Omen

 

 

At that time in the morning, we were little more than groggy.  The mug of latte consumed during the walk in the cemetery is designed to peel the veils from the eyes and allow the morning sun into the shaded senses.  We were on the gravel, under the trees that line the road when the hawk squeaked twice and lifted across our path, up into the lower branches to the southwest.  He sat there, looking at us, intruders stopped, stunned by his short flight. 

I broke the silence with a diagnosis.  “It’s an omen.”  “An omen of what?”  A good question, but one that meant nothing to the teen aged red tail up in the tree.  Omens aren’t pointers toward some specific bit of our normality.  We’re going to run out of gas.  The guests are going to be late.   Omens are rumblings, touches of that which is beyond us, outside our cause and effect universe.  They express relationships that dance at the edges of our small vision.  They shimmer.  Reading omens seems so silly, so non-evidential.  What would CSI think? There’s a fallacy pointing to this weak way of thinking.  But there sat the hawk.  I wonder if he knew what he meant to us.  I wonder.