From Outnumbed by William Pauley II:
This is a clean cut. I won’t be thinking of you again.
Edgar leaned back in his seat, but never took his eyes off the page. It seemed to be glowing—no, glistening—there on the surface of his writing desk, from the moonlight spilling in through the window. He’d just written the words, but did he actually mean them? Was any of it the truth?
He crumpled the page and tossed it in the bin, then grabbed his pen and tapped it lightly against his teeth. Four taps later, he was writing again:
You approached me, remember? I’d already told myself I was finished with relationships. I was okay with living alone. For the rest of my life, I would’ve been fine. MORE THAN FINE. But you… you came into my life like a fucking wrecking ball. It may be a cliché, but it’s fucking true. You forced your way in. I tried avoiding this. In the beginning, it was you who pursued me. You can’t forget that. You were persistent and I eventually gave in to your charms. What I guess I’m trying to say is… this isn’t all my fault. How it ended, I mean. It didn’t have to come to that. Things got ugly, to say the least. I got ugly. I don’t like myself when I’m with you. You bring out this… rage… a rage so deep I never even knew it was there until I knew you. That rage, Tara. It isn’t me. The real me, I mean. And now that I’m alone, it’ll never be me again. It’s over. I’m taking my things and moving out of the city. This entire apartment reeks of you, and every bookstore, every coffee shop, every fucking segment of sidewalk will remind me of you. I just want to forget you, Tara. I need to forget.
Without even reading it over, Edgar again crumpled his words and dropped them in the wastebasket at his feet.
The next day, he broke the lease to his apartment, quit his job, and withdrew every last dime of his savings. He called up a realtor and bought the cheapest house they had listed—a tiny, rundown shack, somewhere in the woods, just outside the city. He slept in his car at a nearby campsite until the day he was handed the keys to his new home.
He never moved a single piece of furniture out of his old apartment.
It was just one of the lies he’d written on that day.
* * *
As time moved on, he saw the many flaws in his plan to forget. Instead of the apartment walls screaming her name, it was whispered to him through her mail, mistakenly forwarded from their old address, and in the sound of his cell phone ringing, and even in certain smells, like the scent of smoke rolling off nearby campfires. He found her in everything.
He thought about her every day.
Every hour of every day.
His mind was plagued, every fold and wrinkle, poisoned by her presence.
* * *
One evening, he made himself dinner, opened a beer, and sat down on the steps of his new front porch. Before even touching the contents of his plate, he opened his notebook and wrote:
You’re haunting me.
He almost left it at that, but he just couldn’t help himself. He continued to push his pen across the page:
I left you back in the city, but here you are… in the woods… with me. I feel your presence with every step. Somehow I see your face in every flickering leaf, and even the ethereal wind reminds me of your warm breath as it slithers over my skin.
He stopped and briefly put down his pen to sit with his thoughts for a moment. The welling tears stung his eyes, but he never allowed even one to grow to the point it slid down his cheek.
He picked up his pen and wrote three more words:
I miss you.
As soon as the pen left the page, he tore the words from the notebook and burned them with the lighter he carried in his jacket pocket.
As the flame withered the page to ash, he noticed his eyes weren’t the only ones watching it burn. There were two others, about twenty feet away, as black as the inside of a well, and that shivering flame danced like a ghost within their wetness.
The eyes belonged to a single crow—curious and unblinking; its sleek feathers shivered inside the darkness. The creature stood on the dirt road driveway, staring at the spitting flames until the page was withered to smoke. Just before the flames died out, it turned its beak towards Edgar, in that silent, judgmental way crows do, then all at once disappeared into the night.
Edgar, curious if the bird was still watching, tore off a bit of chicken and tossed it out onto the dirt. Within seconds, the bird waddled out of the shadows and scooped up the tiny morsel, eagerly scarfing it down. Edgar tossed out a couple more bites, then devoured the rest himself. Then, he and the bird sat there, chewing, watching each other in total silence, until finally he drank the last of his beer and went inside for the evening.
* * *
A bird came to me last night as I was eating dinner, and in that tiny moment, I didn’t think of you once. It was glorious.
Edgar wrote.
But now it’s morning. I’ve had my coffee. My mind is fully awake. And here you are again, staring me down, just like that little bird. There’s a bundle of forwarded mail sitting on the desk, just to the left of me, right now, as I’m writing this letter to you. It’s all for you… but you knew that already. Don’t think I haven’t caught on to what you’re doing.
I know. You don’t want me to forget. Up until last night, I wasn’t sure I ever could, but for that brief moment, you were gone. That moment will grow in time. Eventually those absent minutes will become absent hours, then absent days. There will come a time when I will think of you only once a season, a year, a decade, and I so look forward to it. I long to be healed of the scars you gave me. I will soon be me again, just you wait.
Edgar’s heart thrummed inside his chest. He suspected he’d had a little too much coffee, so he walked to the sink and emptied his mug into it. It wasn’t until then that he thought perhaps it wasn’t the coffee at all, it was something else.
He returned to his writing desk.
I considered forwarding your mail to your mother’s house, but I don’t owe you a damn thing. Our connection has been irreparably severed. There’s no going back now. I can only move forward. And I will move forward without you.
His heart was beating with such ferocity now that he was actually panting for breath. He tore the page from his notebook, grabbed a box of matches, and threw open the front door.
Much to his surprise, his crow friend was standing out in the driveway, in the same place on the dirt as the night before, seemingly awaiting his arrival. The two sides of its beak were parted, holding within it an object of significant size. He assumed it to be some beefy grub worm, a late breakfast perhaps, but curiously the bird dropped it to the dirt the moment the two of them made eye contact. They stared into each other’s eyes for a few uncomfortable seconds, then at last the bird flew off into the treetops, leaving its meal, dead on the dirt, unattended.
Edgar walked over to inspect the object, and vomited the moment he realized what it was. The crow had brought him a finger—a severed, gangrenous human finger.
He kicked it out into the woods. He wasn’t sure what else to do with it.
* * *
The crow I was telling you about earlier, it brought me something this morning. I suppose it was meant to be a gift. I don’t know much about crows, but I do know they like to keep things balanced. You give me something, I give you something—that kind of thing. I gave it food. It gave me a finger. As disturbing as it is, I’m sure there was no malice in its gesture. It was a gift. Although, I must say, I saw something in its eye last night, a glint—perhaps one of recognition. For a brief moment, I wondered if the two of us had somehow already known one another.
Edgar stood, pen in hand, then leaned over to write one final thought.
A gift. It was only a gift.
He tore the page from the notebook, then immediately went outside to burn it, along with the crumpled page he never got around to burning earlier. He opened a beer and watched them both turn to ash.
* * *
In the days that followed, his cell phone buzzed incessantly, all calls from unknown numbers. He never answered or bothered to check his voicemail messages as they came in. At some point he grew so annoyed with all the buzzing that he powered down the device and buried it in one of the empty kitchen drawers.
The phone was silenced. His mind was not.
He didn’t write to her again, at least not until the evening of the fire, when finally he scrawled:
The sirens! My god, the sirens nearly gave me a heart attack tonight! Turns out it was only a firetruck, putting out a patch of flames gone rogue, one set accidentally by a local camper. Tara, my skin crawled! I don’t know if what I’m feeling now is guilt or remorse or just plain fucking sadness, but I miss you more tonight than ever before. Remember that bottle of Johnnie Walker Red your parents gifted to us last Christmas? I’m drinking it all tonight. This emptiness I’m feeling… Tara… it’s so goddamn awful.
* * *
He sat on the steps of his porch and drank until he could hardly keep his head up anymore. Just before losing consciousness, he saw two figures fluttering in the distance—birds, or more specifically crows.
Something dangled from each of their beaks, but he wouldn’t see what they had brought him until he awakened the next morning.
* * *
It’s you, isn’t it? You’re doing this, or you’re at least behind it in some way. The birds, they keep bringing me things. Horrible things, Tara. Am I to believe it’s only a coincidence?
Angrily, he tore the page from the notebook and stormed out of the house to immediately set it ablaze. As soon as his feet hit the dirt, like little drops of rain, black birds descended from the treetops and planted their feet firmly on the dirt. Each one carried their own morbid gift—a severed finger, a rotted ear, an uprooted eyeball hanging by the bloody nerve…
These grotesque ‘gifts’ no longer disturbed Edgar. Instead, they only served to infuriate him. And to think I mistook this haunting for a gift!, he thought. These horrid things are an accusation! A verdict! A jury of crows! Ha!
Then those shimmering black birds descended from the treetops in waves, the same way the ocean creeps and swallows the shoreline, some violent blur. He swatted them away as they came down all around him, but they dodged every swinging fist. Not one skittered off.
“You’ll never leave me alone, will you?!” he shouted at the treetops, but to whom was unclear. “Everywhere I go, you’ll follow… your eyes are here, but also there… and everywhere. You’re in everything. There’s no escaping you. I see that now.”
One of the crows opened its beak, just enough for the hammy bit of flesh it held there to drop to the ground, then swooped down upon the man, tearing into the meat of his arm with its trenchant talons.
Then came another and another.
He fell to his knees in submission as the birds took turns ribboning his flesh. He no longer fought them off.
“So clever. You always were,” he said, in a surprisingly calm tone. He focused on a single crow of the murder, one carrying an extracted eyeball of a familiar color. “An eye for an eye… a murder for a murder.”
Each of the remaining crows took turns making their own exchanges, until at last every severed body part had its match.
Crows… the keepers of balance.
Just before they dismantled his hands, he attempted to etch a single word into the dirt, using only the tip of his finger: ‘GUILTY’—but he fell, one letter short of completion.
