A hundred yards or so east of a wide gray line that is highway 316 in Georgia, two crows occupy a small patch of ground in a grazing field. From a distance, it is difficult to make out what they are pecking at, heads stabbing at the ground and bobbing back. Above them and the fields and skeletal trees, a low-lying blanket of gray clouds has unfurled, tilled and furrowed like crop rows. In the low contrast light the birds seem as black as holes in the pasture. The dying grass around the scavengers is November brown that beneath the cold and tungsten sun seems only ashen—a hundred thousand strands of ash ready to be broken, crushed, and dispersed at the slightest weight. Nothing but two crows, in the whole of this landscape, is moving. This is the picture.

Off from these winged holes and their pecking, through the stillness, wind, and the hum of the highway a little ways away, there comes a long drawn squeal of rubber tires smeared across concrete. The scream increases in its volume, louder and longer, almost as though the pitch might reach up forever and refuse to die. But it reaches the lid of cloud cover through which only ultraviolet escapes. The two crows cock their heads. There is a crash—a shattering of the distance. Then silence. The two crows fly away.

Read the whole thread: A Low Cloud Reflex