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Raven
She can't believe this jag-winged majesty really wants a piece of her small cold life, godless and cold, and yet it circles her on shouldery black wings, blacker than dried blood, now holding still against the sky like a slit opening into somewhere else, now half-wheeling, the charred remains of dark thoughts flown. . . But not gone. It reappears and shadows her, calling, calling her quick steps weak, weak and bored and exposed for those of a woman trying too hard to get lost in the woods, clearing her throat as if for company, snapping twigs, pretending to seek-to need- what mitigated solace there may be in the leatherish creak of new snow. It's no use. She can't get lost, can't even fear death with any decency, seeing there the unmistakable glint of sun off a window through the landscaped brace of trees beyond these, these unplanned. And because beneath her creaking boots comes the unsoothing hum and wheeze of not distant traffic, a muffled laughter at the hungry anachronism overhead. Oh, she'd like to believe she could die; it would give her an edge, a key to open the steely manmade gate of reason's garden, let her into the wilderness of fear and belief, where she could really freeze to death and be eaten quickly by a big black bird, and die consciously in the snow, which would begin to feel delicious, like a slow transfusion of warm sake, and to taste unspeakably like the saliva of a hungry god.