Murmuration
Chloe Sherrill-Howell / V Mag at UVA
Seven minutes before his seven a.m. alarm, the manager of Blacksburg’s Davis Furniture wakes up to the sound of birds chirping outside his window. Shaking off the loose grip of sleep, he reluctantly gets out of bed, set to process a new shipment of ottomans coming in today from his company’s supplier in Richmond. Very exciting stuff. He brushes his teeth, gargles some mouthwash, and fashions his prematurely balding hair into a combover. Aided by a smattering of brief part-time jobs, he had wrestled an accounting degree from his state college six years prior. He hasn’t yet moved out of the quiet little apartment that he’d first leased in his third year of school, and he won’t have the money to leave anytime soon. He was hoping that he could move up to regional management in a little while, maybe sometime before ‘89. Pulling on a scratchy green polo and a name tag that reads “Jerry Raglan, Manager,” the man makes his way to the door.
Jerry ambles down four sets of off-white stairs. The creaking elevator hasn’t been working for a couple of weeks by this point, despite Jerry’s fruitless pleas that his landlord fix it. In the lobby, he unlocks his mailbox, pocketing a couple of letters that were waiting for him and making a mental note to read them sometime during his lunch break. After this, he enters the garage through an adjoining door and finds the old 1966 Pontiac Tempest that he’d inherited when his father passed away. A veteran of the Second World War, his father had struggled with alcoholism for most of Jerry’s childhood but had kicked the habit by the time that Jerry entered his sophomore year of high school. Or at least everyone thought that he’d stopped drinking. Less than a year later, they found him with the steering wheel of a Cadillac where his brain had been. A few crumpled cans of Pabst were found resting under the driver’s seat that cradled his corpse.
Jerry plunges his key into the Tempest’s ignition switch, quickly turning off the radio after it lets loose a burst of static. Damned parking garage. Jerry pulls out of his space and onto Marlington Street. It’s cloudy outside; the horizon is painted gray with the nascent clouds of a storm that is being born. Another cloud hangs in the air, one much lower and much more restless than the others. It is a growing crowd of starlings. They contort themselves, deftly moving their star-speckled bodies through the air as if it were made of water. It’s a beautiful sight in the early morning sky; Jerry has only ever seen the birds gather in this manner around dusk. Stopping at the intersection that turns onto South Main, Jerry notices a scattering of cars along the road, all of them motionless. A few have veered off the street and onto the sidewalk, some of them onto the median. The brief anger of the congested morning commute is quickly undercut by a deeper anxiety. Something primal. After a few beats, Jerry cranks up his handbrake and steps out onto the road. He approaches a mint-green Honda Civic, the leather of his dress shoes landing softly on the pavement. A few yards away from the vehicle, he realizes that it has been abandoned. There isn’t a person at the wheel, nor is there someone in shotgun. Peering into the back window, Jerry sees an empty booster seat. Not a soul to be found.
Approaching a white station wagon propped up on the median, Jerry can see that it’s been abandoned as well. He notices something else when he takes a closer look. The seatbelts are all buckled in. The hair on Jerry’s neck stands on end. The sidewalks are bare, and the storefronts are closed. At least most of them are. The electric sign of a 24-7 convenience store is blinking a block or so away. Jerry goes back to lock the doors of the Tempest, and after firmly tugging on the door to test its lockedness, he starts to make his way to the only open building on the street.
To Jerry, it’s clear from the outside that somebody has been here recently. All of the lights are on, and the “OPEN” sign out front is still blinking green and red. Testing the front door, Jerry finds it to be unlocked. He steps inside, a bell ringing to signal his entry. Other than a faint static playing on the overhead speakers, it’s dead silent. There’s no cashier to sell him cigarettes, no customers to clog the aisles. Jerry goes on to check if anyone is in the bathrooms. Nobody. The storeroom. Nobody. Jerry’s hands, calloused from years of moving furniture, are shaking as he takes out his wallet and approaches the pay phone. He fingers a quarter and jams it into the coin slot. He dials his mother. The phone rings once. Twice. Maybe she’s busy, can’t answer the phone right now. It rings again and asks him to leave a message at the tone. Taking a shaky breath, he tells her to call his apartment when she can, and then he returns the phone to its pedestal. He thinks about calling 911. Had the town been evacuated because of some imminent disaster he’d not been informed of? Had the Reds unleashed some deadly virus onto South Main overnight? Was he losing his mind? None of these thoughts sit well with him, so he sets aside his hesitation and dials. The phone rings. It keeps ringing. And ringing. And ringing. Leave a message at the tone. Jerry slumps to the ground, defeated.
He sprawls on the sticky floor of the convenience store for some time. The static of the radio speakers is slowly forgotten by his ears. A distant roll of thunder wakes him from his reverie. Dragging himself upright, Jerry Raglan, Manager, figures that he will drive to work anyway. Maybe his supplier will be here from Richmond, just as astounded as he is that the whole of Blacksburg has suddenly vanished. Stepping outside of the store, he finds the sky darker than it had been before, the starlings more agitated. He retrieves the Tempest and zips his way through the streets, weaving through the ghosts of cars, careless of crossing the double yellow lines that had once so starkly defined his idea of how a road should be traveled. Traffic lights flash green, red, and yellow, desperately begging Jerry to heed their signals. Only the green light succeeds. Pulling onto the street aside Davis Furniture, Jerry leaves the Tempest in the middle of the road, neatly parked between an empty Jeep and a desiccate Toyota. He walks briskly to the door, which remains locked. Damned teenage cashier must be skipping her shift again today. Jerry unlocks the door, stepping inside the dark store. Deep in the darkness is a breaker board that Jerry locates and switches on. The shipping dock is empty when he arrives at its mouth; the ottomans should have been here at 8:30. It’s 9:14. Jerry sits down in his office, taking the letters from his pocket with a hand shaking worse than ever before. Maybe the sale fell through, and the news of it had only just reached his mailbox. He flicks through the letters. They’re nothing but bills and solicitations from a few days prior. They fall to the floor as Jerry stands and begins to kick his filing cabinet. He kicks it and kicks it and kicks it until he feels like he's broken something in his toes, and then he kicks it some more. There’s barely a dent in the cabinet. Barely even a smudge of leather on its gray paint.
Jerry limps back to the Tempest, revving its engine and making a three-point turn to return home. He turns on the radio after a couple of minutes. It’s playing only static. He leaves it on to drown out the warblings of the starlings above him.
He opens the door to his apartment and kicks off his shoes. He doesn’t bother taking his socks off; he doesn’t want to see the battered state that his left foot must be in right now. He throws a Steely Dan record onto the turntable and grabs a bottle of whiskey from the bookshelf. He pours himself a sizable glass and moves onto the balcony. Might as well enjoy his day off.
The storm that had been building in the distance throughout the morning is at his doorstep now. He can see the rain lifting one foot from the Appalaches and setting it back down on the edges of Blacksburg. He can see the streets now, littered with trucks and vans, Hondas and Jeeps, Toyotas and Fords. He can even see a few Cadillacs. The murmuration of starlings is still crowding around outside, writhing in the air like an angry smog. Jerry goes back inside to turn up the amplifier on the record player and pours himself another drink. He decides that he’ll just grab the bottle. Deacon Blues starts playing.
It seems like only yesterday I gazed through the glass at ramblers, wild gamblers. That’s all in the past. Jerry laughs, it’s all a bit too prescient. The laugh turns to a cough as the burning whiskey slithers down his throat. The dumb birds keep interrupting his music. Jerry picks himself up out of his wire chair, fumbling with the books on his shelf until he uncovers a pistol that he’d bought to punish any would-be intruders. Who would dare to invade his quiet little apartment? He stores it loaded. Stumbling and limping back to the balcony, Jerry holds the gun at arm's length and fires, hoping to scare off the birds with a resounding crack of gunpowder. Jerry loses his grip on the gun as it flies back with the force of the blast.
As the bullet rips screaming through the air, it finds its mark in a starling dancing in the middle of the crowd. He’s a beautiful little songbird, with an iridescent black plumage that is pocked with small white dots, a coat reminiscent of the night sky. His whole body has an ethereal gloss to it, like a little galaxy that’s been polished by a caring lapidary. He catches the subdued light in the air and throws it back in waves of purple and green. The bullet catches him squarely in the chest, and he explodes in a supernova of red, crumpling to the ground in pieces. The birds scatter, finding shelter in the trees beneath them. The rain arrives a few seconds later.