Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these sunken eyes and learn to see
✧
D
ead things are stupidly stubborn, even without a soul to fill them up and keep them warm. My breath leaves me in spurts as I stumble into a patch of nettles when my hold slips and I pull out a chunk of fur from a mottled grey tail instead of budging the carcass whole from the bloody snow. There is fur from something dead in my mouth and my tongue turns thick and decaying.
My mood spoils like milk as I spit the fur out in flurries, like dandelion seeds, before I can figure out what it tastes like.
I am working up to proper infuriation when I breathe out once very slowly and remind myself that Rook will feel it if I do, and that it’s really very silly to be furious at a thing so long dead. Ma used to tell me to conserve my emotions. That they must be carefully rationed, like water in a desert, to be used up a little at a time and keep me from one day drying up.
Grimacing, I shake snow off my tail feathers and push up my mask until its cracked orange beak gawks a hello to the blustery sky. I begin digging again. The snow shroud is harder and more packed down than I’d thought, almost to ice; my hoof scrapes off individual, ruined snowflakes. I begin counting the number of scrapes in my head, to give myself something to do.
(And to distract from the tingling in my spine that won’t stop, no matter how many times I look over my shoulder. It’s a difficult thing, to dig up a body and shake off eyes from your back all while pretending like none of it bothers you. If I wasn’t so sure I had an audience I would’ve dropped this act after scrape number seven.)
When I am certain the snow is cleared away enough now to let its quarry go—I've scraped off so many snowflakes that tiny blades of brown grass peek out at me—I sigh before taking the tail back into my mouth and giving it a jerk. The body moves with a soft whoosh towards me and I almost smile, before I remember my shy, haunting audience and force it back down. I must remain unbothered. That way, they won't bother me.
That's what Ma always said. Sometimes I was almost disappointed with how well it worked.
Freed from its shallow grave of ice and snow, the dead thing is light and barely-there as it dangles helplessly from my mouth. Empty of a soul and a bellyful of guts, I suppose, lightens you up to air. I wonder if I am still being watched. My spine has stopped tingling yet I am not so sure it is because the visitor has left, or because—
“Why are you disturbing the dead.”
There is an eviscerated carcass between my teeth and I cannot scream. Though, I don't think I would have anyway—I am not easily frightened, and the voice is too whispery, like wind rustling the petals of flowers, for me to worry about the girl it belongs to.
She is red, like blood, and white, like snow. I wonder briefly, my eyes blinking slow, if she is so worried about the carcass because she was made from it—pieces of soul stapled together, a body to house it in sculpted hastily from the bloodied snow.
But that is witchcraft, and of Elder's variety, and if it were Elder's magic I would've smelled it before it could ever have smelled me.
I drop the carcass so I can speak and smile a little when it hits the snow with a soft thump. My mask is still raised up like a prayer to the Goddess' sky; it makes it easier to look at her, and let her see that I am looking at her, instead of hiding cowardly behind a mask that can't even smile. My hair is done up in looping braids like vines today, sprigs of swan-necked snowdrops tucked tight into every woven strand.
I tuck a braid behind my ear and nudge at the flopped-over carcass with my hoof.
“This?” I say, my voice echoic through the chill and setting dark. “... Because you shouldn't leave dead things just lying around. We'd be overrun by them before too long.” There is a flake of dried blood on my braid and I frown down at it; I blow breathfuls of air over it until it flutters off to the ground.
When I look back at the girl of blood and snow (who is so still except for the slice slice slice of her tail that it begins to irritate me) I remember my manners and ask her carefully, my voice as delicate as snowdrops, “Does it belong to you?”
