ‘redial.’ The phone rang twice, before a chipper voice rang out, “Holiday Inn, how can I help you?”

I gave the hotel receptionist my mother’s name, but she didn’t find anyone checked in under it. She asked if I knew a room number, and when I told her that I didn’t she said that she wouldn’t be able to do anything for me. She refused to give me a list of all of the guests checked in at that time, citing their ‘privacy policy.’ I hung up and hit redial again, but when it connected me to the Holiday Inn front desk again, I slammed the phone down against the receiver so hard I knocked it off the counter. I abandoned it there as I rushed to put on my slippers. 

By all accounts, my mother was dead. The newspapers had reported on every aspect of her passing, from the day she disappeared to the day the killer told police where he had hidden the body. Forensics indicated that the location had traces of human remains. There was a funeral, and a candlelight vigil, and I had gotten my life insurance payout and my inheritance. But they never recovered an identifiable body, couldn’t DNA match the remains to my mother. That room for doubt fuelled me as I got behind the wheel of my hatchback and set off down the road into the city. 

The gravel road transformed into tarmac, and before long I arrived at the centre of Haven Ridge. I rolled to a halt at the stop sign before the roundabout, the first time I had stopped since leaving home. The roads were dead, as they ought to be at midnight on a Tuesday. If I wanted to, I could drive through the roundabout without abiding by the silly traffic rules which applied to it and drive straight for my exit into town. 

Instead, I pulled forward and flicked my indicator on and merged into the centre lane. My indicator continued its “tick, tick, tick,” as I made my way around the endless turn. A yawn escaped my mouth at the ongoing “tick, tick, tick” and I passed the first exit. My eyelids drooped heavily with the “tick, tick, tick, tick,” and I passed the exit into town. 

I continued around the circle, caught in the hurricane, the safety of the eye the inaccessible green space to my left. I felt its violent winds through my car’s air conditioning vents. My indicator tick, tick, ticked and I kept turning, the steering wheel going damp under my clammy fists, my arms aching at the awkward angle. I passed my exit again and again until it stopped being my exit anymore. Another yawn forced its way through my lips, making tears prick at the corner of my eyes. My mother had been resurrected and all I wanted to do was sleep. 

I turned and turned, the “tick, tick, tick,” of my indicator like a metronome keeping time. The trees of the green space transformed as I looked at them into impressionistic splotches of dark green and black that would’ve been the envy of van Gogh. As my eyes grew tired of interpreting the shapes, I turned my eyes to my skylight and peered at the smattering of stars in the light-polluted sky. I managed to make out Ursa Major, spinning overhead as I span down below, and I realized in the ‘tick, tick, tick’ that Galileo had been wrong. The sun wasn’t the centre of the universe, it was the Haven Ridge roundabout. 

The flash of red and blue lights and the brief shout of a siren abruptly pulled me from my stupor. I slammed on the breaks, silencing my indicator. I contemplated briefly whether I should move my car, but where do you pull over in a roundabout? The police cruiser pulled up behind me, its lights blinking but the siren turned off. Everything was silent, and I realized I forgot what that sounded like. 

The officer rapped on the driver’s side window. I cranked it down for her, and she pointed her flashlight in my face, momentarily blinding me. 

“You wanna tell me what exactly you’re doing?” She asked, a frown on her face before I even answered. 

The frown lines on her forehead deepen when I murmur out, “I’m not sure.”

“Sir, have you been drinking tonight?”

I’d never felt the heavy weight of sobriety more than in that moment, so I shook my head. 

“Can you step out of the vehicle, please?”

I did as she said, my feet shaky under my legs. The outside spun before my eyes, the horizon like a time-lapse of a planet in retrograde. I stumbled and the officer caught me, her grip firm on my upper arms. She sat me down in the driver’s seat of my car, and my legs hung out the open door onto the tarmac. 

“Do you know where you are?” The officer's voice rattled around in my skull. 

I answered with a mumble, and the officer sounded irritated when she said, “Can you repeat that, sir?”

“Haven Ridge roundabout,” I said more loudly this time, the volume that my voice was capable of catching me off guard. I stared at the officer’s black boots and absently wondered whether they were uniform or a fashion choice. 

“Were you going somewhere?”

I knew the answer to the question was ‘yes,’ but it took me a while to remember why. “The Holiday Inn,” I said eventually. 

“Why were you going to the Holiday Inn?”

“My mother died,” I said. The officer took a step back, her brows furrowing with concern. “Three years ago. And tonight she called me from the Holiday Inn so I was going to go find her.”

I looked up at the officer, and her concern had morphed into the same look of pity I got from everyone after my mother’s death. At length, she sighed. 

“Sir, would you like a ride home? We’ll tow the car for you, and I’ll try to get the fees waived.” She looked at my knees, then back at my face. “I’m sorry about your mother.”

“That’s alright. I know she’s fine now, so…” My voice sounded unconvincing to my own ears. My mind replayed the answering machine message for me, my mother’s voice sounding less and less like herself the more I thought about it. 

“Right.”

She held out a hand and I took it, even though my vision was no longer spinning. She held the back door of her cruiser open in the way a limousine driver would for their passengers. I got in and she closed the door after me, giving me a nod and a tight-lipped smile.