Perishing in Solace

Prolouge:

The wind hazzened the distant horizon. It blew around her head like a halo. Like a galaxy of dirt orbiting a sunken star. She felt like a ghost. A ghost that haunted the deep dark hollows of night. And this night, all she had to offer was a confusion of thoughts and a skerry of emotions that rose out of the distant frame of flirtatious nods and winks. A dangerous game. A game of lust and longing and make believe. Pretend.


Somewhere below a car changed gear and a green light ambered.


Her hands trembled as she touched the passionless glass of the window pane that held her to this world. Beneath her the traffic rumbled ironically reminding her of life. A clarion call from the romance of suicide.

She thought again of moist love…. of fingers and tongues and the rumour of his loins. But a rumour seldom is a reality and remote lust rides chill vectors.

Her thoughts drifted. A paper cup that floated upon the sewage of failed sensibilities or even an ocean of lingering thoughts.

And suddenly gravity beckoned. Gravity, which was a sullen mistress. Gravity, whose call was as remorsless and inevitable as the seasons. She felt icy fingers clutch at her ankles and her wrists.

The wind hazzened the distant horizon. It flew around her like a halo and the dust of her dreams followed her down like a trail of tears….even as her hands excited the window pains ever more vehemently.

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I sit beside a swollen old raven, whose beak has cracked more shells and skinned more bones, than time has time to tell.
His eyes are so crystal that they reflect my own reflection.
Within his eyes exist another universe with galaxies and constellations, all of its own, where the daily doings of any intelligent life form are observed by a bird.
A bird as black as famine.

I wonder whether there is a parallel universe existing in each raven’s eyes that live and breathe. And when the bird dies, as every bird must, does the universe that spins its unique existence, within that black environment, die along with the bird? Or does it go on spinning in an independent life cycle? Spinning and turning and burning its own bright stars and suns?

Who knows?

The evening drags a charcoal blanket across my sky. A blanket, blanketing the distant glitter of time-blessed stars. Stars that speak in silent flickers of ancient days. Days of triumphant dreams..
Stars....Fallen heroes or forgotten angels?

Who knows?
Maybe just lights hung within the dreamtime in the wilderness of eternity.

I look at the raven and the raven, with head crooked at one side, looks back at me. We know where we sit and who we are. We know our places in this world and we know how the fates confide, not in the doings of man, but in the ways of birds and beasts and insects.

Below us the traffic grumbles a discordant sound, the sound of brakes being applied and horns being punched. Life is a blur of taillights that fade into a rapidly moving wide-angle screen.

Above us a murder of crows move down like a dark stormy cloud. The coming together of the carrion fowl. They gaze at my raven with eyes of ostracism. There is sardony even in their flight.

A sudden wind blows a halo of dust that converges above our heads and spirals down below us, where a woman sits with sunken eyes and talon fingers that cling in quiet desperation to a glass pane. A glass pane singing its swan song.

The raven shakes his heavy wings and with a practiced ease takes flight.

Worlds spin in the eyes of crows and the days of men are numbered but still…. a single life matters.
Dust swirls into a nebulae of infinite possibilities that froth and fail in the winds’ currents, as the raven plummets like the dead.
Head thrust forward, wings pinned back, a black missile with a singular focus in its beady black eyes.

The ramshackle congregations of crows await the inevitability even as the old raven plummets.

The song ends. The woman falls, like blood spilling from an open wound, surprised to note that time slows.... as if to make the moment of freefall last....
Punishment perhaps or a time for belated reflection.
She sees the earth spin and rush to greet her whilst her own body falls in slow motion. She sees the crow.... beside her.
Wings, now open with wingtip feathers, held out like a clawed hand. She sees in his eyes, wisdom beyond reckoning, and briefly she smiles, as heaven gazes into her and lights her pallid face.... and blood spills on the concrete, drenching the pavement with droplets of rouge.

The heavens turn black as the wings flutter.

Later, when the raven has settled back down beside me, droplets of blood on its wings, and I have finished shaking from the shock of it all, he turns to me and smirks…

“No one should perish in solace”.
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This post is definitely not mine alone...
From the title to the words to the arrangement of the whole story (which was nothing but a cluster of random thoughts before)it has been beautifully put together by a wonderful writer. a bigi bigi thanx to u neel