When he fulfilled his first contract, a crow landed in the branches outside our gray brick home.  After the second, another.  He collected crows like a headhunter skulls.  The dark specters speckled his conscience like drops of blood, drips of corrosive acid, eating everything:  bodies, fingerprints, metal, guns.  As he once told, this future tumbled out of tarot cards when he was but a teen.

As a child he dreamed of beauty, meadows and rainbows, a girl next door.  Yet life hardens you.  As silver streaked his temples, and the knife wound brought on his limp, his mind grew too crowded with crows, his worship too splattered with bird droppings for any light to break through, leaving only shadows, demons, the acid, the crows.

Mars—
the glory of our lives
and the stain

Anna Cates