Sandhill Crane
Lauren C. Johnson
A sandhill crane padded along a median dividing a four-lane road just as the afternoon rain broke. She walked toward the tall, planted shrubs though they offered little shelter, and her companion and two-month-old colt followed close behind. The birds nestled together as cars passed on either side, headlights flashing through the wet gloom.
The crane had grown up among the people and she didn’t fear them. She knew they respected her; she was tall and majestic, with brown feathers, a long, arched neck, and a haughty red crown. She strode their sidewalks and fished their suburban retention ponds unbothered. She stood lackadaisical in the grass off the side of the road and regarded the cars.
Her colt could fly, but she was still covered in fuzzy down and hadn’t developed the wingspan that would keep her to stay aloft for hours, carried by the airstreams. In a matter of months, the cold would be grown and able to migrate if she chose, though few birds that nested this far south ever left. They had all been here too long.
***
Blake lived by himself in a new subdivision. Eva drove by it each day on her way to work at the public high school, and she was surprised she hadn’t noticed the construction. It seemed like its gates and fountains had grown overnight from the live oak forest.
Not like the half-built megachurch, a local drama Eva followed with mild interest. Three years before, the developers had broken ground next to the retention pond kids always mistook for a lake, but there wasn’t a company that would stick around long enough to finish the job; the contractors never got paid on time—if they got paid at all. Then every five months or so, a CAT excavator would jerk to life and paw at the ground for a couple of days. Now, a long, slender cross hung from an abandoned crane and presided over the site.
Blake was waiting for Eva in the driveway of his new home. A sweet yellow house, though a strange color for Blake; Eva had expected a humble grey or beige. He had put on weight, Eva decided, but was still attractive despite the first hint of a belly. She complimented the pink azaleas blooming in the front yard. He embraced her.
“It is so good to see you after all this time, kiddo.”
“Welcome home,” she said into his neck.
***
His heart, his heart, his heart; Eva had always loved how Blake was generous of his heart, mind, time, and money. Even in high school—when she had known him best—he had loved the Model United Nations and the National Forensic League. As an adult, there was Habitat for Humanity, the People’s Climate March and a policy job at Conservation International.
After Blake moved to D.C. and their friendship faded to Facebook likes, Eva continued to admire him. Commenting on his photos from places like Ecuador and Indonesia. Congratulated him on his marriage to Meg, that horse-faced woman with yellow hair who dressed like a brand ambassador for Ann Taylor Loft.
But before that—the move, the job, the marriage—there had been the whiskey-soaked night on the eve of Thanksgiving. Standing outside the pool hall, waiting for Blake to decide whether or not to follow her home. The satisfaction of his yes when they left the bar together, stepping into the balmy night.
Eva sucking on Blake’s nipples, pinning his hands to the mattress, sitting on his face, consummating a night of flirtation and a crush Eva had harbored since her adolescence, David Bowie’s “Low” spinning on the record player. Good God, that night had been fire.
Now Blake had moved back to Tampa all by himself. Her twin flame. They could be something together now, they could be something special.
***
She was still with him when the rain began. You shouldn’t drive in this weather, he told her, just stay and have another beer. Eva had homework assignments to grade and a math class that started at 7:30 the next morning. Still, she didn’t stop Blake when he strode toward his kitchen to retrieve a bottle of tequila and two shot glasses from an otherwise bare cabinet. Two more cans of beer emerged from the white innards of the fridge.
Blake with his cherubic lips and auburn hair—now thinning—that curled above his ears. He still had that crooked little tooth that gave him a mischievous look, and the slightest suggestion of a southern drawl.
Eva watched him, surprised and delighted he was back in Tampa. God, she could hardly believe her luck! When he was younger, he had always been so insistent Tampa could never offer him everything he wanted in a city. Now here he was, a homeowner with landscaping and everything, and he said he had every intention of sticking around. From one swamp to another, uh huh.
Floridians were like the alligators, Eva decided, for the most part, the sun made them too sleepy to move. Some of her friends that had gone to out-of-state schools eventually came back. And the ones that hadn’t still listed their parents’ homes as their permanent addresses so they could vote absentee in Florida elections. Eva speculated that one day they too would all return—the allure of affordable property hard to resist—and nest amongst the great blue herons and Publix supermarkets.
And there were worse places to land than Tampa. Busch Gardens, the boozy beaches, night clubs, strip clubs, Cuban cigars and even the stupid Gasparilla pirate festival brought in tourists. But Eva loved the Spanish moss dripping from every tree and the way the air smelled heavy right before the storms broke. Eva’s own mother was a third-generation Floridian, after all, who had lived in San Francisco in the seventies only to return to Tampa before Eva was born. Maybe that was the whole thing about Florida: no one ever got to leave, not really. Not even Blake.
They streamed a movie on Blake’s laptop, and as rain beat against the windows, memories of the pool hall returned to Eva in fragments. He slid an arm around her and said, “Come here, Evie.” She was all fire.
***
Storms always came in short bursts, and soon sunbeams reflected rainbows in the drizzle. As the rain subsided, the crane preened droplets from her colt’s feathers. She stood with her wings open and released a trumpeting cry. Her voice carried over the traffic and her companion joined. From far beyond the road, they heard summoning calls in response.
The crane soared above the stream of cars and landed on the other side of the road while her colt paced the median. She looked diminished amongst the planted trees and the sound of traffic muffled her trills.
***
Eva placed her hand on Blake’s inner thigh.
“Hey, are you trying to pull a smooth one?”
“Well, you know,” she said. “You’ve gotten pretty good looking.”
She ran her fingers over Blake’s soft abdomen and pulled herself into his lap. His once-familiar scent was irretrievable; today, he smelled like palo santo or incense—like the inside of a yoga studio or a tacky crystal shop, though not terribly unpleasant, just different. She smiled and bit his bottom lip. He kissed her.
“I’ve been wanting to do this again for years,” she said.
He grabbed a fistful of her hair and pulled so hard it made her scalp sting, kissing the arch of her neck as she unbuckled his belt. He slid his hands across her chest and thumbed her bra strap through her clothes. She gyrated her hips against his crotch. She started to unbutton her shirt and he told her to wait.
“Why?”
“Look, Evie, I’m still talking to my ex in D.C.” He leaned back into the cushions. “I’m really sorry I didn’t tell you before. She’s actually thinking about moving here.” He pressed his face into her neck. She was still straddling him.
“It’s why I bought the house.”
Eva inhaled, fighting a lightheaded sensation that created spots across her field of vision. Blake was babbling apologies, but Eva barely heard him.
Well, fucking fuck, fuck, fuck. Then why the fuck had Blake invited her over? He had separated from his wife before he moved back to Florida, that’s what he had told Eva, at least, when he surprised her with a phone call—an actual phone call—to tell her he was coming home (he had referred to Tampa as his home) because he had accepted a job with the Mayor’s Office, because his home state, their home state (he had corrected himself) was on the frontlines of climate change, and he was going to do something about it, because cynicism was a waste of time, right? And in the next breath, he had told Eva how much he admired her work in the public school system and how hearing her voice after all these years filled him with relief but mostly sorrow for the time that had been lost, and Eva had admitted that she had thought about Blake from time to time, too, especially when there hadn’t been anyone in a very long time—and there hadn’t been anyone in a very long time—so truth be told, these days she was feeling pretty manic; she could also feel her life becoming small and still and routine and here was Blake with his travels and fancy NGO jobs and she wanted to absorb some of that magic vis-à-vis his skin, so to those ends, she had tucked a foolish condom in her bag that morning because she hadn’t had sex with a man in nearly a year, and here was a live one in all of his glory—and not just any man, but Blake, her twin flame!—with cheeks flushed, lips parted, eyes half-closed and tapered prettily at the corners and she could feel his hard-on and she wanted to crush him beneath the full weight of her hips.
“It’s fine.” Eva said, aware that her pencil skirt had crept up past her thighs.
“Meg wanted a house—we both did. We just couldn’t afford it up there.” Blake exhaled.
“And with all of the foreclosures in Tampa—”
“But the divorce—”
“We haven’t filed yet,” Blake breathed. “She’s just not sure about Florida. But she’s going to come around. I’m so sorry—this was really shitty of me. I shouldn’t have let this happen.”
She had to roll over him to pull down her skirt, and she hoped, after all of that, he had, at least, caught a glimpse of her panties.
“The rain’s slowed up, so I’m going to take off now.”
“No, don’t go yet! Are you even okay to drive? Do you want something to eat? Maybe you should wait a little longer.”
Eva still felt lightheaded, but this wasn’t the first time she had pulled out onto Bruce B. Downs Boulevard after a drink she didn’t need. She insisted she was fine.
“Promise me you’ll text when you get home.”
Eva was always snatching vape pens from her students but today she bought one for herself from the gas station across the street. She sucked on the end and idled her car in the parking lot, waiting for her head to clear, savoring the metallic aftertaste. She slammed her hands against the steering wheel, hard enough to sting her palms. Good God, how had she gotten this wrong?
When she put her car into drive, “My Neck, My Back” by Khia was playing on the radio and she left it on. She realized that song had come out when she was in high school. Her phone dinged on the seat beside her, and she reached over to grab it at the red light.
Thank you for this afternoon, Blake texted. Please don’t forget to text me when you get home.
She wrote back before the light could change. Thank you too.
For what? Ur great. I’m a sucker.
The light changed, and she pressed the accelerator. She was thinking about what to say when the bird flew into her windshield.
“Shit!”
Cracks spread like lattice upon impact as Eva slammed the breaks, shrieking, forcing the car behind her to swerve. Trembling, she parked on the shoulder of the road where the grass sloped into the retention pond. She opened her car door to smell of mowed sod, recalling a story of a local man who was so drunk he drove straight into that water. She reached for her phone, hovering her thumb above Blake’s number while staring at her car. A pickup truck whizzed past and the driver honked his horn and shouted something unintelligible. She hit the call button.
Blake’s voice, soothing in its familiarity.
“Are you okay?”
“I hit something. I think it was a sandhill crane.”
“Really? Those things are humongous! It could have run you off the road.”
“No kidding.”
“I told you to wait,” Blake said.
“It must have been a baby.” She ran her fingertips over the shattered glass. “I feel awful.”
“Well, hey. It could have been worse—you could have hit a person.”
“I feel like shit. You’ve seen how the cranes fly in families—you’ve seen the little ones.”
“See? I told you not to drive.”
“Aren’t sandhill cranes endangered?”
“Actually, I think the IUCN lists the Florida species as vulnerable but not endangered,” said Blake.
Eva nodded to herself and closed her eyes.
“You know, the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List of Threatened Species—”
“I know what IUCN stands for.”
“Never mind,” Blake breathed. “Look, it was just a bird. It could have been a lot worse.”
Eva said nothing, wiping away the first buds of tears.
“Are you okay to get yourself home? Look, I’m in the middle of something now and I can come meet you, but it’ll take a while. You’re almost home, right?”
“Sure,” Eva said.
“Just be careful. Drive slowly. Don’t look at your phone.”
They hung up and Eva ran her fingers across the windshield. Worried her sour breath and perspiration would give away how much she had had to drink, she decided against AAA. The impact was on the passenger side, and she could still see through the glass. Home was ten minutes away. She slid into the driver’s seat before she caught a cop’s attention or one of her students saw her shaking by the side of the road.
Looked over her shoulder and pulled back onto the road. Swallowed the lump in her throat and tears pulling at her eyes. She had woken this morning so excited to see Blake. The way she had slipped her panties around her ankles the previous night, kicking them from the bed to the floor, imagining Blake’s mouth in the place of her hands, getting herself off four times before going to sleep. The searing disappointment of it all.
***
The crane landed at the top of the tall, tall cypress tree and her companion nestled beside her, close, absorbing the space where their colt had perched. Up here, they were safe from the alligator that lived in the retention pond below. It was early evening, the time alligators liked to hunt, but this alligator was fat on trash. No threat.
It had been their first brood. There had been another egg, but a hawk had snatched it before it could hatch. Death was natural, hawks had young to feed, too, but this was——
The crane’s feathers stood up on end. She had thought the people respected her; the parents of her parents had told her so.
Here came two joggers. She could poke out their eyes the way she had killed a young fox who had crept too close to their nest when they still had both eggs. She could shred their ugly clothes. Break their snouts against her powerful wings. Chase up a storm of blood, chaos, and feathers.
But the joggers were fast, and the moment was lost. The crane and her mate tilted their necks skyward and keened.
***
Growing up, Eva saw sandhill cranes almost every day, but as she entered adulthood, she took them for granted, these creatures with ominous calls that rattled over the flat, suburban landscape.
Back when the subdivisions felt like outposts, Eva and her friends played along the water’s edge of the big lake in their neighborhood. They dared each other to stand in the warm, soft mud at the water’s lip. They rode their bicycles to the lake and watched the egrets wade on slender legs. Eva knew better than to follow the armadillos into the palmettos. Everyone knew there were rattlesnakes in there. Sunlight dripped through the moss-covered oak trees and warmed the earth. Eva remembered the rusty scent of sweat and sunscreen, and the smell of decaying plants. Sometimes near dusk, they saw an alligator snout slice through the water’s surface, far from them, in the middle of the lake.
***
In the following days, Eva considered the incident in equation. She thought about asking her students something along the lines of: Woman A is slightly drunk while driving her 1393 kg car down Bruce B. Downs Boulevard at 50 mph. She's texting some dude and doesn't see baby sandhill crane B flying towards her at 15 mph. Determine, when she slams into the innocent creature, what the impact is on the woman.
***
The sandhill crane began to walk into lawns and backyards. She watched the people through their screened-in patios and glass doors, the soft blue glow of screens illuminating their faces as they ate. Wary of these houses and sidewalks beside these live oak forests where the parents of her parents had built their nests. Had she been wrong to think she could share the land?
On a particularly still afternoon, the half-built church reflecting dry, white sky, the sunlight became oppressive. Asphalt and brown swamp mingled and smelled like fecundity and rot. The sandhill crane could barely stand the stinking air and left her mate’s side in their tippy tall tree.
She soared over the neighborhoods, evaluating the rooftops. A squat house with putrid yellow paint caught her eye. She had never noticed that one before. And there was a man trimming shrubbery in the lawn below: another new resident. The crane glided in a silent descent and landed on top of a car parked in the driveway. The yard was covered in pink petals, and the gardening shears made squeaky, greasy noises as the man sliced through the leaves and delicate branches. When the shears popped open and enclosed around the head of a blossom, the man said, “Whoops!” to no one in particular.
The crane opened her beak and hopped from car to ground. Crystals from the sidewalk reflected white sunlight. She released a low trill and the man turned around. They were so close. He had a pink face, as long and thin as a bone, and an ugly twisted tooth poking through his smile. The man cocked his head to the side.
“Hey there, beauty. Aren’t you something?” He put his fists on his fat hips.
The crane extended her wings—sunlight passed through feather, bone, and cartilage—and released a booming cry. The man shrieked and dropped his shears. They fell, blades open—just missing the crane as she jerked back—and stood upright in the soft earth. The man turned, preparing to run, and she lunged into his calf. Bright red seeds of blood broke through skin and left a bland aftertaste. With stained feathers, the crane extended her wings to fly trumpeting over the neighborhood.
***
As evening fell, Eva jogged along the sidewalk that ran between the road and the swampy mess of retention pond and trees. Beyond the pond, the half-built church remained untouched, the sad cross still dropping from the crane. Eva watched it between the gaps in the trees as she ran.
Months and months later, when her thoughts turned to Blake, she would see, with clarity, how round his eyes looked and the feathery hairs on his arms. Tufts of unruly brows. The way shadows played on his high cheekbones, elongating the bones in his face past the point of attractive. That twisted little discolored tooth no longer mischievous but truly distracting. Eva would realize he was ugly, and she would feel surprised and disappointed with the revelation.
Eventually, she would tire of her jealous fascination with Meg, who posted selfies from a solo trip to Paris and quotes from 1 Corinthians 13, but not a word about Blake or Tampa. Eventually, Eva would quit checking Meg’s Instagram page from the secluded corner in the teacher’s lounge, dropping soppy bites of potato salad on her keyboard while comparing her looks and interests to Meg’s.
And when Eva thought about the nice new house Blake and Meg might share, she would train her thoughts to the bare walls and the empty interior that had greeted her when she stepped inside. That God-awful paint job. The way everyone who had lived in Tampa long enough knew his subdivision was built on flood-prone land. And then she would laugh and laugh at Blake and at Meg and at herself.
With time, she would get over the rejection. With time, she wouldn’t care.
But all of that would come later; it was still the cusp of nightfall and the air was warm. When Eva turned back to the sidewalk, she saw two large birds standing in her path. They were rooting through the cracks of the sidewalk, but they raised their heads as she approached. She could try to jog around them, but the sandhill cranes stood very still, side-by-side, and took up the full sidewalk. They were not afraid of her. They walked toward her, all long, skinny legs and serpentine necks. They were an image from a papyrus scroll or stone animals stepping down from some ancient fresco. In unison, they opened their long, slender mouths.
Eva’s ankle gave out from under her and she stumbled to the sidewalk, skinning her hands and knees on the pavement. She felt the air pressure change as the pair passed above her, their flight feathers catching the light. Their beating wings and the airstreams moving in the opposite direction buoyed them up, over the streetlights and the highway that would eventually lead to the coast. She could hear their cries long after she no longer saw them.
The palms of her hands were tender, and she could feel an angry, violet bruise blossoming on the hip where she landed. She applied pressure to her stinging kneecaps as the sky darkened and the retention pond mirrored gathering clouds. Another jogger zigzagged around to avoid trampling Eva but didn’t stop to say hello or offer help. A spider darted across her thigh, striking with its velvety gray body, making the hair on the back of Eva’s neck stand up as she watched it escape into the shelter of the grass.
Lauren Connell Johnson attributes her upbringing in Tampa, Florida—America’s weirdest state—to her interest in the ecological and surreal. Her writing has appeared in The Racket Journal, Pacifica Literary Review, Museum of Science Fiction, Boston Globe, Oracle Fine Arts Review, and others. She earned her MFA in creative writing at American University and lives in San Francisco, where she is a co-host of Babylon Salon, a quarterly Bay Area reading series.