FLASH FICTION:YOU'D BE SURPRISED at the people I have walking in here asking about the white crow or saying, Hey, this isn't Maastricht. Sorely surprised.

But I’ll tell you how I got the name. Let me tell you.

I was living in a studio in Maastricht with this Geordie builder and the builder’s mate. I was bedding on the floor in a bag while the builder took the couch.

The builder’s mate found an Islamic carpet in a skip and he slept in that, rolled up like a pastry. The room wasn’t so cold after we had slept in it but the air was mouldy with a reek like frying onions.

I’d woke with an awful start in that place one morning and was sitting on a crate at the table quite shook.

And I must have been looking askance at the builder shrouded in his jacket on the couch because he starts getting thick with me.

– What’s your problem? he goes.

– I had a bad dream, I say.

– Aw, a bad one, had you? He nodded with the builder’s mate wriggling in the carpet, then he asks me: And what was your dream about, you bollocks?

– It wasn’t about anything, I tell him, it was a dream. But I was looking out the window and instead of a clothesline like we see now, there was a tree, a monkey puzzle tree. And up in the branches I notice this white crow and the thing was staring at me.

– White like an albino? asks the mate.

– No, I say, because it had normal black feathers, too. More white feathers than black, though.

– Not such a white crow then, was it? tuts the builder. White crow. No such thing.

And the mate chimes in: Hardly a magpie, or you’d have said. No mistaking a magpie. Sounds like a young gull. A gull maybe two winters old, like.

– That bird was no gull, I say.

– Call that a dream, you do.

– Was it a grey crow and not a gull?

– It was a white crow I dreamt about.

– Except it wasn’t even white according to you, says the builder.

– No, corrects the builder’s mate, it was a young gull he saw.

– He doesn’t know what he saw, goes the builder. Can’t even dream properly. Up off your holes now, lads, there’s a day’s work to be done.

That’s what it was like between us with the builder and the builder’s mate living in that studio in Maastricht. I thought my life was over.

So that’s how I came up with the name.

Anyway, the point I’m making is that if you see the white crow, you feel a hot need to get out there and name something after it.

Stephen Beechinor’s short stories have appeared in Barcelona INK and the Dublin Review

Flash fiction will be a regular item in The Irish Times. E-mail a story of no more than 500 words to flashfiction@irishtimes.com