Synkroniciti is honored to welcome Canadian poet, writer, and visual artist Lorette C. Luzajic with the heartbreaking short story “Crow Funeral.” Arrow and Jess are out for a drive when they come across a huge murder of crows. Awestruck, they pull over to bear witness to the sobering scene.
“Arrow who knew all these things, the things that Jess did not, told her more about the crows after their drive. How what they had seen that afternoon was a corvid funeral.
How crows and other corvids like rooks and jackdaws gathered in mourning.
When these proud creatures found one of their family fallen, they cawed repeatedly until word spread and crows from all around gathered in masses to stand with and sing to their dead.”
Arrow’s father suffers a rare and catastrophic reaction to the Covid-19 vaccine and is unable to cope with the pain and his reduced capabilities. Half paralyzed, he steals the family car. Jess guesses what he is doing and where he has gone but is helpless to shield Arrow from the oncoming grief.
The story is partially inspired by Anguish, painted in 1878 by August Friedrich Schenck, which shows a mother sheep standing over a dead lamb, surrounded by crows, her frozen breath exhaling into the winter landscape. In the hands of a masterful storyteller, the visceral pain of the mother sheep is transmuted into the pain of a young woman mourning her father, surrounded by community that gathers to support her. Lorette unfolds the piece lovingly and delicately, making the impact all the more shocking and unavoidable. Human beings like to think we are more civilized than animals but in our most traumatic moments our connection to nature becomes obvious and it does us honor. The patterns of grief transcend language, finding a deeper voice: the cry, the lament, the song.
Read “Crow Funeral” in Synkroniciti’s “Patterns” issue, Vol. 7, No. 4, available for purchase here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/. Lorette’s characterization, style, and emotional resonance will have the tears welling up in your eyes.
Lorette C. Luzajic has published short stories and poetry in hundreds of journals and a dozen anthologies. She is the founding editor of The Ekphrastic Review and The Mackinaw. She is also an award-winning mixed media artist with collectors in forty countries so far. She adores world wines, archeology, art history, cats, and detective television. She lives in Toronto, Canada.