Jackdaw’s reflection doubled cabin walls occasionally and it suited him to think of his silence.

Jackdaw once sidetracked, nonchalant through festivalgoers who were there out of love for country music whereas his affection lay in knots of sweating congestedness and something beyond his audience’s reach as he failed to put it when he had reminisced, for all they knew. Security and local police may have cordoned three sectors off with code words such as system. Jackdaw was illegible then and in retelling aside from cell data and his willingness to project himself into something delivered with fabulist simplicity; he wasn’t made to inspire anyone or to be inspired by them but he exuded dreams of living by example; or so some neighbor could imagine as someone who knew of Jackdaw moved cross county, walking with two willing listeners.

Tales would have it Jackdaw heard Magpie crack open doors before stomping in and away and sat still for hours until Magpie’s nap began. Magpie sought herself in women who booked long-distance flights and gesticulated toward coastal deception by strategic omission. Somehow they lasered open dialogue about future trips.

One part went that Jackdaw had been loaded with atomic clock data and hygrometer and barometer.

Train clacking punctuated noontime heat: Jackdaw existed open access and amendable. These tales lifted off like sheets that turned invisible and became obligations like kicking asphalt between potholes. Jackdaw’s partial acquaintance was talking about Jackdaw, as though to say: “Jackdaw is noncommercial but on TV between shows for two secret minutes beginning at 2:61 AM.” He was, like, “If Jackdaw were here, he would say what I’m saying.” Jackdaw was nowhere close to average height, not his weight. He sweat less because he was under pressure that he had grown inured to. He was even inurement itself.

“Jackdaw tells another old woman in his life to go to Prague. She was instructed to buy red balloons and had wide discretion to decide on which one. That balloon lifted up above two trams as passengers watched. That was when she understood that she knew Jackdaw and was anything like him, though she never spoke of it until much later. That woman was not like Jackdaw. At the end of her days, she said that balloon going atmospheric meant she was someone.”

Activated uphill deodorant interactions overlaid narration that pointed out how Jackdaw existed between friend and parasocial attachment in trouble and causing life to happen; but surely they both sought themselves out of shared values. Jackdaw, he said, looked in mirrors yet again last week and claimed someone named Dingo tried too hard to be sneaky, and looked in mirrors, and invented Doggo, who kept inventing out toward double mirroredness present in those chats with neighbors and even with kicked chunks of asphalt and bottles.

One neighbor asked if Jackdaw was famous or if he was out of contention in his own mind for fame and widespread attention. No clear answer.

Those two neighbors echolocated his conversation’s main thrust but may have engaged with it as voice jazz such that maybe there was logical continuity or maybe it was too evidently blossoming in another realm and bouncing back beyond his intuition.

There was no endpoint to being Jackdaw and no point. It was as needless as him claiming that Madam Seeker looked at Jackdaw talking all day out far from town with God knows who and saying deep down he was “Double.” And Seeker of “memeseekseek” infamy would claim that every moment brought new appreciation to how Jackdaw was embedded in intrigue shifting like rain that caught them, though it was not forecast.

One neighbor guessed Seeker had one question about Jackdaw: does he like indie rock or punk?

His rock landed inside interstitial hedgerow: all doubles would become single.

They parted ways but not quite at two driveways. One said they should walk late at night. It would be chirrups and lightning bugs.

He texted that Jackdaw was Double. This was according to kids nearby doppelgangering.

He knocked on her window exactly once. She did not respond.

This woman assuming Seeker’s role knocked on his window sometimes, he suspected. He barely slept until far past that season. It would be pseudomoonrise. And then there would be flashlight in his eyes from outdoors. He interpreted her in dreams vulturelike. Or as though to shame him for Magpie posts. And then he would wake up and think on sneakiness giving itself away for cheap fun and he would laugh and wave at what must have been her and whisper that he was not available. It was even possible that she had either lost her phone plan or blocked him and she was coming to his window over and over to tell him it would not work out and he wasn’t some Jackdaw he knew he wished he could float into being. And he started evoking it to others and somehow said nothing about Jackdaw, Magpie, Dingo, or any others except to his combination aunt and joint head of household, who heard his account and said: “We all need to forgive.” And fell quiet.

Some full moons, this beam would track empty like it should. Or maybe her light brightened his bed such that no single sneaker could ever forget or maybe even admit to her. Maybe on one occasion these two mini-lights were correctly…Double. And his camera was not yet good enough to measure it and he told himself that this must have been what he had wanted.

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Stephan Crown-Weber‘s fiction has been published in Hobart Pulp, Space Zine, New Kentucky, Don’t Submit!, and ExPat Press. He has translated thousands of academic abstracts and is working on translations of two eighteenth-century French novels—one a novel of development about a chivalrous man—the other about a bitter hermit who criticizes one pet peeve after another common in the France of his day. Stephan lives in Central Kentucky. Twitter: @crownweber