The silence of it all ricocheting, echoing the pendulum of the raven’s caw itching to be filled with the hollowed out remnants of a man’s sanity. Muttering to the empty decanter, its glassy eye reflecting my own sunken one back at me. The fire spat embers onto the rug like accusations, each spark a whispered indictment of my growing obsession with the damned bird perched above my chamber’s cockamamie door. There was something grotesquely intimate in how the raven’s talons curled around the bust of my phallus as if it had always belonged there—as if I hadn’t spent nights bleeding ink into elegies for a dead woman. A draft slithered through the room, making the candle flames bow like penitent monks, and the shadows stretched their elongated fingers toward me in mock sympathy.
The bird tilted its head, one obsidian eye glinting with a knowing that made my teeth grind. It croaked again, though I hadn’t asked a goddamn thing. My fingers twitched toward the decanter—half-empty or half-full, who could say?—but the raven’s sudden, guttural chuckle froze me mid-reach. Laughter shouldn’t sound like that, like bones rattling in a coffin’s-crow pie. Outside, the wind hissed through the eaves, a susurrus of secrets I wasn’t meant to hear. Or perhaps I already had. The rug smoldered where the fire had spat, its threads curling black as Lenore’s hair had been before the worms got to it. The scent of burning wool mingled with the wax dripping from the candles, thick as congealed blood on a deathbed sheet.
The raven’s beak parted—too wide, too human—and out slid a sound like a key turning in a rusted lock. My chair scraped back as I stood, heart hammering against my ribs like a prisoner begging for release. The shadows on the walls twitched in time with its breaths, though birds don’t breathe that way, don’t breathe in great heaving gulps that make the air tremble, above my chamber’s cockamamie door. Then came the whisper—not from the bird, but from the space between its feathers, a voice like wet earth shifting in a grave. “You miss the weight of her in your arms,” it said, and the decanter shattered in my grip, though I don’t recall squeezing. Shards glittered in the firelight like the diamonds I’d buried with her, like the teeth she’d left in my shoulder the last time we’d loved each other alive.
