Winter Moon

slave population."
        The crow pecked for more lice.
        "Have you made any attempts to control me? Because if you have, I don't think I was aware of it. Didn't feel any probing at my mind, didn't see alien images behind my eyes, none of the stuff you read about in novels."
        Peck, peck, peck.
        Eduardo chugged the rest of the Corona. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve.
        Having nailed the lice, the bird watched him serenely, as though it would sit there all night and listen to him ramble, if that was what he wanted.
        "I think you're going slow, feeling your way, experimenting. This.world seems normal enough to those of us born here, but maybe to you it's one of the weirdest places you've ever seen. Could be you're not too sure of yourself here."
        He had not begun the conversation with any expectation that the crow would answer him. He wasn't in a damned Disney movie. Yet its continued silence was beginning to frustrate and annoy him, probably because the day had sailed by on a tide of beer and he was full of drunkard's anger.
        "Come on. Let's stop farting around. Let's do it."
        The crow just stared.
        "Come here yourself, pay me a visit, the real you, not in a bird or squirrel or raccoon. Come as yourself. No costumes. Let's do it.
        Let's get it over with."
        The bird flapped its wings once, half unfurling them, but that was all.
        "You're worse than Poe's raven. You don't even say a single word, you just sit there. What good are you?"
        Staring, staring.
        And the Raven, never Jutting, still is sitting, still is sitting.
        Though Poe had never been one of his favorites, only a writer he had read while discovering what he really admired, he began quoting aloud to the feathered sentry, infusing the words with the vehemence of the troubled narrator that the poet had created: " And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming, And the lamplight o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor-" Abruptly he realized, too late, that the bird and the poem and his own treacherous mind had brought him to a confrontation with the horrific thought that he'd repressed ever since cleaning up the soil and other leavings on June tenth. At the heart of Poe's "The Raven" was a lost maiden, young Lenore, lost to death, and a narrator with a morbid belief that Lenore had come back from-Eduardo slammed down a mental door on the rest of that thought.
        With a snarl of rage, he threw the empty beer bottle. It hit the crow.
        Bird and bottle tumbled into the night.
        He leaped off his chair and to the window.
        The bird fluttered on the lawn, then sprang into the air with a furious flapping of wings, up into the dark sky..Eduardo closed the window so hard he nearly shattered the glass, locked it, and clasped both hands to his head, as if he would tear out the fearful thought if it would not be repressed again.
        He got very drunk that night. The sleep he finally found was as good an approximation of death as any he had known.
        If the bird came to his bedroom window while he slept, or walked the edges of the roof above him, he did not hear it.
        He didn't wake until ten minutes past noon on July first. For the rest of that day, coping with his hangover and trying to cure it preoccupied him and kept his mind off the morbid verses of a long-dead poet.
        The crow was with him July first, second, and third, from morning through night, without surcease, but he tried to ignore it. No more staring matches as with the other sentries. No more one-sided conversations. Eduardo did not sit on the porches. When he was inside, he did not look toward the windows. His narrow life became more constricted than ever.
        At three o'clock on the afternoon of the fourth, suffering a bout of claustrophobia from being too long within four walls, he planned a cautious itinerary and, taking the shotgun, went for a walk. He did not look at the sky above him, only toward distant horizons. Twice, however, he saw a swift shadow flash over the ground ahead of him, and he knew that he did not walk alone.
        He was returning to the house, only twenty yards from the front porch, when the crow plummeted out of the sky. Its wings flapped uselessly, as if it had forgotten how to fly, and it met the earth with only slightly more grace than a stone dropped from a similar height. It