The Crow
Anya Farooqi
A short story about motherhood, grief, and the importance of rituals.
My period hasn’t come in a while. Generally, this wouldn’t be a cause for concern. I’m a 26-year-old man. I was born healthy, and normal, and for most of my life, I lived healthy and normal. Except… something changed. Twelve months and 4 days ago, I got my period for the first time. Late puberty, huh? I’ve bled for the exact timeframe of 5-7 days, once a month since. Then, 2 months ago, they stopped coming. No more bleeding.
It was painful, yeah, but I got used to it. It’s not just the familiarity. I miss it.
When she was pregnant with me, my mom thought I was a girl. She prayed and prayed for one. I wonder if this is some sick way of her wish coming true. Not really a girl, but something twisted and wrong. Would it have been better if I had just been born a girl? Would she have liked me better if I was her daughter? What do girls do? Do only girls get mothers that love them—painting their nails, matching outfits?
It’s unfair, to think like this about women, to want what is obviously a worse life. The patriarchy means society bows to me. I’m lucky to be a man. I’m happy to be one. It’s just that my mother wanted a daughter. And I can never be that. So yes, bleeding once a month has not been wholly bad. Monkey’s paw—my worst wish come true. It’s like something special, just for me, something important. I’d go to a doctor, but I didn’t go to a doctor when all of this started, so I’m keeping up that streak. Every time I’d bleed, it would feel strange. Both good and bad. Bad because obviously, but still good. It felt right, and that was scary.
I don’t like that it’s stopped. It upsets me.
The worst is that I don’t really know what’s happening. I feel tense, antsy, waiting for the other shoe to drop. My boss has noticed the change. I’m rude to customers on the phone, I snap at my coworkers. I don’t really care. He puts me on a forced ‘vacation’ anyways, telling me to sort “it” out. If only it was that easy. If only I knew what “it” was.
I spend hours in the bathroom that week, just sitting and staring at myself in the mirror. My arms were long, dotted with faded ink from when I wrote down my grocery list. My legs, covered in scars from a youth spent exploring. I bare my teeth at my reflection, stick my tongue out, examine myself for spots. I look the same. I have changed, but I look the same as I did when I was still seventeen and stupid. My body has remained in stasis, and my soul has gone somewhere new.
Is it still my body? I call up religious friends, hippies, spiritual advisors, and optimists. I Google, feverishly. I try to see my future in tea leaves, palm lines, cards, spirits, and waste money consulting every medium available. I still can’t ever seem to make it out. I look back at the past, and I still can’t see clearly.
Something is wrong. I realise this now.
When I finally tell my roommate, Sam, he thinks I should see a doctor. He thinks I should have seen one months ago, when the bleeding first started. Sam, though he is my best friend, is also a drug addict who spends most days on my couch. That is, he doesn’t know anything about doing the right thing. Still, he cares, and that’s always sweet. I halfway appease him: on the three-month anniversary of my missing period, I go to see The Doctor.
The Doctor is a crooked old man who lives on the ground floor of my building in a damp, ugly apartment that nobody visits unless they have to. He doesn’t pay rent, and he doesn’t leave the apartment—ever. It smells strange, awful, like something large is rotting. The apartment seems bigger from the inside, definitely bigger than my unit. The room looks like a child’s idea of a mad scientist’s lab. Piles and piles of books, jars with things floating in them, multi-coloured powder scattered on the floor, a ragged crib in the corner. I stand at the entrance, stupidly glued to the spot. The Doctor gives me a once-over. His eyes are large, staring at me, and I want to look away. Before I can speak, he tells me exactly what is wrong, tells me he can get me back what’s missing.
I stammer, trying half-heartedly to say that I don’t want it back, that I want it gone for good. Even as I say it, I know it isn’t true. The Doctor smiles way too wide at me, and I cut off my own lies. He settles me onto a small crib. I should be on guard, alert, but the crib is impossibly soft and my eyelids feel heavy, so I let them fall. I’m not asleep though. I can hear The Doctor chanting, his cold fingers darting quickly over me, his voice echoing in my ears. Suddenly, my eyes shoot open. He doesn’t cease his chanting, just begins to cut around my abdomen, carving straight, agonising lines. There’s a wailing noise, and it takes me a minute to realise it’s coming from me.
I try to look, to understand what’s happening to me but my animal brain can’t focus on anything but the pain. It hurts, white-hot in its intensity. Just as suddenly as he began, he stops, and my eyes shut without my say. I’m blank. I don’t know if I’m asleep, or if I’m dead or somewhere else.
I open my eyes again.
I’m in a basement. A woman stands in front of me—or someone’s idea of a woman. The longer I stare at her, the more wrong she seems to look. How tall she was. How beautiful. Then, she looks straight at me. Her eyes were mesmerising. Nothing I’d ever seen before; beady orange, like a bird’s, shining with a light of their own. It was like staring at the sun.
The woman opens her mouth. She has too many teeth—rows and rows of perfect, white tombstones. Rather than my ears, I can hear her inside my mind. She is musical, releasing a familiar, warbling noise I can’t quite reach the meaning of. All I know was that it was loud. Loud, clear and cold, like a rushing stream. As she goes on, I feel calmer somehow, my brain awash in a soothing wave.
Fear not. Your body is simply preparing for a great gift. The gift that I have given you is what you desire most. You will have it, a life of your own, the life you have always wanted to make. But you need to do something to get it.
Anything. I would do anything.
I find myself bowing down, still facing her. I say my thoughts aloud then. I would do anything.
I tell her I miss the bleeding. I tell her I mourn its loss. I mourn, like an alcoholic mourns his spilled liquor, like a woman mourns her innocence, like a caged animal mourns its freedom. She seemed pleased, smiling a flash of white. I did well.
You are special indeed. The path ahead is not easy. You will have to sacrifice a life. Only then can it be born. The child will come from you. It will be born of you, borne by you. But you know what you must do for it to survive. For it to thrive.
And I do. Even as I open my eyes again, awareness of the “real world” around me filling back in, I am still certain. I don’t know why it is happening to me, or what it is, but that doesn’t seem to matter anymore. Whether it was the whisperings of the woman, or some seed planted in my mind, I instinctively know what I have to do to fix everything. I leave The Doctor, smiling his toothless smile at me, and I head back home.
*
Sam is waiting when I come back, half-watching some horror movie on TV. I tell him I went to The Doctor. He yells at me for it, because Sam still believes in faith, and God, and he thinks that The Doctor is a perversion of everything. I don’t care what Sam thinks. I head to the bathroom, determined to make myself ready for what comes next. From the TV in the living room, someone screams.
I am sorry for what is coming. Sam is a good guy, a nice guy. The thing is, he is also required, an ingredient, a part of something bigger. Shame. I really did like him. But that is how things have always worked, since the dawn of everything and probably even earlier. It is always this: one life for another.
In the bathroom, I take my shirt off. Rows and rows of lines cover me. They are straight, mostly, curving only around my chest, above my heart. They sort of look like directions. They aren’t exactly scars—no matter how I pressed them, they appeared fully healed. Like an old tattoo. Or a brand.
I went to bed after that.
*
Morning is watery and grey, just like every morning ever. My oatmeal is too runny. It doesn’t matter. I’ve called off work. I won’t show my face there again. No more crummy office, no more appeasing the idiot managers and crunching numbers that don’t even matter. No, for the first time I am doing something useful. I can’t exactly start yet though. Instead, for the next month, I take Sam out—let him believe I’m doing fine. He believes me, because he is Sam, kind and trusting, even if he is an idiot. I take him out to see museums and parks and bars and movies. He seems happy.
Sam, in his eternal goodness, decides to get sober. He starts trying again, stops drinking, goes to work again. It really is such a shame he chose now to get better. Still, I know what I had to do. I wait for the moon to wax.
*
When I was young, too young for anyone to tell what I was, my mother used to dress me up as a girl. She would put me in pink frocks with matching shoes, or put bows in my hair, and then take me out for walks. She loved it when strangers complimented me. “Oh my! what a pretty daughter you have, looks just like you!” She was so happy then, pretending easily that I was what she wanted, that my father was her prince. My hair was always long then, too long for my comfort. She had to stop when I started school. I remember her disappointment. It’s hard to forget, even if I haven’t seen her in years. Blood doesn’t let you forget – it just lives on in you, thrumming its poison through your veins.
I wasn’t a girl, and that was the worst thing I could do to her.
I don’t know where she is, or how she is, or what she’s doing. I don’t even know if my own mother is alive. Does that make me a bad son? Will my child abandon me too? Maybe that’s how it’s supposed to be, just a cycle of children and parents abandoning each other. The weak leaving the strong. Isn’t that what the world is built on?
*
Waiting makes me think too much.
I start blood-letting. Fast, easy gashes on my legs, spraying out red that I collect in jars. New ones appear at my door every morning. I never order them, but they are for me.
I spend most days dizzy from the loss, sick with myself, drunk, hazy. I’m not so sure that what I’m doing is right anymore. But did it matter? Wasn’t it already too late?
I started dreaming. I never dreamed as a child, but now the same strange vision would play out nightly. I could see a child suckling at my flat chest, pulling out something for me. As I looked at it, it would bite down, and painful spurts of blood would rush out of me. It writhed against me, this thing, this child. Yet whenever I woke, I was calm in the knowledge that this was where I was meant to be. This was it, this was right, a piece slotting into place, like something I didn’t know I was missing.
I stopped cleaning my room, allowed mould to set in under my bed, let my blood rot, let my teeth decay. All the while, I waited for the moon. Sam was slowly sensing that something was wrong, but he couldn’t prove it. He was too busy getting sober to focus his mental energies on my strangeness. At night, he would shake through withdrawal, and I would soothe him, placing cold towels on his heat-stricken body. It was the least I could do.
*
I wake up one day, two months after my visit to The Doctor, with a certainty. There is something growing inside me. I remember that old myth, that seeds you swallow grow. Some dormant seed I swallowed as a child is finally awake, growing inside me into something beautiful and horrendous. It doesn’t “belong” in me, not naturally, and yet it grows. I grow around the shape of it, its tree branches scraping inside me.
My skin stretches wide and unhappy over my bulging stomach. I don’t care. I force it to grow anyway, to expand and bloom with me. My body takes a new shape. Unwillingly, my mind shifts to my mother again, to her wish for a daughter to continue the family line. I will never be her daughter, but the family will not die with me. Another two weeks, and it will all be over.
I find myself collecting teeth. My own usually. They kept falling out, but as they did, new would grow back. I kept all the old ones in a little jar by my bed. In another, I kept my blood. I should have felt uneasy, but I didn’t, not yet. This was what was meant to happen…wasn’t it?
I hurry my preparations now. The dreams come more often, faster. New visions, worse and better than before. Children tearing out of my body, tearing out of Sam, clawing their way through the floorboards. The skies rain with bloody children. Children, everywhere. I barely leave the house anymore, I just catch my blood and teeth in various containers. I don’t know where they come from, but I know what I’m meant to do with them.
The fear only sets in when I wake up to find my eyeball sitting on the pillow next to me. I reach up to my face, hands shaking, and lo—another one has grown in its place. I don’t know how to stop this anymore. I don’t know if I ever could.
My eyes begin falling regularly then. I wake up to find hundreds of body parts scattered on my bed, and I know they are all mine. I hate to admit it, but suddenly I’m scared. I think… I think I’ve done something wrong. Or worse, I think something wrong has been done to me. How much of me is me anymore? So many pieces have fallen out and regrown. I don’t know which parts are me. I truly panic now. I hyperventilate for a few days. I scream into a pillow, my voice a low moan. To my ears, it sounds like a death rattle. My body doesn’t stop falling apart around me.
The next two days, I try and fail to be normal around Sam. Instead, he makes a single move too close, and I yell at him, crying. After that, he forces me down in front of the TV and hands me a plate of food (instant noodles, the only dish he can make). Then we sit together on our terrible couch, and watch a documentary. It’s boring enough to calm me down, Sam claims. So I sit and watch. It’s some snoozefest about birds. I barely stay awake, but one part of it remains with me. Cuckoos. The brood parasite. They lay their eggs in other nests, and then their children make sure to eliminate any competition. Survival of the quickest, the most violent. Often, crows are their victims. That seemed strange to me—weren’t they intelligent birds? How tragic for the crow, who thinks itself so smart. Outwitted by the simple coo of a koel.
How tragic. I laugh then, genuinely laugh, at my own naivety. Of course. For a life to be made, one life is not enough of a loss. Of course. I will die too. I don’t know why I thought I wouldn’t. I’m actually relieved now. No more waiting in suspense, wondering how I’m still alive. I know why. I know everything I need to. No longer am I blocked by fear, by my own stupidity and insecurities. I know my role. I am a vessel, and I am the milk the child will feed on. I am the carcass and the mother, and I will keep the vulture feeding. The child will live. This is my role.
I am the crow.
*
Feverishly, I continue to prepare. This is the last thing I will ever do, and it will be the greatest.
In the final week of my life, I am untethered with joy. It’s almost over. My months of toil, my constant dizziness, the pieces of me rotting in my own bedroom, my whole awful life—soon, I will reap its reward.
The last day dawns. I would have thought there would be more fanfare, but there isn’t. It’s an entirely normal day.
I consider calling my mother. I don’t know her number, so I wipe the thought from my mind. I don’t know what I’d say to her. I don’t know if she’d listen. No use being melancholy. It’s my last day alive. I deserve to see it.
I make Sam breakfast—pancakes, because unlike him, I can cook. I feel a sudden and deep fondness for him. No matter his flaws, he was a good friend. He tried. Then I go outside.
I forgot how beautiful the sun was, the clouds. Everything seems brighter, better. I wander into my favourite park, take a walk for the last time. I reach to pet a dog, but it shies away, whining. I suppose it can sense something is wrong with me. Animals have always been perceptive – I can’t walk down the street without cats yowling. I sniff flowers, and pretend not to notice how they wilt if I step too close. I ignore the grass dying at my feet. The air tastes so, so good. Strange, you really don’t know how amazing something is, until right before you lose it. I stay out till sunset. It’s breath-taking, yellow-orange, the sun like spilled yolk spread over the sky. Like the eyes of the koel-woman. I have to go back now, I know. I gave myself this, a small present, but no more. There isn’t time.
I spend the last few hours in my room, surrounded by pieces of me. I sharpen my knife. I open my curtains. No distractions. I will complete my task. I alone pace with impatience for the night. Finally, I look out the window. It’s time, the moon shining just right. Fittingly, it is red. This is the fanfare I had hoped for.
I collect myself—the jars with pieces of my body in them, they now face me in a circle, piles and piles stacked high.
And I? I face the moon.
It’s quite heavenly. The red glow reminds me of the koel-woman I met, her beady orange eyes, her glimmering smile.
It’s time for the knife now. My hands shake, and I wish I wasn’t so weak. Still, I force myself past it, allowing the knife to enter through my stomach. Once it’s in, my hesitation is gone. Quickly, I cut myself open, blood slick hands slipping slightly as I go deeper, pushing the knife further into my abdomen.
Odd – I feel both joy and pain at once. It’s almost orgasmic, the pleasure of this moment. I retch slightly, the blissful agony too much.
I twist the knife, here and there, and just as abruptly as it entered, I pull it out. I start the chanting then. It spills out of me automatically, instinctually, rather like blood. I’m loud now, screaming the words that I did not know I could speak.
Hearing me, Sam rushes in. Good, I thought. Now I don’t have to go get him.
His mouth is agape, as he stares at the room around me – the jars filled with pieces of me, the mould, the smell. I imagine it smells like death to him.
To me, it smells like life.
I reach out to him, hold out my hand, beckoning, waiting.
He sputters out panicked words, eyes wide, and he moves towards the door, trying to call for help. I cackle, a high, awful noise that sounds nothing like a laugh. There is no help that can come now. There is nothing left to help.
Hearing me, he looks, somehow, even more concerned, face taut with fear. He comes closer, touches my outstretched hand, says something. I can’t hear him over the blood in my ears.
He is close enough though, and so I act. I grip him quickly, pull him to me. Sam tries to flee, but I am strong now, in my last weak moment. His body is flush against mine. We are melting into each other. I can feel it, us merged into one, powering one life together. It’s enough to make you cry.
Still, I can’t be sentimental. The knife that was in me now enters him, throat first. He chokes, gurgling in fear and pain and sadness and confusion. I want to tell him I’m sorry, and so I do, a quick apology muttered over his tear-streaked face. He probably deserved more, but this is all I have to offer.
The rest of me will go to the child.
Kneeling over him, I finally cease the chanting, centre in a circle of body-parts, hovering over a dying man.
My stomach roiled, a sea of guilt and anticipation.
I could feel it coming. It was almost here.
Standing there, shirtless in the moonlight, I know this was both the lowest and highest I have ever been.
A wave of pain crashes against me. I fall to the floor, knees buckling. I feel it inside. The child begins to claw at my insides, and I shriek, pure agony overtaking me.
It was time, truly now.
It claws harder, ripping and tearing at me. I cut again, using my knife to make a bigger opening for it to emerge.
And oh, emerge it does.
Out of my mangled stomach crawls out a child.
It is gorgeous, covered in viscera and gore, eyes shining bright. It is larger than it should be, more aware. It did not speak. It simply moved towards Sam, towards his face. I couldn’t see what it was doing, eyes blinded by my own sweat and blood. I could hear everything though – the crunch of bones, the slick sound of flesh.
It turned to me then. Within seconds, it was on me. So close to my face now, I could see everything. I think it was the best thing I have ever seen, luminous and ethereal. Fey eyes looked back at mine, unblinking, wide awake and alive.
I stretch my arms out for it, almost like a hug, as if saying, have me. Yes, go ahead.
It bites its way up my chest, too-sharp teeth easily tearing past my flesh to my ribs. I can see my own heart, beating faintly behind its cage. What a sight.
The child opens its mouth to clamp down on my life.
It had so many teeth, a graveyard of white inside. All to take me.
So quickly I would leave.
I made this. Only it would take me. This is right.
Parents and children will always ruin each other.
I open my eyes impossibly further, and then I see no more.
Anya Farooqui is an eighteen-year-old writer and artist based in Karachi. She is an avid reader and is intrigued by the unique perspectives of others. When she is not writing, she also loves to draw. Her biggest inspiration is Gerard Way, lead singer of the band My Chemical Romance, which first sparked an interest in the supernatural.
Hamza Qazi was born in Lahore in 1995. A graduate in visual arts from the National College of Arts Lahore (2021), Qazi has shown work in over twenty group shows all over the country Qazi has the distinction of being the first artist to exhibit a non-fungible token (NFT) in a public art gallery in Pakistan, and in 2024 was awarded the prestigious Nigaah Art Award for best emerging artist. He has shown work at the Hunkensten Art Fair 2024 in the Netherlands and "Sadequain ki Anjuman Mein" by Gallery 6 in 2024. Qazi was the resident artist in the Studio RM residency program of 2022 and is currently a drawing instructor at the Studio.
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