The Omen

The fireplace cast an amber glow to the living space. On the bed I’d pulled closer to the fire that morning, my daughter-in-law slumbered, cheeks rosy. Next to her, the newborn also slept, round cheeks as full of colour as her mother’s.

I bit back the worry of the minutes following the birth, when mother had looked on daughter numbly, uninterested. If it hadn’t been for her flushed complexion, I’d have sworn she was still bleeding, but there was no extra flood. The bleeding had stopped, all was sound.

If only I understood the lack of interest in the child. The girl was bonny, round and healthy. After feeding she fell quickly into a deep sleep with no fuss.

And my daughter-in-law simply looked on, as though seeing nothing more remarkable than the regular flicker of a candle.

The fire would be spent in a few hours, and with the wind howling through the cracks around the windows I could tell we’d need more firewood well before morning.

I wrapped myself in my heavy buffalo coat, and before winding a scarf around my neck and face I took pause to kiss the downy hair on my granddaughter’s head. Then I was opening the door against a punishing wind, snow swirling inside along the floor despite my efforts to quickly close it behind me.

My son was somewhere between the ranch and cattle lot. No doubt he would be hunkered down in the home of a friendly acquaintance, waiting for daylight as anxiously as I was.

The babe, like the snow, had come early.

Twilight cast the sky in a milky-blue background, the white swirling every which way, obscuring the steps I took by memory towards the wood stores near the barn. The snow barely covered my toes, but by morning I predicted there would be a foot of accumulation.

I hadn’t brought a lantern, wanting to keep both arms free to carry wood. The old barn loomed ahead, a roof near to collapsing the only protection for the season's supply of cut and stacked wood.

Loading my arms to straining, I turned back to the house, smiling to see the fire’s glow through the windows. The home I’d help build with my husband thirty years earlier.

I knew my daughter-in-law was more accustomed to life in the city, as I had been. It had taken a few years, but I had adapted to living by simpler means. Once my daughter-in-law and son had their own home built and she made it her own, I knew she’d be just as happy here as I had been.

A rush of air surged overhead, nothing to do with the wind. I stopped to gaze skyward, expecting a raven.

Instead, I gasped, frozen in a way that had nothing to do with the gathering storm.

The wings carried that beast of a bird smoothly to the barn, settling its eerie form in the sill of the hay loft.

The last time that white and brown dappled demon was seen my husband keeled over in the paddock, dead before he hit the ground.

My arms tightened around the firewood, head shaking in refusal. It was not my time. I had priorities, a young woman I saw as my daughter needed me, a new granddaughter to help raise.

Sweat beaded and rolled down my back. I blinked.

The barn owl blinked.

“It’s not my time,” I whispered, barely able to hear it myself over the wind.

The owl’s head swiveled in that ungodly way, gazing into the hayloft, then turned back to me again. And it blinked.

My son? God, no. He was young, healthy, a strapping boy who worked hard and shared an engaging smile with his father. That smile marked them both as mine from the moment I first spotted it. He was safely waiting out the storm, anxious to get back to his family.

Not my son. Not me. I’d be damned if that owl would hurt anyone else in my family—

The firewood hit the ground around my feet with dull, echoed thuds. Lump in my throat, I spun towards the house, madly flailing, tripping over the wood I’d just dropped but catching myself. “No no no no no.” My chant was dry, throat already raw.

The door crashed against the wall as I shoved it aside. The smell of wood smoke overpowered the smell of fresh blood again. On the bedclothes the knife sat, near my daughter-in-law’s hand. I’d used that blade to cut the umbilical cord, now fresh blood stained its steel. Again. Blood still warm from my daughter-in-law’s wrists.

Her eyes, no emptier than what had worried me earlier, cast upward. Still. No breath animated her body. Her face had already yellowed, waxy. Already short so much blood, it would take little to tip the balance towards death.

Her legs were on top of the coverlet. She had to rise to collect the knife from the kitchen table.

I circled the foot of the bed to collect the child from the bassinet, but again I felt a temperature drop in my very bones.

A pillow rested in the bassinet, obscenely plump and whole. When I lifted it out of the way, a howl ripped from my belly, out of my throat, filling our home. Never had I heard such a sound from man or beast.

That owl. That damned, cursed owl.

Spinning madly, my eyes settled on the shotgun resting near the open door.

I know it’s loaded. It’s always loaded.

Vision turning red in fury, I grasped it tight and head back into the night to kill that demon.