Page 31 of We Live Here Now

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The rooftop is better than nestling in a barren tree in the freezing night, but the raven wishes the man would come back. There were more fires when the man was here, and the extra heat in the tiles would make him feel less uncomfortable about being on top of the house.

He puffs out his feathers and settles down, pressing his head into the dry husk of his mate. She is closest to the bricks, and as her feathers warm slightly from the heat it’s almost like she’s alive again, except for the fragile hollowness of her frame. He can’t press his head too hard for fear he’ll break her.

His mate is dead. He knows this.

He drifts into sleep for a while, only the lights of the car leaving and the movement of the woman within the walls waking him, but when the house falls silent and dark, and with his talons clinging to the roof, he dreams of the day his mate flew inside. Her frantic caws and the angry sweep of her wings as she became trapped in the flue. His own drive for sunlight, wings close to his body, propelling upward, leaving her behind, not wanting to get trapped himself. He never liked the house. She never listened.

Even as he perches beside her, his beak lost in her dryness, he’s not sure how much he ever liked his mate. Not fully. Not after that first summer. She was quick to anger. Quick to rage. She pecked him. Peck peck peck at his face and the underside of his wings where the skin was thinner, sharp stabs of annoyance if her mood wasn’t good, if the twigs of the nest weren’t pliable enough. If he hadn’t hunted well enough.

What is it that keeps him with her, he wonders, as he wakes in the stretch of the long night, when the woman within the walls turns a light on below, a glow of yellow startling him awake. Is it love or guilt?

As he presses himself closer to her, his dead lover doesn’t answer.