Page 41 of We Live Here Now

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He leaves for longer in the days now, takes to the skies and cries out to the heavens as he races across the moors, scavenging among the dead things hidden in the frozen gorse and moss between the craggy rocks. Sometimes he sees another raven watching him. She pecks at a lifeless rabbit, lying half in and half out of a stretch of bog, and then perches on a stone several feet away, giving him space to approach.

When he strips the dregs of meat from the carcass, she lets him be. Her feathers shine. There is no broken wing. They dance like this around each other for hours, and then as the bright canopy becomes a blanket of night, she heads back to where the others all roost, warmth and comfort in numbers. She caws back to him, and although he wants to follow, he finds he turns and his wings take him back to the strange house on the hill where his dead mate waits.

Her dark, dead eye is full of venom. You can’t leave me. You left me alone. You fled and left me to die. You murdered me.

He shuffles in closer and drops a morsel of rotting mouse in front of her that he knows she won’t eat. She can’t eat it. His mate is dead. He knows this. He settles down beside her to sleep.

But this night he dreams of earlier long, hot days, many cycles gone past, when they were young, before her wing was damaged, before she pecked at him, before he chose to leave her in the chimney, before he fled up and away not only from the danger but from her— You left me to die. You murdered me —when they existed only in the joy of each other. Before, before, before.

And nevermore.

In the morning, the new raven, Bright Wing, as he thinks of her, alive and vibrant, not like Broken Wing beside him, is on the wall. Waiting patiently, beady eyes alert and sparkling. He doesn’t look at his old mate as he flies off, letting out a caw that comes from deep inside him and speaks to freedom and imprisonment and wanting what cannot be had.

As the wind cuts cold across his beak and Bright Wing comes alongside him, and they circle and dash like he has before, he can’t help but think— before, before, before.

Maybe not nevermore.