gargandi

I don't think it's crows, but some lower-order raucous avians are out there now, grating competitively at each other. I cannot see them, but they are eminently audible. The sound cuts through window glass and whatever opaque substance descends between the waking self and the dreams and hypnogogic visions of the night before. Hearing it, I remember the sound I had forgotten having heard before sleep. It was some innocent bird in the night trees, whirring to itself (or perhaps to others), all unknowing that its call hooked through the air to my brain, pulling up from memory its near double, the artificial squeak some effects man had laced through the soundtrack of a particularly unnerving horror film viewed over a year ago. Enticed by the lure of the night bird's liquid chirrup, that other sound came nosing up to the surface of memory like a fish disturbing the skin of the water, and I recall now how I thrashed in the bed to hear it.