Nevermore

Author’s Note: There’s a McDonald’s down the street. On occasion I eat breakfast there. The ravens usually eat there, too.

“Oh dear.” Vera fretted as Cor preened her feathers. They huddled on a sycamore bough, rubbing beaks and comforting each other against the chill evening wind. No respite from the weather came in shadow of the red brick edifice, its walls tangled in English Ivy, its slate roof glittering and white from a heavy snow. Nor, really, did the pair expect to find comfort there. They preferred the safety of their nest. Needs must, they had decided, so here they were.

“What?” Cor looked up just in time to hear a white wood window slam shut. 

“He finally did it.”

Cor searched the lower boughs. “Oh, don’t tell me.”

“He went inside.”

Thundering followed. “He went… how can…? He knows better!” 

Cor swooped to the branch nearest the window, then to the snowy ledge itself, flapping against the wind. Vera joined him a moment later, gazing through the dirty glass at the crackling hearth fire.

“Well, at least he’s warmer,” she offered hopefully.

“Until he gets killed,” Cor groused. Hugo was not his smartest brother. Devoted? Unquestionably. Smart. No.

“Do you think he’s suicidal?” Vera whispered, as she straightened one of Cor’s feathers.

“Who knows?” Hugo had been inconsolable after Mungi’s death.

“You think we should have let him alone the way we did?”

Cor shivered, ruffling his plumage. Vera tisked and set about preening him again.

“You think we should have kept him away from the window at least? Maybe the house entirely?”

Cor hopped a few times, adjusting his placement on the sill and clearing the snow. He peered in at the somber man who, he noted, had stopped pacing for the first time in days. Instead, the bedraggled fellow had pulled a chair of wood and velvet up to the doorway.

“Oh,” Cor observed. “The fool found himself a perch out of reach, anyway.”

Vera ceased preening long enough to see for herself. “Well that’s a good thing, anyway. Don’t you think? They look like they’re having a chat.”

“Since when do the humans listen to us?” He cocked his head and blinked. “They just don’t have the capacity.”

“Well, I hope they work things out.”

Vera’s optimism grated for an instant. Cor had grown accustomed, even happy for it, but now wasn’t quite the time.

“Maybe. But Hugo’s as mad as the landlord, that’s for sure.”

“Well you can’t blame either of them,” Vera snapped up a beetle that emerged from a crack between the bricks. “Losing love so young and all.”

Inside, the landlord had begun gesticulating wildly. He pulled at his hair. His dressing gown hung open on his lanky frame.

“I can blame my brother for his stupidity. And the landlord—if Hugo meets his doom—will have three souls on his hands. He might as well leap into the fire and finish the job.”

“Now Cor, Love, I miss Mungi as much as anyone—“

“Not as much as Hugo.”

“Well no,” Vera conceded. “The two were quite a pair. Boys of a feather, and all. But the whole thing was an accident.”

“It was stupid,” he cawed. “Carriage tipping, indeed. Oh!”

The landlord had stood up. He screamed and shouted at Hugo, flapping his arms and pointing at the window. Hugo held still. Cor hesitated to acknowledge the spark of hope that kindled when his brother hadn’t risen to the ire of his agitated interlocutor. Certainly, Hugo had reason. But reason never entered the equation where humans were concerned.

“He’s… look out, Vera!”

The pair leaped from the sill as the landlord threw open the window. Raucous caws filled the crisp air and loose feathers drifted on the wind to the snowy earth. The man screamed at them, shaking his fist, then disappeared from view.

The couple returned to their nest in a tall pine nearby and watched the open window. They croaked and kraah-ed throughout the night, hoping for a sign from Hugo. Other ravens soon joined them in song. Mates preened and cooed in the safety of deep crooks and crotches of limbs. Uncoupled young cawed and clicked and played in the lower branches and across the snow. On the morning of the first day, the chimney smoke abated. By evening it was gone.

On the moonless third night, the songs of the growing unkindness met with reply: a soft caw from inside the room. Cor swept down and landed on the sill.

“Brother? Are you there?” Cor asked the darkness.

The reply might have been a single human word. Cor understood, then cawed to the others, to his beloved Vera. They descended upon the house.