Winter

  ~ A Crow's Lament ~

  The cold had long woken you, or perhaps sleep had never truly come.

  5:43.

  The numbers had started glitching, fading into the dullness of the screen. Soon, the battery would fail, inevitably, but you couldn’t spare the concern. The storm lingered, the snow had piled, and the whiteness had sealed the cabin that was now a tomb. Perhaps you would never leave. Perhaps it made no difference.

  There was nothing left for you outside. Nothing left for anyone.

  Only the cruel bite of frost. The pulsing ache of fever. And fear.

  Sleep had forsaken you since the looters had come. Waking up in cold sweat too many times to count, fingers lunging for the rifle always within reach. Traps had been laid. Doors reinforced. But defences meant little against the abyss that stretched vastly beyond your walls. An abyss you had watched for hours, waiting, listening, dreading.

  A vain pursuit of peace. But peace had been lost the day the first bombs had blown in the East. The day death had slithered unseen through foreign hospitals. The day cities had turned to dust, and the world’s foundations crumbled. The day you had lost everything.

  Even the fire had abandoned you; where once it roared, now lay only pale ashes. A symbol of your humiliation. You had not gathered nearly enough wood, and now, wrapped in threadbare blankets, you felt the weight of your mistake—the air that extended beyond the fabric a tangible agony, a threshold too fierce to cross.

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  Three days had passed, maybe more, since you’d last left your bed. But you knew the date.

  January 11th.

  Your birthday. Marked not by celebration but by solitary confinement. Waiting for the end. Whether the end of the hail or that of your consciousness, whichever one came first.

  Once, you might have wished for gifts. Then you only wished for a cake. Not for a candle to blow but for something to content the growling beast that was your stomach. You wished only for sustenance, for it had been days without a hearty meal. November had taken the preserved meat. December, the dried berries. Only the stale, frozen bread was left, breaking like stone beneath your teeth.

  And there was no routine to mask the hunger. No morning ritual. No perimeter checks. No whispered prayers to a silent radio. There was only the howling wind. And the tapping.

  The trees had lost their leaves, and with them, the birds their song. But one of them remained. One made of onyx. Feathers thick and sparkled with snowflakes. A sentinel. It came every morning. Dutifully. Perched just beyond the windowpane. Turning its head so that a single charcoal eye studied the cabin’s insides. And then, with a twitch—

  Tap.

  Tap. Tap.

  Perhaps it waited for you to die. Or perhaps it sought entry so that it may warm itself by your side. You had considered letting it in, but you had also considered the sharp curve of its beak, the way it might rend frozen flesh from bone. And then, you had considered eating it.

  Tap.

  You stared at the bird. And maybe it stared back.

  “Alek.”

  The name did not belong here. Not in the hush of winter. Yet the raven watched, and you swore it had spoken, or shrieked its intent into word. You pleaded and asked. What could a corvid possibly want from you? The bird merely cocked its head and bristled its feathers against the zephyr’s bite.

  Tap.

  And then, it answered. Not in words. But in the way the storm rattled the eaves. In the way your breath curled and vanished. In the way the world had grown silent, and hunger twisted in your belly. In the way memories dissolved into fog, and the names of those once you loved slipped further from your grasp each day.

  The bird ruffled its wings and took flight. A sliver of black breaking the porcelain.

  And, as every morning before, you found yourself hoping it would return.

  ***