posted by Ryan on Sunday, 31 May 2009.
Carrie saw a black bird perched on a wire above the deck off the back of her house. She watched it through the sliding glass door as it squawked menacingly at her.
When she moved to the couch, the bird relocated outside to a tree branch and continued to squawk at her. She returned to her original seat at the dining room table, and the bird followed again, and this time she saw it land on a plastic chair on the porch, where it continued its tirade. Her two pit bulls offered no reaction to the bird, which only served to intensify her uneasiness. When I texted to let her know I was going to pay a visit, she responded urgently, asking me to be especially careful, convinced that the black bird with the shiny, deep blue head was a warning or a curse. I said I would be careful, but that a bird is only a bird. An hour and a half later, I arrived safely at Carrie's house, and I entered through the glass door from the back deck. I offered comforting words, and then the bird perched on the wire above the deck. I was glad I could see it too. She wanted a distraction, so she picked up the remote and turned on The Dog Whisperer. She increased the volume, and then the volume slowly decreased down to nothing, seemingly of its own accord. She looked at the remote in her hand and pressed the Volume Up button again until the TV's volume was considerable. Then, as she removed her fingers from the face of the remote, we both watched the hash marks back off to zero, as the volume decreased to nothing again. I was reminded of the beginning of the movie Poltergeist, where two neighbors have remote controls on the same frequency, and their televisions flash between a football game and Sesame Street as they battle it out. Two remotes, I thought. I hunted for a moment, and found what I hoped to find, the television remote (as opposed to the DirecTV remote that Carrie continued to hold impotently), wedged between two cushions of the couch, the pressure on the Volume Down button just enough to deny us sound no matter how hard we pressed on the other remote's Up button. Outside, the bird had removed to a tree branch in order to squawk at us through a window. "See?," I said to Carrie, "The bird wasn't a curse. The television isn't haunted. It's just a weird day. We're going to be fine." A few minutes later I felt something hard amidst my peppermint Orbit gum, and extracted a tiny round metal chunk, a 20-year old molar filling. I tongued the glaring hole toward the back of my jaw and put on a brave face. Somewhere outside, the bird squawked.If you would like to comment on anything, please contact me and please be specific in your email. With your permission, I will add your comments to this section.