Today, it was owls.
Passing by a storefront with an owl painted on the sign, I had this absurd thought. “She watches through the owls. She sees through their eyes.”
We pull the car into the auto repair shop, my grandmother and I. I squint and ask her if we’ve been here before. She doesn’t answer, she just keeps rattling off her to-do list for the evening. I try to help her get out of the car and she stubbornly refuses my hooked arm. A “hoot hoot” interrupts her from a nearby tree and I lose focus for a minute.
They’re calling me.
My grandma is hungry so I walk with her the half mile to IHOP while we wait for the tires to be replaced. It’s like wrangling a a cat, worse than wrangling my son if I’m honest. She keeps trying to walk in front of cars and cross the street when the “DO NOT WALK” hand is glaring at us. There’s a bite in her words and sass in her veins when she asks me if I follow all the rules all the time or if I’m just slowing her down on purpose.
Crossing the street at 4th and Federal, an angry red pickup on monster truck wheels looks at me nose to nose. Two matching owls dangle in the rear view mirror. I pass a green owl decal with golden eyes in a parking lot, slapped on the rump of an old mini-van.
We spend the next two hours at IHOP. I cringe when I see the waitress’ large tacky owl ring from China. She mistakes it for a smile and adds an extra pancake to my stack when it comes. The rest of the time is uneventful but my strawberry banana pancakes are excellent. I could enjoy them if I closed my eyes and ignored the feeling of being watched. I could savor them if I just pretended it didn’t feel like a layer of thin, sticky grime clung to the hairs on my exposed skin. I felt dirty.
I primped in the restroom for a moment, ignoring the extra set of eyes hovering behind me. I stared at my hands, washing them for longer than necessary. I ate with dirty fingers.
On the walk back to the repair place, I overhear two strangers conversing. They were talking about owl conservation.
“Look here,” someone said at the park, pointing to a couple of burrowing owls staring out from their small den. For a moment, their innocence took away some of the absurdity of the last couple hours. I stood cooing and awing in wonder.
With grounded clarity I breezed back into the auto shop. The man behind the register handed me the keys to the old truck while a plastic owl watched unwaveringly over the shop floor.
I told my contrary grandmother that I’d drive. She scoffed but allowed it. I slowed for the red lights much too early. I drove the speed limit exactly. I let other cars weave around me while I contemplated the owls. She’d roll her eyes occasionally, shrilly criticizing my driving. “Stop being so careful! Just go!”
I was careful, wasn’t I? So, so so so careful. I’d followed the ritual completely and to the letter.
I inhaled slowly, zoning out on the road and ignoring my grandmother chattering away. I went over all the steps in my mind, the hours of preparation, the painstaking notes, the careful chalk lines that I’d practiced drawing weeks in advance.
On the exhale a thought, a memory really, struck me. I pulled into the driveway, remembering the way the demon looked down at me. She was monstrous, terribly monstrous in her beauty and I’d wanted nothing more in that moment than to feel her power. To tremble and fall to my knees before her, to praise her like swine without dignity. I thought for a brief moment about her talons raking my neck while her white hot eyes bore into my skyclad flesh.
It was just a sliver of a thought, a splinter of fear and wretched longing that nailed it’s way into my heart and it might as well have been my coffin. I was a fool. A weak and terrible fool.
I was still white knuckling the wheel when my grandmother rapped on the window. I stared above her right shoulder, a small screech owl perched delicately, cutely almost on our birdhouse in the yard. A small, plump snake jerked in its mouth.
I don’t answer my grandmother on the way inside. I don’t talk to her the rest of the night either. She doesn’t mind. She talks enough for the two of us.