The Messenger

It's pieces of the Nevermore that are falling outside my window, fluttering down from the skies and tapping against the glass. It keeps me distracted, but in the most familiar way. The variety of distraction that eventually ends up focusing itself on the subject matter that wants to be addressed. The pitter patter of ice against the windows that is covering the ledge in frost, inviting me to get lost in between their soft layers of winter.

They fall and I watch them blanketing the ground and changing dark into light right in front of my eyes.

It's freezing out there, but everything is melting in here. Colors bleed from those secret corners of my brain where they're swimming in rainbows, bathing in an old claw-footed tub filled to its porcelain lip with primaries and secondaries. A candle-lit room that hangs heavy with their favorite incense, the shadows cast from dancing flames playing hide and seek across my skin as I splash around in neon colors that run over the sides and seep through my skull. They glaze over my eyes, and I can see them reflected in the window, creating blazing kaleidoscopes every time I blink.

I take their picture a dozen times a minute.

My eyes roll around in their sockets and stare at a perfect negative of the world on the other side of the glass as white becomes black, cold switches to hot and still spins itself into a storm. The moon finds itself caught in a frozen moment of blinking, a shadowy sphere, and the night sky shakes itself free of the dark and becomes a brilliant sheet of white hung out to dry. The stars blink themselves into ink stains. The trees transform themselves into dancing ghosts with dozens of arms that rip chunks out of the sky and stuff them into barking mouths.

Then the snowflakes.

They fall through the air as black feathers. There are hundreds of them, parachuting exclamation points that pepper the ground like daggers. I fumble with the lock and clasp of my window and fling it open wide once I give it the secret term that releases its hold on the frame. The air out there hits me in the face like a blast furnace and I can feel my eyelids singe. A gust of wind slips across the window sill and it's flame licks a hole into my t-shirt in an attempt to kiss the thrumming beast that lives inside my chest. I quickly grab a fluttering feather from among the molten storm and pull it through to this side of the glass and slam the window shut. I look down at my capture and quickly realize that it is I who has been caught. The feather stands askew, a leaning monument, the quill having buried itself into the meat of my right hand and before I can pluck it from its sharp landing it melts into my palm.

That's when I hear the storm outside increase in decibels, rattling the window with its cawing cacophonous cry. I crane my neck to see just how intense the wind has become when the noise dies down for a few moments, and then that ear shattering squawk splits the air again, and again, and again. It's at that moment when I see a shadow shifting across the blackened landscape below and I turn my attention from the feathered ground to discover its source.

Thousands of crows are flying above me, swirling in and out of spiraling clusters like hurricanes, scattering their feathers down over the earth as they create mysterious scripture in the sky with their wings. They write in a language that my eyes cannot understand, and my brain boils from the effort to decipher the tomes their tumultuous tumbling is transcribing against the terrain of twisted twilight. The wound in the palm of my hand starts singing and I stare back down at it as the melted remains of the feather that penetrated my flesh swims into the opening its stab created. The wound closes behind it and I can't help but think of a stone being rolled away as a figure of blinding light steps from out of the darkness.

I feel it coursing my veins, spreading out through my body like hundreds of frosted fingertips. Not cold, but sweet. Frosting. I can feel my internal organs transforming into treats. There's glaze spreading through my guts. My nervous system is being spun into cotton candy. My muscles twist themselves into ropes of licorice and my brain slips into an oven and bakes itself into a fruity Buccellato cake. All of my bones have turned into peppermint sticks and my rapid beating heart has become a raspberry tart.

I haven't been infected, I've been confected.

I look back into the window through candied-apple eyes and one of the crows has descended from the sky and is floating in front of the window squawking madly at me from the other side, literally raving at me in its shrill voice. I stare at it straight into its flaming green eyes, hold its gaze with my own and ask it who it is.

It answers, and all of its brothers and sisters flying around above, behind and beyond it chime in unison.

"Our name is legion for we are many."

The beat of its wings slow down in surreal motion as a light begins glowing from beneath its wings. It grows brighter as the beat of its feathers keeps slowing down, but the crow remains suspended just as before, even with my face. Nose to beak. Eye to eye. The light intensifies. It begins shifting through colors like Christmas lights, spilling secret shades of the rainbow across the glass. Its wings beat one last time just before the light becomes blinding and that is when I see her face shape-shifting through the window like the holiest of ghosts.

I blink back tears, shying away from that beauty.

My eyes roll around inside my head and they open back upon the blizzard.

The crow, frosted from the snow, shakes sugar from its back and abandons the shelter it sought from the overhang of my window when I turned on the lamp at my desk, it's claws scrabbling as they left their purchase. I watch it flutter through the trees in the yard, avoiding the flailing of their limbs as it swoops and dives in between them, it's eyes sweeping their shapes and looking for a possible roost to sit out the storm. It turns its head one last time and shoots me a glance as it spreads its wings and begins climbing higher and higher into the night sky - a silhouette as it vanishes into the heavens.

It leaves 11 points of blinking white far up in the sky. Twin pairs of 4 claws on its feet, both tips of its wings and its beak all poking holes into the black blanket of night, leaving their own personal place to let the light in.

A brand new, bright constellation now hangs above my head in a sky that I claim as my own.