A Plague of Grackles

By Tara Costello

Margaret Brooker died from a pulmonary embolism the day after reading a book in which the main character’s mother died of a pulmonary embolism.

There are many things to consider here.

The first is luck. Many would consider Margaret’s death a case of bad luck. The readers, a deadly case of dramatic irony. The writers, a symbol of a greater pattern—a motif hurling her towards death like a long sentence bends to its tired, extensive, inevitable end.

Her family considered her death sad, of course, but financially burdensome, what with the cost of funerals these days. Her children, of which she had two, considered her death a great loss, while their therapists considered it a great gain.

(Yes, Margaret was a mother, just like the mother in her book. But being a mother does not mark one for a considerable death, does it?)

The medics considered her death unexpected. She was nearly eighty years old, but in decent enough health. The inspectors, well, they had to consider the cause. What a relief it was when the coroner—who considered the physical body—revealed to them that the cause of death was internal. Just a mishap in the body. Had her body ever failed to consider not having such a mishap? It seemed it had not.

Margaret was a considerate woman while she was alive, therefore her death was considered by many. What these many failed to consider about Margaret’s death, however, was not the cause of death, nor the meaning of her death, nor even the book Margaret was reading when she died. No, what every person failed to consider was the number of seeds she’d left out for the birds that morning, and every morning since she moved into that house.

Nobody stopped to consider the birds.

Three days after Margaret passed, her two children, Michael and Maria, came to clear out what they could. They didn’t take much with them, just pictures, clothes, jewelry, and a few sentimental pieces from the basement. They came a few times that first week and then never returned. Their mother had left them money and a few assets in her will, but she hadn’t left them the house. She hadn’t been able to. The house went to Gregory, her husband’s son from his first marriage and Margaret’s stepson.

Gregory was an inconsiderate man.

He had a family and house of his own, but his wife had divorced him a few years ago and taken the kids with her. Years before, as his father lay in a hospital bed, teetering between this world and the next, he had him sign over the house. The house his second wife still lived in. She was allowed to stay there as long as she was alive, though Gregory tried very hard to not make it easy for her.

Gregory never liked Margaret, but Margaret loved his father. She took care of him during the last five years of his life. He was bed-ridden, and she brought the world to him in that bed each day until he went into the hospital and never came back. You can imagine how much this angered Gregory, who had spent the first fifteen years of his father’s second marriage claiming Margaret did not truly love his father and was only with him for his money.

And now the house the two had shared was his.

The first thing Gregory did was change the locks. He didn’t need those nosy neighbours poking around the place. They had been Margaret’s emergency contacts, so they had a key. The second thing he did was rent a large dumpster and fill it with everything in the house that had been hers. His father’s stuff he would take for himself, or maybe keep to furnish the place while he figured out what to do with it. In the end there wasn’t enough left in the house to properly furnish it, and he had to rent another dumpster just to throw everything away.

As soon as the dumpsters had been taken and the house was no longer filled with the sound of drilling new locks, scraping furniture across the floor, and flinging garbage into a big metal bin, Gregory settled down in his father’s old chair, closed his eyes, and leaned his head back to enjoy the silence of the empty house.

Tap, tap, tap.

It wasn’t long before he heard it. Gregory opened one eye. Everything in the house remained still.

Tap, tap, tap.

He turned his head. It sounded like it was coming from the kitchen. Gregory heaved himself up and walked over to check on the sink, but no water droplets leaked from the old faucet.

Tap, tap, tap.

The sound came from behind him.

Turning around, he faced the sliding glass door that led out to the porch in the backyard. Three black birds, larger than the mourning doves that flew into his yard at home, stood on the other side, tapping their beaks against the glass. Gregory stomped over to scare them away, but instead of stumbling back and spreading their wings, they peered up at him, as if waiting for something.

He opened the door. “Go away!” he said.

The black birds only stared back at him, their heads twitching from side to side as if trying to figure out who he was.

He closed the door and went back to sit in his chair, but as soon as he had, the tapping started up again and he couldn’t relax. Whatever, he was done for the day anyway. He would just head back home where the mourning doves kept their distance.

When he opened the front door and went to unlock the outer screen door, he nearly jumped when he saw the black-feathered bodies of five birds latched onto the mesh with their talons. Their beady eyes fixed on him as he popped the lock and shook the door, trying to get them off before he passed through, but they spread their wings for balance and held on. Eventually he gave up and left through the side door, barreling through to startle the birds that were no doubt waiting on the other side of that one too, but to his surprise and relief, there were none.

The next day as he drove up to the house, a group of the same black birds were sitting on the walkway, waiting for him. He went through the side door that he’d exited through yesterday, the only one bird-free, though he caught one out of the corner of his eye watching him as he stepped into the house.

Shaking off the unsettling feeling the birds gave him, he set to work on getting the house ready for staging. He had decided on selling it. The neighbourhood was blossoming with young families, and the new addition of a train station only ten minutes down the road made this house prime real estate. He’d contacted a few real estate agents the night before, but had a few more things to get in order before he’d bring anyone into the house. Namely, the tile in the bathroom was cracked from the walker his dad had used before passing away, and the carpet in the basement hadn’t been cleaned in at least ten years. He would need them both fixed before he had someone come to assess the value of the house.

He sat down at the dining table to start sorting out what he would need to fix these issues, but he couldn’t focus because of the tapping. Did the birds do that when he wasn’t here? It felt personal, the hollow thunk of their beaks against the glass. He tried scaring them away again, but again, they didn’t budge. This time, as he stepped outside, they moved in closer, and he had to shut the door to stop them from coming inside.

Crazy birds, he thought. Had they done this to his father? To Margaret? Then he scoffed. She must have done something to make them act this way. She had seduced them just like she had seduced his father.

Over the next few days as he cleaned the carpets and replaced the tiles, the tapping continued mercilessly. He tried to drown it out with music, but the birds somehow adopted the beat of whatever song he played so that it lingered in the silence as one song ended and the next was getting ready to begin. Eventually he had to switch off the music because every song sounded like someone was singing along to the tapping of the birds.

He tried several times to shoo the birds away, but they didn’t scare easily, so he had to get creative. He went so far as building the top half of a scarecrow with one of Margaret’s old shirts he’d found in his father’s dresser. He stuffed the floral blouse with newspaper and stuck it on the porch bench, but the headless torso wasn’t enough to ward them off. Instead, they dragged it by its sleeves to the bottom of the porch stairs, and Gregory had to go looking for it the day before the home appraiser was supposed to show up to assess the house.

With the black birds on his heels the second he slipped out the back door, he quickly found the floral pattern sticking out from underneath the old wooden porch. As he knelt down to grab it, his eyes caught on the translucent blue of a large Tupperware lid that was tucked under the porch. He grabbed it and brought it inside with him along with the blouse, picking up chunks of the scarecrow’s scrunched-up newspaper guts off the grass as he went.

He opened the container as soon as he was inside. It was filled with birdseed, and on a torn piece of masking tape stuck to the outside, the words “Grackles and” were written in black permanent marker.

Gregory looked from the container of seed to the birds—grackles, apparently—tapping their beaks on the glass. “Is this what you want?” he asked, tilting the container towards the window. The tapping got louder. “Huh.”

If Gregory fed them, then they would keep coming back. That’s clearly what Margaret had done, and now it was his problem. No, best to starve them out, teach them to search for food elsewhere. He snapped the lid shut and placed the container of seed in one of the empty kitchen cabinets.

The home appraiser came by the next day and gave him a high appraisal. Gregory was delighted. Soon the house would be out of his hands, along with those dreaded grackles and their annoying tapping, and he would be wealthier for it.

The next week when he showed up to ready the house for his first prospective buyers, he nearly crashed his car right into the garage when he saw how many grackles were on the front lawn. The group of birds that usually gathered at the front of the house had not been as aggressive as the ones in the backyard. They usually fluttered off when other people walked up to the front door, though they typically didn’t give him the same courtesy. Now there were at least one hundred black-feathered bodies standing on the lawn, their heads turning to follow him as he got out of his car and ran around to the side door.

As soon as he made it in the house, sweating and slightly out of breath, they began migrating to the backyard. Their caws echoed overhead, and he could hear the beat of their wings as they moved as one to settle on the back porch. When he looked out the glass door, he couldn’t see the old, stained wood of the deck, only a sea of black.

Gripping the edge of the kitchen counter, Gregory racked his brain for a solution to this grackle problem. A young couple would be there in half an hour to tour the house, and he didn’t need a hundred grackles in his backyard tapping on the glass and scaring them off. What would make them go away?

The seed.

He flung open the cupboards, looking for where he had stored that Tupperware container. Once he found it, he grabbed the whole thing and stormed outside, prepared to dump it. But as he was about to rip the lid off, he stopped. He couldn’t do this here. He needed them off his property, not feasting on it. The grackles watched him, their eyes hungry, their beaks sharp. He retreated to the kitchen once more, set the container on the counter, grabbed a fistful of seed, then stepped back out into the yard. He walked awkwardly over to the edge of the porch, stepping over grackles that he’d much rather step on (but then he’d have dead birds on his porch for when the couple came for their tour), and flung the seed into the neighbour’s backyard.

A flurry of wings surrounded Gregory as the grackles took flight, beating their wings against his body as they scrambled to follow the food. They descended on the neighbour’s backyard like a black blizzard. Gregory stood, satisfied as he watched the squirrels and chipmunks, who came daily to eat the nuts the neighbours set out for them, run and hide from the army of grackles. He straightened his shirt, ran a hand through his receding hair, and went back inside the house. He still pulled the curtain on the glass door closed, just in case.

William, his real estate agent, arrived shortly after, and then the couple, and they were given a wonderful tour around the house. Gregory peeked through the curtains while they looked at the other rooms, paranoid that the grackles would be back for more, but the porch was clear.

“We would like to see the yard if we can,” said the man, his hand joined with his wife’s, who nodded eagerly.

“Of course,” said Gregory, sweeping the curtains aside. What was clear moments ago was now swarmed with an angry mob of cawing grackles, their beaks raised like pitchforks.

“Oh my,” said the woman, as the man drew her closer to him. “That looks like a lot of crows.”

“They’re grackles,” said Gregory, then quickly added, “There aren’t usually so many of them.”

“Usually?” asked the man, his eyebrow raised as he stared at the birds. One of them tapped their beak on the glass and everyone, including the real estate agent, jumped at the sound.

“Well, we don’t have to see the yard, I guess,” said the woman, and her husband agreed, shaking his head.

“Well then,” said William, smoothing back his hair. “We’ll be in touch.”

After the couple and the agent had left, Gregory paced back and forth in the kitchen. The grackles watched him from outside, their black shiny eyes shifting side to side as they tapped rhythmically on the glass. What was he supposed to do? Would there be more of them tomorrow? How was he going to sell the house when there was an entire colony of birds living in the backyard?

In a moment of panic and frustration, he snatched the container off the counter and stormed outside. He stomped through the crowd of birds, not caring if he stepped on one—in fact, hoping he did—until he reached the edge of the porch. This time he wasn’t so intentional with his aim. He tore off the container and dumped the seed into a pile beside the porch, right near the spot he’d found it in the first place.

“There!” he said, tossing the empty container and loose lid with it. “That’s all there is! So eat it all, and don’t come back!”

He dreaded returning to the house the next day, so he got there only a few minutes before the next prospective buyer, a single man in his thirties who worked downtown at an insurance firm. When Gregory pulled into the driveway, there were no grackles waiting for him on the lawn. His shoulders relaxed. Perhaps they had listened. Or perhaps they understood that this was it. There was no more food for them here.

He couldn’t hear tapping as they stepped into the mudroom, which had to be a good sign. He excused himself to use the bathroom as William began the tour, starting with the main floor. As he ran his hands under the water, taking a second to admire his handiwork with the tile, he heard a gasp coming from outside the bathroom door. He shut off the tap and, without drying his hands, ran out to the kitchen where William and the insurance man were.

“Just ignore those pesky grackles!” He called before he had even reached them. “The old woman who lived here used to feed them, but they’ll be gone as soon as they realize there’s no more— ”

He froze when he reached the kitchen. Instead of a hundred feathered bodies shuffling about on the back deck, pecking at the glass and fixing their beady little eyes on him, there were a hundred feathered bodies lying still on their backs. A gust of wind ruffled a few feathers free and twirled them into the air like autumn leaves.

“Are all those birds dead?” the insurance man asked, his voice cracking on the last word.

Gregory was too stunned to speak. The man thanked him and William for the viewing and left without another word. William told Gregory he was going to have to call pest control or do something to clean up the dead birds in his backyard before he could bring more buyers in for viewings.

Gregory called a service as soon as he left, but they couldn’t come by until the following afternoon, so he had to call William back and cancel the open house they had planned for tomorrow morning. He stared out at the sea of dead grackles for a while after that call. Rage burned in his chest along with hatred for the grackles, but studying their bloated bodies kept that rage from bubbling up into his throat. They were dead. At least this was over.

When pest removal came by the next day, they motioned for Gregory to come take a look at something in the yard.

“Come over here, I want you to see something,” said a short woman chewing gum. The patch on her tan jumpsuit read Lucy. She pointed down at the overturned Tupperware. “You see this here?”

“Yes.”

“Did there used to be seed in there?”

“Yes.”

“Now see, there’s your problem.” She smacked her gum. “You can’t feed ‘em that much. Crows are smart, but they’re birds, and birds don’t know when to stop eating.”

“They’re grackles,” said Gregory.

The woman shrugged and held up her hands. “All I’m tellin’ you is don’t overfeed your birds.”

Gregory waved her off and headed back inside. He wouldn’t need to worry about overfeeding birds, or even feeding them at all, after today. Like with Margaret, his issues with the grackles died when they died.

Until the next day, when he got a call from his real estate agent. He hadn’t gone over to be there for this showing. He was tired of that house and its problems. He just wanted it to sell quickly, and for a lot of money.

“Gregory,” said William over the phone. “You gotta do something about these birds, man, they’re scaring people away.”

“What are you talking about?” said Gregory. “I did do something. The pest guys came the other day and removed them all. I was there.”

“No, no, not the dead ones. I’m talking about the live ones, all over the backyard.”

Gregory gripped the phone tighter. “There are more?”

“Yeah, I’m staring at about fifty of these little guys right now. And to be honest, they’re kinda freaking me out. They freaked out the people who came by today. I can’t sell your house when you got such a bad pest problem.”

Gregory hung up the phone and drove right over to the house. William had left for the day, but the grackles were still there. Not as many as last time, but still a pretty significant amount. His first thought was that some of them had come back from the dead, but he shook that fear out of his head. No, more had just shown up at his back door. Why, he didn’t know for sure, but he was pretty sure it had something to do with the large amount of seed he’d dumped on the grass.

He was right, partially. The birds were there for food, but they were there for Margaret’s food. This, of course, he didn’t consider when he went to the nearby garden store and bought a new bag of bird seed.

If he couldn’t make them leave and he clearly couldn’t kill them all—well, kill enough of them, at least—then he needed to tame them. He needed to show them who was boss and get them off his property for as long as it took for people to tour the house. He dropped a small amount of seed along the fence line at the far end of the yard each day leading up to the next showing, training them to move away from the door where they wouldn’t be seen. After a few days, his plan seemed to be working. When the next people, another young couple, came by to view the house, Gregory invited them in with confidence.

The tour went well, and although this couple asked a lot more questions than the previous prospective buyers, they seemed to be satisfied with the answers William and Gregory each gave. When they entered the kitchen, the grackles were not crowding the porch and tapping on the glass door. Gregory let out a sigh of relief.

“Can we see the yard?” asked the wife.

“Yes, of course,” said William, grinning at Gregory before sliding open the door. He gestured to the porch, allowing them to go out first.

As soon as they stepped onto the porch, a dozen black birds descended on the young couple, biting at their clothes and hair and cawing loudly. They screamed, and Gregory ran out to usher them back inside.

One of the birds nipped at Gregory’s hand. “Not enough!” the bird squawked at him. “Not enough!”

But Gregory wasn’t listening. He swatted it away.

The couple left in tears. William slumped against the metal railing of the three-stair staircase that led to the main floor from the mudroom.

“I don’t know what we’re going to do.” He shook his head in defeat. “It’s kind of hard to sell a house that attacks you.”

“But it’s not the house,” argued Gregory. “It’s just the birds in the backyard.”

“I understand that, but when people are looking for a house, they’re looking for somewhere they can feel at home. They’re looking for a feeling. A sign.” He looked in the direction of the kitchen, his eyebrows drawn up in worry. “Those birds are a bad sign.”

“I’ll get rid of them,” said Gregory quickly. “I will.”

“You better,” said William. “Or else we're going to have to reevaluate our asking price.”

By the time William left, Gregory was fuming. “That’s it,” he muttered through gritted teeth. He lugged the entire bag of bird seed he’d purchased out into the yard, sliced it open with a knife, and ran back inside the house as the birds descended on the pile. Then he called pest removal and made an appointment for the next day.

“Too much!” the birds squealed as he got into his car, but he couldn’t hear them. He didn’t try to hear them. He’d kill every bird in this neighbourhood if he had to.

“Now what did I tell you about overfeedin’ your birds?” Lucy chided the following day. She stood in the yard, shaking her head disapprovingly. “I’m tellin’ you, the next time you call us to clean up the scene of your crime, we’re not comin’!”

“It’s your job to clean up stuff like this,” said Gregory, irritated.

“An unfortunate accident, sure, but not a murder!” Then she slapped her leg and laughed. “Ha! Murder, get it? Like a murder of crows.”

“They’re grackles,” said Gregory through clenched teeth.

He took the warning, but only after the next time, when he discovered Lucy to be a woman of her word. He spent a good few hours in the yard with a pair of old garden gloves, plucking stiff, black-feathered bodies from the grass and throwing them into shiny black trash bags.

It wasn’t coming face-to-face with his victims that made him decide against another mass murder, though, but the soreness in his back from bending down so much. Besides, it didn’t seem to matter how many he’d killed anyway. There’d only be more in his yard the next day.

No matter what Gregory did—overfeed them, starve them, give them the seed they seemed to want or throw it in the neighbour’s backyard—nothing seemed to get the grackles off his property.

One day he stormed out the back door in a rage, waving his fists in the air and yelling “This is my house now! My backyard! It’s not yours, and it never was! You are trespassing on my property and I’ll kill you for it!”

The birds watched him silently, their eyes as sharp as their beaks, but they didn’t budge.

After a few more viewings disrupted by the birds, Gregory’s real estate agent advised him to call up a company that deals with live pest removal and relocation.

“And how much is that going to cost me?” Gregory grunted.

“I don’t know,” shrugged William. “But you gotta do something.”

“I’ve already tried everything!” cried Gregory. “There’s no company out there that’s going to come in and magically fix it.”

“Greg— ”

“Those birds got something against me, I’m telling you!” His face was now red with anger.

“Are you saying you think it’s personal?” William smoothed down his hair, considering this theory, then put his hands on his hips. “Why?”

“I don’t know,” said Gregory. “But I’ll bet that as soon as I’m out of here they’ll move on. Start telling the buyers that.”

His agent began to shake his head. “Gregory, I don’t— ”

“Just do it!”

Whether or not William did tell prospective buyers this when Gregory wasn’t there, nothing either of them said could compel people to overlook the bird problem in the backyard. Even if the people who came and toured the place believed the excuse, that only led them to ask more questions about Gregory’s history with the house. That conversation always ended with Margaret. An old lady’s death within its walls and an angry mob of birds outside was too much of an omen for anyone who took a second to consider these two things together.

Gregory’s frustration only grew, and his outbursts at the birds became more regular, to the point that one day a police officer showed up at the front door to check on him. Those annoying neighbours had called. After explaining that he was fine to the officer, he slumped down into his father’s chair and closed his eyes, but the birds wouldn’t let him rest for even a second.

Tap, tap, tap.

His hands were tight on the wheel the whole drive home. He breathed through clenched teeth. He thought he was free of Margaret, but it seemed she’d still found a way to ruin things from beyond the grave.

Eventually, at William’s firm advice, they lowered the listing for the house. Which, to a man with Gregory’s pride, was its own kind of pulmonary embolism. Not long after, they found a buyer who was willing to live with the birds in the yard: a young couple moving out of the city.

“Not the worst housemates we’ve had,” shrugged one of the women.

“And definitely not the worst we’ve ever had squatting in our yard, either,” said the other one, nudging her partner playfully.

A week after closing the deal, Gregory went over to the house for the last time to drop off the keys. The birds had gathered on the front lawn to say goodbye. Their heads followed Gregory slowly as he pulled into the driveway, got out of his car, and walked to the front door. He placed the keys in the mailbox, shut the lid, then turned around to face the black birds.

He spread his arms out wide to address the crowd. “Good riddance, to each and every one of you!”

Climbing back into his car, he felt the weight of the birds lift off him like he was a scarecrow. As he pulled out of the driveway, he took one last look at the house. It was over. He didn’t have to think about the house, or its birds, or Margaret ever again.

Before becoming his, he’d rarely visited the house. However, he’d spent a lot of time sitting out front in his car after his father had passed away. He’d spent far too many words telling Margaret that the house belonged to him, that he was just waiting for her to be gone so that he could have what was rightfully his. Far too many minutes standing at the front door after she’d closed it on him, rapping his knuckle against it repeatedly.

Gregory had never lived in the house. He didn’t grow up there. The house wasn’t familiar with the softer sounds of his voice or even the weight of his footsteps on the floorboards. He’d spent more time outside of the house than inside, so the house had never really gotten to know him.

But the crows had.

They recognized him as the man who sat in his car across the street, who occasionally got out to yell at the lady who lived there through the screen door. The lady who fed them, along with the grackles, the same amount of birdseed every day for the last twenty years.
​
(How considerate of Margaret.)

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Tara Costello is a writer and library worker based in the GTA. She holds an Honours BA from the University of Toronto and an MA in English from Toronto Metropolitan University. Tara collaborated with Contemporary Verse 2 in 2023 to create an educational poetry resource for high school students. Her writing has been featured in The Strand, Pivot Journal, White Wall Review, and PHWOAR! Magazine.