...the life I've made.
Crows grow where dead things go.
Crows go where the lives come to blunt ends, bright beaks tearing out wide, unseeing eyes.
That is what she remembered of the blue-black birds. She had offered them a feast, a smorgasbord of flesh to strip from bones. She'd burned a city to the ground, and the crows laughed for days.
She understood them. She appreciated the simple way they worked. She grasped the ease in which they pulled pieces apart.
She hated what she'd become.
She'd never change, no, but as the crows had laughed? She'd watched the way all that she was had swirled down the drain, destroyed as easily as a candle snuffed out.
All of that bright humanity had burned out of her, pulled into some pit where there was nothing but sighs and shades.
Milton had had it right.
And so when she saw him, all of the possibilities came rushing back to her. What could she have been? What if Mommy and Daddy had loved her proper, hadn't treated her like trash?
What if she hadn't read that book?
And now, behind the glorious white of her teeth, the black of her tongue turned and churned, unspoken words dripping down the back of her throat, high-lighted by the cruel cold of her eyes.
Crows. What smart, strange birds they were.
And so, and so, having gone to and fro,
with nothing to show
for it all
she stalked towards the huge thing, a bird that was not a bird at all, but some sad depiction, some mockery of black and blue
bruises
on a young woman's face.
"Who are you?" she asked.
And he just laughed at her.
