Every week, the crime reporter calls up Sergeant Hubbard at the police station and hears a summary of the calls they’ve responded to. It’s always so boring — 11:35 driver locked out of car; 4:40 ticket for speeding, driver issued citation; 10:05 domestic disturbance, radio too loud… — Edgar Matthews often wonders if he’s wasted his money on a journalism degree from Michigan. Office politics being what it is (and probably the fact that he made some off-color jokes at the last Christmas party) means he might be stuck on the crime beat for the rest of his career in this failing newspaper industry.

He feels like a mere stenographer, easily replaced by a machine. And anyway, does anybody even read the police reports in the paper? Well, anybody besides Betsy Krisinski?

But every once in a while, an item in the weekly report arrests his attention. The Sergeant on the phone reads everything in a monotone; everything becomes mundane. But Edgar is touched by those mundane moments that evoke something ineffable: “Cat rescued from tree, later disappears down drainpipe”; “man arrested for loitering, carrying several passports from 1963”; “sleeping driver crashes into mattress store”; Or in this case “injured owl turns out to be large mushroom.”

It’s at these moments when Edgar feels like his years of study of the English language and the human predicament have been worth the effort. It’s as if his entire life was meant for him to be here — sitting at a cluttered desk in a far corner of a newsroom which is gradually emptying out from layoffs and burnout. No matter. Edgar understands why he is alive.

He types his little summary of the week’s police calls and quietly submits it to the editor. The copy editor barely skims his article before approving it.

The next day he fingers through the pages of a fresh copy of the paper — he habitually flips to page 11 or 12, where the police report is published. He feels a subtle sense of satisfaction in his hands as he reads the byline: “Police Report by Edgar Matthews”

“The owls are not what they seem

…”