Horizon Line Crow
Horizon Line Crow Megan Jones
My beak is broken, I don’t speak much To me, my words are worth less than the air it takes to make them if the air could have been used under a birds wing
When it all becomes too much, I focus on three things Sleep, food, and warmth
I only have money for enough And so I have everything
I don’t mind forgetting my umbrella because I know the number of days ill walk in the rain is numbered. There will be a day when I will miss walking in the rain.
Heaven exists in the beauty on earth, Hell is what we do to eachother
I give away all my secrets but not always with words
Ill only be here a short while
Give me a home to last my life and ill give you my body’s worth of work
The Crow from the Sketches In the fall, I found a crow. It died in a storm the night before and had no signs of trauma or injury. I put on gloves and arranged it as though it were sleeping to take pictures for an art project, but also out of curiosity and intrigue. It didn’t smell like death at all. It didn’t smell like anything. I might have forgotten it was ever alive if not for how my handling it broke the feathers and added to its decay. I put it in a plastic bag, inside another plastic bag, inside a cardboard box, and since it was already freezing outside I put it in the snow for winter, thinking I would like to bury it in the spring.
drawing in my back and shoulders. With my gloved hands I took out the bird. It looked the same as it did however many months ago, but now it glistened with a chilling slime. I laid it on its back and opened the wings. I see something white in its folded feathers but I cant describe the texture or consistency because I could only look at it for a thousandth of a second. I found myself unable to focus on any one part. Gravity pulled on it harder now that the tissue is soggy and malleable, but there was still something awake about it.
I would see the box occasionally. I watched the temperature on the thermometer, getting anxious when the thermometer bobbed along the freezing mark. I wondered what the bird looked like in there. Was it decomposing? Or was the snow keeping it frozen in time?
The smell burned. I bundled up the bird and put it back in the box. I wish I could say I buried it but I didn’t. The smell controlled my body. I ran to the garbage bin and laid it as gently as I could at the bottom, hoping the crows didn’t see me and that if they did, they might please find it in their hearts to forgive me. I laid the gloves down too like an offering, maybe to remind the crow that I tried to be gentle.
I think the crows that live near my house knew that I have one of them in a box. I think they followed me, wondering why I wont let their return to the earth Spring comes. The temperature shot up. I couldnt bring myself to touch the box. I feared what I might find inside, what smell might have grown. I coulnt get rid of it either. I couldn’t just throw it away. A month passes. I knew whatever I feared only worsened. Its April. I had to do it now. I put on thick yellow gloves, a scarf to cover my face, thick boots, long sleeves. I didn’t want to catch any disease that might have grown in there, but even more so I didn’t want to touch death. Ill live forever if I can just not touch the bird. I opened the box, no smell. I took out the first plastic bag, it leaked water but still no smell. I took the bag containing just the bird out and held my breath for as long as I could. When I finally breathed in, it smelled sweet at first. But my body recognized it and convulsed. Dread flooded my spinal chord,
I scrubbed my hands immediately. I scrubbed my face. I washed my clothes. I set my shoes outside. I was thirsty but couldn’t drink. I worried a small piece of crow still clung to me; that it would get inside me and kill me and I would become slimy too. I scrubbed again. Then again. Then again. But I couldn’t get clean. I looked outside where the box used to be. There were remains of other decaying fall things, now thawing in spring. Fall leaves and deconstructed pumpkins. But in the leaves, were sprouts of new plants, bright green and new- life building a home in the damp remains. The smell lingers in my nose, and everything smells like death. An hour later, I still smell it. Or maybe, life smells more like rot than I knew before, and it takes smelling decay itself to realize it.
Life in the time of Sickness I started this project during a steady point of my life. I had the emotional currency to spend and it felt like an investment to work through these darker notions when I could afford to do so. The time to spend this emotional investment came earlier than expected as the world settled into stillness. When working from home, I felt guilty when I sat down to paint these images of mortality because, unlike the reality many people are facing, I could choose to come and go. I began neglecting my paintings about death, and found myself instead, sketching everyday life. I promised myself to sketch something from my apartment or window view every day to encourage finding something beautiful in these isolating, and slow times. I found that my apartment changed daily and when I documented that through my drawings, it suddenly didn’t feel like I was stuck in one place but this living world. The rules reversed I now focused on life in a time of sickness. This side project seems hardly the same as the body of my thesis, but it’s not quite an antithesis either. It complements the ideas, evolves them and turns the notions of balancing life and death into something tangible, a tool that has an active role in helping me through hard times.
As of April 16th, I have completed twenty-eight daily sketches and will continue to do these every day of the Quarentines times. These sketches live on the instagram account @sweater.jones