With the fifth gift, things started to get weird, but by then I’d gone past caring. I arrived home from work for the last time, a cardboard box full of odds and ends in my arms, and the sight of black wings fleeing my balcony came as a welcome distraction. The crows were even better than nature documentaries for taking my mind off of things.

Left behind in the empty peanut dish lay a tiny, sun-bleached skull. It almost looked like rabbit’s, aside from the antlers, and no amount of searching on the internet could identify it. I turned it over in my hands, running my fingers along the teeth. A fake, of course, like the feather. It had to be, for all that it looked and felt completely real. Obviously my crow admirer had strange sources for the oddities he left behind. Other people got shiny trash; I got the skulls of legendary creatures, even if jackalopes were somewhat underwhelming as legendary creatures went.

Still, the long search through photos of skulls provided the diversion I needed from the cardboard box on the table by the door, and the paper sticking out from it. That white page, glimpsed out of the corner of my eye, dragged at me like the paperclips pulled along by my lodestone. Dragged at me, and repelled me as well. I looked back down at the skull and traced a finger along one of the antlers.

I would have to deal with it. With the paper, and what it meant. With the phrases that flitted through my head, like “too many sick days” and “lack of engagement” and…

But not that night. That night, I researched the skull, and then I ordered pizza and set some out for the big crow who left strange things behind, because you should always thank people who give you gifts, even if those gifts are slightly unsettling. Maybe especially if the gifts are slightly unsettling.

The gifts started coming faster then, and stranger. A reddish stone that was always warm to the touch, and smelled faintly of blood. A black arrowhead I though might be obsidian, that spun around if set on a smooth surface until it pointed in the same direction: west-northwest, as near as I could tell, and I wondered what might happen if I found the courage to follow its pointing. A spiky, curled shell that sounded like the sea when I held it to my ear, complete with the crash of waves and cries of gulls. A small stone with a hole in it, through which the world appeared in strange, burning colors.

Each, I was sure, had a story. Each proved more mysterious and impossible than the last. At some point I had stopped believing they were fakes, and started wondering about their origins, their nature. Where did the crow get them? Was the big black bird that left these fantastic objects behind even a crow at all?

I welcomed each distraction from the haze of job postings and applications, the agony of disastrous interviews and the soothing numbness of nature documentaries, but despite my burning questions I didn’t tell anyone about the gifts. Even if there had been anyone to tell, it felt wrong. A betrayal, although I didn’t know of what. Or maybe I was just scared that the strange magic of the gifts would be explained away or lost by sharing it. I kept my shelf of oddities to myself, and fed the crows that came to my balcony with whatever I was eating at the time, although as the weeks went on and my savings dwindled that became more and more disappointing.

The final gift came in the evening, when I was sitting at the table, staring at papers and trying to make numbers twist themselves into something more useful. I’d always been good with numbers; I had few things I could rely on as much as the certainty of mathematics. But no matter how I turned it, the numbers weren’t in my favor this time. I didn’t have a job, or savings, or much of anything else. I’d even fallen out of touch with my friends, if I’d ever really had any to begin with. That was my fault. Maybe everything was my fault. I’d made mistakes. Poor choices, miscalculations, and painful blunders. In the indifferent math of the universe, it had all been added up, and short of a miracle the numbers weren’t going to come out in my favor this time. Then again, they never had. I rested my head in my arms, letting the exhaustion of long, fruitless days push me down against the table with the weight of an elephant, until the tapping on the window raised my head again.

In the fiery light of late afternoon, the massive crow watched me through the window until I opened the door, and then it dropped its final gift into my hand. A key, the old-fashioned kind with a long stem and ornate handle. Among the curling lines and leaves of its decoration, my questing fingers found the shape of a crow.

My own crow just looked back at me with knowing black eyes that seemed far too clever for any bird. Its head was cocked, as if asking a question, but I wasn’t sure of the answer yet.

“Thank you,” I told it. The key felt slightly warm in my hand. I knew it would be like the other gifts. Something more. Something magic. And that was what I needed right now. A miracle to save me. It was what I’d needed for a while.

I didn’t bother to pack, but I did gather up the other gifts as the crow waited patiently on its perch on top of my shelf. It seemed wrong to abandon such wonders, and worse for anyone else to find them. “Nevermore,” I told the somber bird, but got no response. It watched silently as I walked to my door, and lifted the key to the lock. Not my own small, compact, and entirely mundane key, but the beautiful, delicate shape of the crow’s key. I paused for a moment then, the key poised in front of the lock’s opening. My breath hitched in my throat and my hand shook slightly. I steadied it with the other, and inserted the crow’s key.

It fit into the lock as easily as if it had been made for it, and there was no resistance as it turned. I almost closed my eyes and turned away as the door swung open, but I forced myself to look as the familiar opened onto the utterly strange. Sunlight warmed my face, and the calls of crows rang in my ears from both sides of the door.

“This is it, I guess,” I told the crow. “That’s alright. There hasn’t been anything holding me here for a while. I guess now I’ll see where all those wonderful things came from.”

The rustle of black wings followed after me as I stepped through to elsewhere.