Chapter 13: The Crow That Types
Once upon a crack, in the slant between word and wing, he found the bones of a sentence in the rust-leaf of a Smith-Corona. Rust-guttered and gum-belled, the typewriter slept beneath the moss-shawl of an abandoned sanitarium where language had gone to bruise. And he—the Crow That Types—nested in its platen dreams, ink-thirsty and utterly unreadable.
It began with a glyph. One peck. Kak. A beat too sharp for birdsong, too exact for syntax. “T,” it typed, and the forest shuddered. Foliage reconfigured into half-script alphabets, wing-veins of moths spelled out guttural subtexts, and the beetles—oh, the beetles—spelled ampersands with their legs and clicked sonnets into mulch.
The Crow typed.
No rhythm. No rhyme. Just (klak) (klak) (skrrr) (tch), each keystroke a curse, a riddle knotting around itself like a Möbius tongue. The paper—blank still. Ink vanished upon contact, not erased, but never-arrived. But linguists, the poor damned things, heard whispers in the keystrokes and came.
They came from Stuttgart and São Paulo and the asphodel schools of Tagalog dream-chambers. They brought phonemes in jars and dialect maps inked on vellum stolen from the Vatican. They pitched tents in the rot-grass and waited, ears bleeding Morse from the constant, constipated typing. One by one, they read.
And one by one, they ruptured.
Not all at once. No, no. The first just sneezed himself inside-out—soft tissues rearranged into glottal stops, bile dripping diphthongs. The next wept blood in the shape of Arabic ligatures until he gurgled “syntax is a suicide pact.” The third, a prodigy from Ankara, simply opened his mouth and screamed a phoneme so acute it echoed only inside the cerebellums of birds.
Still the Crow typed. He never stopped. His feathers ink-black with ideogram-stain, beak nicked raw from the violence of semiotics. Not that he knew what he typed. Or maybe he did, and that was worse.
The last linguist—Ah, Professor Nelda C. Kline, she of the Rosetta Project, who once translated dreams from the EEGs of octopuses—she alone did not try to understand. She only listened. And then she opened her throat and unspoke. Her jaw dislocated like a crow's mimicry, and she uttered no word, only not-word, an anti-vowel so dense it bent the italic slant of the world’s axis.
And the Crow paused.
He looked at her.
And typed, slowly: TH3 W0RD 1S W1NG. TH3 W1NG 1S LY1NG.
Nelda folded into a comma and vanished.
The sanitarium sank two inches into the earth, doors now facing inward.
The Crow returned to his typing, obsessed beyond species, unhinged beyond meaning, plucking sigils from the void with his beak, manifesting them into keystrokes that refused grammar but built god.
And above him, the sky began to spell something wrong. Clouds in palimpsest, wind conjugating itself into storms.
The Crow typed faster. He was close. So close.
Somewhere in the Mariana Trench, a jellyfish formed the subject of a sentence no one had yet invented.
And it began.