In Short – Issue 4 (Winter 2026)

January 31, 2026

Image credit: Katherine Matsubara

Summer Murder

By Katie Schwarz 

A murder of crows keeps shitting down the side of my car, white and grey goo oozing down the window. After they take the kibble I leave on my garage for stray cats, the murder flies onto the power lines overhead. They perch, and they shit. 

The crows arrived in East Oakland in June, just as the apricots ripened, but the stray cats have been here forever. In August, they wandered around at midnight while a 51-year-old was shot in the leg across the street. He’d stolen money from the illegal gambling den two doors down, the one the neighbors gather by most years as it’s raided by men in helmets and bulletproof vests, their drones flying overhead.

My neighbor asked how to get the blood off the sidewalk in front of her gate. I said I didn’t know. So she drove to the hardware store to ask a professional. The store is a five-minute drive down the freeway, past the Michelin-star restaurants near Lake Merritt, right where the apartments of the flatlands meet the houses of the hills. Down there, people don’t hear the sounds from our neighborhood. Not the gunshots, not the drones, not the news of those whose blood stains the street.

The crows yell at my cats: two strays born in my garage. My cats lie still on the grey brick of my front stoop and glare at the murder as they pluck small, sour plums from a neighbors’ tree. As kittens, the cats were anxious and wary of people. Now they are gentle and playful. They don’t rustle at the sound of fireworks on summer nights anymore, but they do jump at gunfire. In East Oakland, we’ve learned to tell the difference; taught there’s usually nothing to do but go back to sleep.

It’s September now, and the murder is moving along with the warmer weather. Three days ago, I watched a YouTube video of a recent crime scene three miles southeast of me. Before dawn, a local news crew filmed a body on the ground, draped in a yellow sheet. A woman in a “Crime Scene Investigator” jacket scribbled over a clipboard. On the ground, bullet casings 2, 3, and 4 are marked with tiny, plastic sandwich boards. It’s a three-minute video, and no one talks. The only sound is the chirping of late summer crickets, echoing like a heartbeat through the dark.

Katie Schwarz is from Oakland, California. She is currently writing a memoir about growing up with a chronic illness from childhood through adulthood, and a novel in which climate change meets economic change in late 90’s Oakland. Her writing has been published in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Bold Italic, HAD, and Brevity’s Special Issue on Disability.