The Omen

How could this not be.

The scattered feathers on concrete like torn pages from some terrible book. Gray and white prophecies spilled across the sidewalk, each one a word in a language we’d forgotten how to read.

She’d been walking to work, same route for three years. Past the retaining wall, under the oak tree, around the corner to catch the 8:15 bus. Ordinary morning, ordinary life.

Until she saw them.

The crows first. Seven of them arranged in a perfect circle around something that had once been a pigeon. No blood. No violence. Just feathers spread like an offering, like evidence of something that shouldn’t be possible.

The crows watched her with eyes like black coins. Waited.

She thought of her grandmother’s warnings. Birds know things. They see the shape of what’s coming before it arrives. When they gather like this, when they leave gifts…

Her phone buzzed. A text from her sister: *Call me. Now.*

The crows took flight all at once, a black explosion against the morning sky. The feathers remained, scattered evidence of whatever message they’d been trying to deliver.

She stood there on the sidewalk, phone in her hand, understanding finally that some things couldn’t be dismissed as coincidence. Some mornings you wake up in the same world you went to sleep in.

And some mornings you don’t.

The phone kept buzzing. Her sister’s name on the screen.

How could this not be an omen.

She answered.