Corvus

It was in the dead of winter when I first became chronic with fever. I remember the twinkling of the stars seen hanging outside my cracked window. It had gotten quite cold and by the brumal season, I was nothing but a ribcage of skin and bones—scuffling around on useless crutches. 

As the child of many—perhaps six or eight, I was the second to oldest. I was twelve when my father Theodore went away to work in the iron poorhouses--minding coals, fixing furnaces, etc; and barely thirteen when I got frightfully sick. We had no money to sign away for doctors--and a plague of poverty had enshrouded and overtook my family. With nothing to eat but bland, white porridge, and uncut oat wheat squares, we did what we could to survive during and outlive the greatest and longest famine. 

I did nothing but hibernate inside my sepulcher, coffin bedroom--shiver under holey blankets, and desperately wait for fate to arrive and snatch me up in its treacherous talons.

In the cabin, it was like a glacial grave--and in those temperatures, I remember the melancholy echo of the outside world seeping in--the cries of hungry children and the shuffle of my wailing mother, descending from the mattress in the other bedroom--walking back and forth to feel foreheads and check enlarged tonsils. 

Quarantined on my own, the waxy candle became dead with every lit match stick. The wall clock was stuck at a ghostly stroke of noon and the gas heater in the room was broken beyond mechanical repair. I was disconsolate like a dying elm--with no mulch or water or sunshine to leech or siphon from. I realized that this was what the graveyard poets must have lamented about--all the lacrimal tears spilled--all the requiem written in ode of. O’ ensuing death!—was what I now understood perfectly. I tried to not let the despair take over even as the mortality rates plummeted and became solidified rot in the ground.

It was then I had fixated on my window, watching the twinkling stars intently. The constellation of Corvus was particularly was my favorite in sky lore. A boxy shape, both bright and noticeable--I looked for it constantly at night, even when eyesight was partially obscured and affected by the moonlight and window.

On the snowy nights, I watched the flakes fall--how they buried everything with their frozen milk and how they drowned. I watched the world disappear that winter and silently, I hoped it would spare me--not taking me to expire with it.

During one of my more introspective navel gazings, I noticed a particularly daring, organ-eating bird. Its body was ebony--delicate like a Chinese brush painting, with feathers quite cape colored. With a beak both onyx and crookedly bleak--it looked at me and I looked at it. 

What I was looking for, I did not know. Perhaps, resolution?

I was within the inch of my life--trying to configure whether it was crow or raven but alas, could not. I thought of my father’s educational books and the childish name-category games we played together when I was young and tried very hard to scrutinize the bird’s size--the color of its plumage, the curved slope of its breasts and the rough diameter and pupillary distance between each of its eyes. 

Deep in thought, I never noticed the dark bird beginning to warble and caw--and starting to sing to me. Out of its beak, rang a beautiful elegiac, mourning song.  

When I looked up, it took off into the air and flew away. 

I waited earnestly for its return, evening after evening, checking the tree branch every so often and then looking aimlessly to stars and the pockmarks of the cabin ceiling. But it never did come back and I began to give up hope.

Had I imagined the bird entirely--a result of the fever, I was suffering?

One day, my little brother and sister, Thorn and Briar paid me an anomalous visit. Thorn who was a bit older brushed my brittle hair and sang to me. He had selected the niche lullabies of Saturnalia’s harvest. One depicted feasts, another spoke of a ritual gift-gifting. By the end, he had made up one about a woman who sacrificed herself by drowning in a well, in exchange for the Saturn god's eternal love.

Briar, the littlest one of the bunch fed me encouraging spoonfuls of slimy porridge and concurrently checked if I was swallowing. Even though she was pretty gaunt herself, she looked after me like I was a baby and she was my mother. Barely six years old and she was already quite empathetic, mature, and independent. I was amazed to see how much she had grown, if not in size but in will and overall might.

When it got eerily quiet, I thought of the sooty bird and pondered.

“What must possibly be the difference between a crow and raven?” I questioned out loud.

Thorn looked at me with a childlike bemusement and arched an eyebrow. Resting the pricky, unkempt hairbrush down on the side table, he said, “Mother says you mustn’t work yourself up. You haven’t gotten the strength.”

“If you help me figure out what I saw outside the window, some odd weeks ago, as in what kind of bird it was and what it looked like—perhaps, I might settle in and stop my intense contemplations.”

Thorn looked at Briar who shrugged her shoulders and also, like Thorn had done with the hairbrush, set the porridge bowl down. Her long black hair touched the ground long before her short, petite feet had.

“Well during lessons, we were taught that--a crow is much smaller than a raven and is in theory much more social.” Thorn rubbed and itched his nose.”Was the little beast alone?”

“It was not a beast. I don’t think so, no. But yes,--it did seem quite persistent and dead-set on a goal. Sitting on the corner of the tree branch, he looked in through my window and sang a lamenting requiem for me as well.”

Briar began to suck her sore thumb--her dark eyes exchanging back and forth--like a tennis ball bouncing between the court and match of me and Thorn. “Was it pretty?” she asked inquisitively, stumbling through the three, almost mono-syllabic words.

“Very much so, indeed.”

Thorn interjected, “What was its tail like?” He was quite bright for his age and was keen to show and prove it to everyone else. He was always a boastful one, he was.

“A crow has a fan-shaped tail and a raven has a blocky looking one.” 

“I hadn’t gotten to look at his tail much. Particularly though, his almond eyes seem to haunt me. They were truly cloudy like two charcoal blocks of ice.” I swallowed. “and eerily familiar like an image of a passed loved one’s face.”

“What do you recall of the size and shape of its beak?”

“Straight if it were not so crooked.”

“What about its coat and feathers? Was it iridescent--having a dull sheen?”

“It was more of a mix of purples, blues, and black--but matte and dark like untouched coal.”

Thorn touched his sullied pants and watched his depressed sock fall down his bony ankle. Briar stifled a titter between her teeth and waited for Thorn to continue--but he did not. He only looked on with the silence of minor defeat.

 “Were you scared?” Briar asked, with one teacup-sized hand on my shoulder.

“I felt strangely at peace.”

“It must be a raven then. Mother says ravens are deep and interesting--if not mysterious,” Briar beamed.

I tickled her chin and intimately tugged a few strands of her falling hair, behind her ear. My soft spot for her was always well-known. Out of all the siblings, I adored her the most. Her hand brushed against mine--like a smooth pebble gliding against a sharp rock on a beach shore and she brightened and warmed.

She looked at me like she was looking into the face of death itself but yet--she was stiff and unafraid. I turned to gaze into her, with my face towering over her entire body like a shadow befallen a stout wall.

“Of course, you’re right." I pressed my lips together and then apart, smiling slyly like an arctic fox. "You know, both Branwen and Emmeranne were named after the raven.”

“Really?” Her eyes became huge like deep, dark pools, my reflection dancing on the surface of her sloe-eyed pupils.

“Oh, yes! Mother simply does adores them.” 

It was both proper and true. Two of our other siblings. Bran and Emme were named after the ravens our mother, Helene had apparently spotted and befriended in a field--some decades before all of our combined births. This pet-keeping was long before I was barely human--when I was but an undeveloped moon, crescent and still affixed in utero and between womb.

“The story goes that when Mother was but a child--she became starved and went out looking, in search of food. It was there that she serendipitously stumbled upon two ravens fighting over a darkened piece of bread. When she approached them, they obediently and generously gave it to her instead.”

Thorn smirked to himself. “Ravens don’t eat bread--they are vultures.”

“They do too. Lenore said it, so it must be true.” Briar spoke while on the brink of tears.

“These ravens ate bread, as most of these birds are omnivorous--and they were also very kind-hearted to help Mother in such a great time of famine and needful dread.

“Maybe the bird you saw was a raven--maybe, it tried to save you too.” Briar cooed. Her cheeks rose and fell as she sounded out the two syllables, her mouth like a tulip in bloom.

“Or perhaps it was a crow,” Thorn answered gloomily from across the room. He likened street snow that was marred, salted, and then thawed. “After all, Grandfather used to see them all the time, around here--especially throughout winter.”

“But Grandfather died of fever,” Briar said and then caught herself. “Oh, Lenore! I didn’t mean—”

“It’s quite alright, Briar. I see what you meant exactly.”

Thorn only just stared into me. His eyes did not flutter, falter, or blink. I could hear his heart thumping and pounding out of his chest; the room beating with an aching quiet. 

In the engrossing dim light, he began to resemble a hunched over magpie.

“Crows are vultures, even more so than ravens. They gnaw on the flesh of the dead.” Thorn spoke like a ghost, his lips barely moving to speak.

“But, Lenore is not dead!” Briar shouted. Tears were spilling from the pointed duct and crux of her eyes.

“Not yet she isn’t but just you wait.” There was a glacial mien to Thorn when he spoke. A sombre gravel and a moky matter-of-fact-ness, I had never heard, never—not once before. It was unnerving and deeply unsettled me. All the family trouble and death that surrounded us, on winters especially, had clearly gotten to the young, and conscience-eroding boy.

Thorn rolled his eyes and crossed his arms like the petulant goth, he was.

“Indeed, if it truly was a crow--then surely you will die by night’s time.”

I felt my legs tingle with sudden frost and looked to the window. It was getting quite dark when my eyes settled on the branch that ominously scratched the window. I thought I saw movement and a flutter of black wings, but after some mental assurance, my legs regained blood flow to my knees conceded their dread.

A fingernail grazed my arm and I turned to see Briar sniffling and rubbing the tattered linen of my nightgown. “I don’t want you to die, Lenore. Please don’t--don’t d-die.”

“I won’t die, Briar.” I wiped her cheeks and took her head into my chest. Her scalp was soft like a newborn baby’s fontanelle. I looked at her and patted her back like Mother did for me when I was young and often, hungry and inconsolable. 

“What a ridiculous thing to promise!” Thorn looked at both of us and yelled with growing annoyance, “Briar, don’t be such a crybaby!”

I shot him an impolite look and pointed to the cold bowl of porridge. “That is enough. Take the dishes--and go on downstairs.”

He stopped short. “Why should I?”

“Because I said so. 

“—and?”

“I suppose if I’m dying—then it’s my dying wish to make you disappear.”

“Fine!” He sibilated, hissing like Dolores, the stray cat that sometimes, often visited.

Stomping out of the room, Thorn had gone and Briar finally stopped her crying and became silent. Curled up against me, she was now inside the bed with her cold, infantile feet touching my descended belly and sclerosis torso. I looked down at her—at the face that was as cherub as old, as immature, as mature and as colorful as pallid. I grieved both of our childhoods and fell asleep, to the sound of the Mother walking faintly across the room and Briar's sucking of her thumb.

The feeling of something detached overwhelmed me, and all at once, I was empty.

When I awoke, Briar was gone and the room was changed--almost shapeshifted. A fog had sent in and my poor eyesight became blurry--with everything appearing in an indistinct, black and white slow-motion.

The cottage cabin was stillborn and I was the fetus—vertiginous and unfeeling.

When I looked down, my bare feet were approaching the nape of ground. I stretched out to grab my slanted crutches and pulled myself up from the mattress. Inside the coil of the fibers, I could still see that it would forever hold my outlined form and underdeveloped body.

The window was open just a crack and the mistral wind was blowing in. It had stopped snowing but a blanket of white was covering the ground outside. The trees looked dead and unsaturated like a storybook dystopia.

I found a crow--or perhaps a raven hopping then diligently walking to the sill of the window. Apparently, it was its final destination. It must have come off of the tree’s branch, I reckoned.

I looked at it cleanly now, but still, I remained categorically unsure. 

What was the difference between a crow and a raven?—I still didn’t know.

As I walked closer, the bird sat unmoving, almost like a picture taken out of focus. But, otherwise, its eyes had tunnel vision. It surveyed forward--well past from where I was standing.

I reached out and touched it--beak first then feathers and tail last. It nozzled my arm and separated its wings, engulfing me, completely. I carefully pulled my hand away and realized--an obsidian feather was stowed away in between my fingers. The feather was matte yet silky. It was still warm and had a feeling of skin.

All of a sudden, I felt dizzy.

The feather was now clearly white--like snow had covered the obsidian black nature. I spun around and looked down at myself on the mattress. My corporeal body, it seemed—was laying down with eyelids stricken and open.

I eyeballed on in shock.

Was I sleeping— simply dreaming even, or was I like Thorn had predicted,--cold and unequivocally dead?

I turned around to see the bird, who was once black, now an eerily opaque of lily-white. Its face was human, a mortal head situated upon a bird's neck. The hyperreal image was an exact replica of my very own visage.

I collapsed with sudden fever—nothing to be heard, but the scrambling feet of my mother crossing the adjacent bedroom to the door of my own.

The stars were the last thing I gazed upon before my eyes shut.