Crows will sometimes bring small gifts to people they like. I learned that from a documentary I saw late one night, when I was lying around and trying not to look at my phone. I’d learned a lot of things that day, like the effects of climate change on coral, the migratory habits of the arctic tern, and what it felt like to have your heart ripped out of your chest. The next documentary was about jellyfish, and as I watched the aimless floating shapes of strange gossamer flowers, I finally drifted into something resembling sleep.

The attention and affection of carrion birds sounded pretty good right then. I was at the grocery store picking up some cheap hot dogs and peanuts the next morning when my phone buzzed with a text that I answered with embarrassing eagerness.

> Stop being so dramatic dude.

> You want me to come over so you can weep into my shoulder?

Not who I was hoping for, and I saw no reason to dignify that with a response. Instead, I set out a bowl of peanuts on the balcony and waited. There were more birds around than I had realized – I’d never paid much attention to wildlife, unless you counted half-watched nature documentaries – and it didn’t take long for a crow to show up. It landed at the far side of the balcony, hopping closer cautiously. Wary black eyes watched me through the window as the thick beak dipped to pick up a peanut.

“Take as many as you like buddy, there’s more where that came from,” I told it. “Let’s see how long it takes you to eat through my date night fund.”

My phone hummed with the arrival of another text.

> Seriously though I’ll bring a movie and pizza

>> Sure. I have peanuts.

> You joining the circus?

>> Like my life isn’t a circus already.

>> I’m one of the clowns.

> Nah dude you’re the guy who swallows swords

>> Constantly making poor choices that cut me up inside? Sounds about right.

When I looked up, the crow was gone.

Crows are picky. They’re suspicious and judgmental and they don’t give away their treasures to just anyone, even among people who feed them peanuts and cheap hot dogs and occasionally cold pizza. Nearly a year of heartbreak and slow decline passed before the first gift appeared.

It was early morning, the first true sunlight pushing back the pre-dawn blue, and I’d been up most of the night. Nature documentaries again; I’d learned all about hyenas and dozed through something about tropical birds, but had switched to cooking shows after the thing about the bobbit worms. This time, I wasn’t eyeing my phone. It was on silent and shoved into my sock drawer. I couldn’t decide if the conversation with my mom had gone on too long or not long enough – maybe both – but I wasn’t eager to continue it. Definitely not then, and maybe not ever.

When the light through the window told me it was finally morning, I dragged myself into the bathroom and splashed water onto my face, although it did little to help the dry burning of my tired eyes. The face that stared back at me from the mirror looked like it belonged to someone headed to a funeral, possibly as the guest of honor, and I turned away. Out on the balcony, the biggest crow I’d ever seen was waiting for me, staring in the window from its perch on the railing beside the peanut bowl. It fled with a harsh call and a flurry of wings, but left something bright behind.

The cool morning air made me feel just a little more awake and alive as I stepped out onto the balcony and lifted the small gift from the peanut bowl: a dime, one of the older ones made with real silver. It was a little worn, the ridges of the face smoothed by time, but it hadn’t lost its shine. Maybe that silver glint was what had attracted the crow to it; maybe the bird had seen humans passing money around enough to know it was valuable. Either way, it was the first time the crows had given something back.

“Thanks,” I called to the empty sky. “I’ll put another hot dog out.”

Ten cents isn’t a lot, especially compared to how much I’d spent on hot dogs and peanuts that year. But it still felt like a validation. One small victory in a world that kept tumbling out of my fingers. I turned to go back inside and properly start my day, and saw that the big crow was still there, perched on a ledge a little way above me.

“You know,” I told it, leaning back against the balcony railing, “usually it’s just a penny for your thoughts. Or are you adjusting for inflation?” It stared back silently, not that I’d expected an answer. I turned the dime over and over in my hands, fingers running across a face rubbed smooth by years. I struggled to make out the date in the early morning light.

“I used to know where I was going in life. And now… no, I guess I know exactly where I’m going, it’s just not where I expected to when I was younger.” I sighed and shook my head as if I could shake off those thoughts like a dog shaking off water. “And now I’m complaining to a bird like I’m Edgar Allen Poe.”

I stepped back inside to get the promised hot dog. The big crow left with it, and didn’t reappear for days.

The second gift didn’t come until almost a month later, and I never saw the crow who left it. That evening I’d stumbled home from work, shrugged off my coat, and collapsed face first onto the couch with a thwump of abused upholstery and an exhausted groan of abused human. When I finally pulled myself back up and stepped outside to let the cool night air breathe a little life back into me, I found it sitting there in the peanut dish.

The small gold dome of a brass button, marked with a lion’s head. I turned it over carefully in my fingers, letting the light streaming through the doorway play off its ridges and curves. It looked more like something that belonged on a historical costume than anything someone would wear today. A small thing, but with a certain air of mystery to it that called to me. Whose was it, before the crows got to it? What sort of a garment had it been part of, and how had it been lost?

I set it down carefully on the shelf, beside the dime I couldn’t bear to spend. I was starting to build a collection.

The third gift came as a welcome distraction from the email I’d spent the last day writing and rewriting until every sentence, every word, every character had been more carefully analyzed than a cadaver in a classroom of med students.

After deleting the same sentence I’d written and erased a dozen times that hour, I’d stepped out to the balcony to escape the stifling closeness of the apartment. I startled the big crow into flight from his place on the peanut dish, but once again he left something behind.

It was a small black stone, its jagged edges and sharp planes just shiny enough that it might have caught a crow’s attention. I set out some more peanuts, and an extra hot dog of gratitude, and went back inside to continue my endless revisions, absentmindedly rolling the pebble back and forth across the table. Until it ran into a stray paperclip and stuck.

“Huh,” I muttered, waving the stone and its new attendant paper clip back and forth. “Magnetic.” I wondered if the crow had known, somehow. It was certainly just a coincidence, though; I doubted birds paid much attention to electromagnetism. No, that wasn’t right; it helped the migratory ones navigate. I’d heard that from another documentary I’d watched a few nights ago. Maybe they could pick up something from magnets after all, though I couldn’t begin to imagine what they thought of them.

Baseless speculation aside, the simple entertainment of pulling chains of paper clips and other small objects back and forth across the table was a welcome, if unhelpful, distraction.

Unlike the first three, the fourth gift arrived with an announcement. Or perhaps a complaint; I’d been a little lax about refilling the peanut bowl for the last few days.

I ignored the gentle tapping against my window at first, focusing on the narrator’s calm voice as time-lapse videos and before and after photos flashed across the screen and he described the likely fate of future glaciers in a soothing tale of world-wide devastation. The ice, he said, was vanishing, once impressive glaciers fading with each passing year. I could sympathize.

The tapping persisted though, and as the credits scrolled up the screen I finally lifted my head to see the familiar shape of the big crow standing at the window, tapping its beak against the glass. Its eyes met mine and stared into my soul. Presumably whatever it found there disappointed the bird as much as me, because it hopped away, back up onto the balcony railing.

I rose from the couch with glacial slowness, wrapping the blanket around my shoulders like a cloak and shedding erratics of uneaten peanuts I’d lost in its folds, like strange stones left behind on an ice-carved plain. The crow watched me from beside the peanut bowl. Slowly, deliberately, without breaking eye contact, it set down the object it was carrying before flying away, its wingtips almost brushing my head.

Once again, I picked up the crow’s gift from the dish. It was a feather this time, and if it had arrived without fanfare like the others I might never have noticed it, if it had even lasted long enough for me to see it. It was so light that even my breath sent it skating across my palm, and I quickly gripped it by the stem before it could escape (no, I remembered from the documentary I’d watched a few weeks ago when I’d made a mess of the job interview, that part was called the shaft or calamus).

The feather couldn’t be from a crow, or any other bird I knew. A fake costume piece, more likely, though nothing about it felt fake. It was almost as long as my forearm and black as a hole in the world, a dark, feather-shaped void that shone with iridescent shimmers of green and orange where the light hit it just right. But in spite of its size, it was almost impossibly light, as if it scarcely existed at all. Gripping it in one hand as the other clutched the blanket draped around my shoulders, I felt a little bit lighter too, some of the weight lifted from my tired limbs.

Its strange beauty took my breath away, and for a moment I wanted to share it with someone. I even fished my phone out from under the bed to take a photo before it struck me that there wasn’t really anyone to send it to. No one I knew who had the time or interest to look at some weird feather I found. Its strangeness would be lost in a photo anyway.

So I set the midnight plume on my shelf beside the dime, the button, and the lodestone, and secured it with a clothespin when it kept trying to float away.

I also made a trip to the store to get some food. The peanuts were really supposed to be for the crows, after all. The big one especially deserved it. And some bits of whatever I was having for lunch, too.