millionaire city glasses

I was chosen to represent Crow Patrol at the banquet. No one else had a suit. I went down early to harass the crows before the money showed up. I would use it as a point of conversation later in the night. Oh, yes, it’s very effective. Didn’t you notice how clean and quiet the streets were tonight? And it’s humane too. Yes, I did hear about that poor girl . . . terrible . . . I heard he was on drugs.

	The banquet was a fundraiser for the Clean & Safe District. Funds would be collected by Clean & Safe, Inc., and re-invested into programs aimed at reducing consumer friction in the heart of the city.

In the wintertime, the crows like to roost downtown; tens of thousands of them . . . everything gets covered in shit. A world of shit. It’s bad for business. So, C&S Inc. bought a specialized street sweeper to polish the shit off the sidewalks. It was a total failure. The Poopmaster 9000 flattened a myopic little girl at Pioneer Square within a month of it’s commissioning. She had dropped her glasses . . . The PM 9000 had a virtually silent electric motor, it was a major selling point.

Crow Patrol was formally approached soon after the incident with a contract to keep the streets clean. Most of us had worked the vineyards in the Willamette Valley before the contract. You get to know the owners. Thomas Ahab Carlyle was a millionaire and he wore glasses with frosted black lenses. He hated crows . . . last season a massive ghost of a crow, fat on the grapes of his vineyard, in a frenzy of gluttony, plucked out the eyes of his entire family. Moby Dick, they called him . . .

I WANT HIM DEAD! DO YOU HEAR ME CROW PATROL!

And but so the vines were wateréd with gilded blood.
And the Crows laughed.
Our eyes are but grapes ripe for the beak.

the end