Soliloquies Anthology 30.1

By Bridget Wadden

The moment the crow flies through my bedroom window, it forgets how it came in and does not know how to get out again. It crouches atop the doorway to the half-bath and shrinks into its body, looking at me in confusion. I wave at it and tell it to go. I motion to the open window by sticking my arm through it and flapping my hand like a wing. I take down the curtain rod and tap the wall beside him. He flaps his wings in panic and hops farther down the ledge. The sky is darkening outside. Seeing he’s unconvinced of his ability to leave, I get so upset that I
yell at the crow to “GET OUT! LEAVE ME ALONE! THE WINDOW IS RIGHT THERE
LITERALLY IT IS RIGHT THERE AND IT’S OPEN! HOW DUMB ARE YOU HOW DUMB HOW DUMB HOW FUCKING STUPID CAN YOU GET YOU IDIOT BIRD?” I scream and hit the wall harder and sit on the bed and cry like this is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, and all he does is flap some more and look scared. He doesn’t leave. I feel bad, then, and start apologising because he didn’t deserve that, did he? He gives no response, and I look at him right in his blank bird stare, and all at once I feel so forgiven that it is as if I had not said a single word
to begin with. When the sky is black and I feel heavy, there is nothing else to do but sleep with a pillow over my head.

The house is massive and it echoes when I walk. It was a snap decision to rent it for the winter, and I didn’t check the location too closely so I didn’t know I’d be plunged deep into farmland, alone save for the birds. The crow is staring at me and I at it. It didn’t leave in the night, didn’t attack when I woke. We are bathed in morning winter sunlight, disregarding the cold. When my phone dings, the crow cocks his head and I pretend not to hear anything. A second ding bristles his wings.

“It’s none of your business,” I tell him, and break out my trail mix to throw him some seeds, keeping the nuts for myself. He catches expertly, twisting and turning to account for my bad aim. A third ding, and he caws. I open my phone to the same messages I’ve gotten for a week, all from Greer. She asks me where I am. Tells me to come home. Says I have her sweater. I look down to see it hanging off my body the way she used to, the way a person who loves another person hangs onto their every limb as if it were the best limb ever made. I close my eyes
and smell her in the knit, all warm and fleshy. When I start to see flashes of her face the way I saw it last, all twisted and awful with tears, I open my eyes and try not to blink. The crow is still staring at me, eyes wide and cutting. It ruffles its feathers with impatience. I throw another seed.

It is nearly lunchtime when the crow follows me into the kitchen and settles on the dining table. He is gentle with his claws against the hardwood, even when I take out a pan, a knife, a spatula, and clang them around without meaning to. This room feels most like the cottage quaintness I envisioned: plates on walls, dried flowers in bundles hanging from the ceiling.

Today I’ll use freeze-dried eggs, the last pantry ingredient. So far I’ve avoided omelettes; memories of breakfasts with Greer slip in through smells. I open the side door onto the garden, I turn the fan on high, I plug my nose. Nothing works.

The crow observes as I dump frozen onions and mushrooms into a pan, on low—Greer likes them soft. I whisk powder-eggs with water until they are like new. She cracks fresh ones into a bowl, getting the whites on her fingers. I sprinkle cheese, she folds the omelette in half. While I gather plates, she grabs us mugs. I turn on the kettle and she pours it when it’s hot.

It is not until I am sitting down in front of two plates, two mugs, two halves of a meal and a crow, that I realize I have counted wrong. I sink and breathe out every memory of Greer onto the eggs that are going cold. The crow watches without judgement. I am about to offer him a seat, a napkin, a demonstration of how to use a fork; but as I reach for it, he finally remembers where he came from and flies up around my head, and out the side door.

I watch the spot where he just was. I think of how interested he seemed in my dance without a partner: Greer’s and my path from fridge to stove to cupboard (where I’m sure I kissed her behind the door), and how the crow did not care at all to see me eat what I had made. I think I am the same. I think I, too, would like to fly away before anything ends. Anything, anything ever.