The Raven Wife

By Greta Valentine

The cave has been devouring the unwary for years, or so they say. Every local with a grain of authority has a story about it, from parents to babysitters keen to earn their keep to the superstitious old folks who gather at the corner cafe for coffee. When you and I were children, we smirked at the warnings. We thought ourselves clever for having deciphered that they were merely code for concern; an admonition to be home by nightfall.

And yet, there it still sits, yawning, on the edge of our village, a great black maw wide enough to swallow the world.

No one agrees on what waits in the depths of the cave, despite having their own version of the story. We tally up their factual inconsistencies. When I ask my grandmother about it one summer, all she says is, “People who go down there come out something else.” I think she must be referring to my grandfather, who worked in the mines before the company shut them down for being too dangerous. When he went in, he was a healthy young man who liked to tell tall tales and crack jokes. Now that his years of work are over he coughs more and smiles less, and spends his evenings dozing by the fire, too tired for stories. But when I press her, she won’t say more. If all this talking around the cave is meant to deter me, it does the opposite, drawing me like a magpie to a shiny trinket. We are alike in that regard. You share my love of the stories about the cave that don’t end in destruction. Our favorites are the ones that tell of shape-shifters, and wishes granted in the dark. We shiver all the same over the darker tales, putting on a show, grinning at each other across campfires. We let them think they have us fooled.

Perhaps we have always been so stubborn. Or perhaps it’s only that I like to cling to my own stories about the things I can’t explain.

It happens on a Saturday at half past ten.

You are sitting at the table eating cornflakes, and I’m making coffee. It’s the slow kind of morning that I love, and it takes everything to will myself out of bed at a decent hour. Sun is already slanting across the dining room table in wide, bright patches. I run the coffee grinder and put the kettle on. I let last night’s half-remembered dreams dissolve as the grounds brew.

When at last I turn to offer you a cup, there is a raven in your place, eating from your bowl, large, glossy and black, all feathers and claws where you had skin and bones.

You go right on eating cornflakes as if nothing has happened. It’s like you’ve been using a bowl twice your size all your life; like the spoon lying next to it has always been this alien implement too clumsy for your beak.

You don’t even ruffle your feathers when I drop the French press on the floor, coffee beading across the linoleum in little rivulets. It splashes onto my bare feet and I curse, but I don’t take my eyes off you. I don’t know what I’m seeing. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry, so when I blink and you remain a bird, I do a bit of both.

Anyone who doesn’t know you like I do will tell me you used the moments my back was turned to step outside, to walk away from our little house; from our life. You wouldn’t be the world’s first husband to bolt, but I know better.

I would know those eyes anywhere, even in another face.

I spend the early days preoccupying myself with questions of how because I’m not yet ready to ask why. You seem undeterred by the transformation, and there are times that I wonder if I am the crazy one for having missed this in you. I keep expecting to walk into the room and find you reading in your favorite chair, or cooking dinner - pork tenderloin and garlic potatoes. Your favorite, or so I thought. I feed you leftovers now, fixing you plates of scraps because I don’t know what else to do. You seem grateful enough, but I cry when the lasagna eventually goes bad because I’ve made too much. There is too much food in this house for only one human and one bird.

I keep imagining I’ll wake up one day and you’ll walk into the kitchen on two legs, but the weeks go by, and your feathers and beak remain. I buy a field guide and observe you closely as you flutter around the house, the porch, even straying as far as the yard, though you always return. I am absurdly satisfied that I can find you in its pages: Corvus corax, with your thick curved beak, ragged black feathers, tail fanned out at just such an angle. These are facts, but they are not answers.

You collect every shiny thing you find lying around the house and hide it in a decorative bowl on the mantel that I find only after several weeks, in a feverish bout of cleaning that I think will take my mind off what has happened, and the fact that it is still happening. There is a pile of pennies and paper clips, one of the earrings I wore on our wedding day, the foil from a pack of cigarettes I thought you didn’t smoke anymore. The key to our first apartment tumbles out, along with the bottle cap from a celebratory beer opened to christen this home when it was new. Do you remember these things like I do? Or have I clung to them, static images in time, while we shape-shifted into people unrecognizable to each other?

I bring you water in your favorite chipped ceramic mug. You like to drink from it while perching on the arm of the sofa as I watch television. You hover there, hopping from one leg to the other.

I remember sitting on that sofa when we first moved in, leaning against each other in the dark, the colors from the screen washing over our tired faces. I thought we would be that comfortable forever, folded into each other, but what did I know? How could I hold it against you for changing all at once over breakfast, rather than more slowly - one piece at a time?

Perhaps I, too, am unfamiliar to you now. Perhaps I am no longer the woman you married; the girl who found herself enchanted with your stories of dim descents into the unknown that lives beneath the world we know. I rest my hand on the arm of the sofa, slowly inching it towards you, hoping you’ll perch there, but you always hang back, uncertain. I can’t say I blame you.

The days go by and I don’t know what to do until the thing that seems most absurd is the only one worth trying. If there’s one thing we still know, it’s that there is a place where wishes might come true in the dark.

When I enter the cave, I can barely stand upright. The smell is of old earth, and something decomposing - dying, or long since dead. I go quickly from a hunched walk to hands and knees, trailing my fingers over moss and wet walls, following the path from dim to dark. The flashlight helps me for a while, but at some point it fails and I am left in pitch blackness. It doesn’t matter. There is only one way to go here: down.

I smash into unseen stone more than once, bloodying my knees and elbows against the bones of the earth. I cannot bring you with me, so before I leave I grab your hoarded trinkets and shove them in my pockets. They are talismans to me now. My hand grips them as I stumble through the dark, crunching across the skeletons of what I hope are animals that have expired so far from light and air.

At first, everything is a blunder or a bruise, but soon I am making my way through a blackness so complete that it doesn’t matter if my eyes are open or closed. The deeper I go, the more tangible the darkness becomes - every step downward is a step inward.

Finally I can go no further. Everything is quiet, tomblike. I realize I have no idea what I’m supposed to do now that I have arrived. Are there magic words, or will something find me in the dark? Will a light appear?

None does, and my breath comes quicker and shorter, as if I’m using up the air around me. Minutes pass that feel like hours, and I call out, but nothing answers. The space is too confined even for an echo. I try the flashlight again, and to my relief a weak beam illuminates the space. I breathe in the tang of mildew. When my eyes adjust, I nearly fall against a stone ledge that juts up from the floor.

It is more a pit than a well, but the broken rim was clearly constructed to keep miners or children or desperate fools like me from falling in. I can see a few feet below the surface of the water, deeper than I expected, but the surface reflects back a wisp of my own face too. She is wreathed by the jagged edges of the well - a toothy mocking grin.

Make a wish.

What else can I do? Hope is almost too much to ask for beneath all this darkness and dirt, but I find myself grasping the first object my hand lands on in my pocket: a shiny token for the ferry across the Seine on our trip to Paris. It is the most coin-like thing among the trinkets, and I know I should throw it over the edge with a plea, but I find myself clinging to it. What if memories are the last thing I have left of you? What if I lose these pieces of our past and nothing changes?

I gather the remaining items and spread them out on the wet stone lip of the well: a movie ticket stub from an arts festival we attended several years ago. You walked out halfway through a screening, telling me you just needed some air. Now I wonder if you wanted to be there at all. There is the pull-tab from a brand of sparkling water you claimed to love, but never bought for yourself. They are small things; they fit in the palm of my hand. But when added together, how often have I told the wrong stories about them? I have kept them as mementos all these years, but perhaps they are lies - proof of a life only I was living.

A tear spills down my cheek, and something cracks within me. I unfreeze, gathering up the trinkets, and drop them one by one into the water. Each one disappears beneath the surface with a satisfying thunk and is gone.

Somewhere overhead you are flying, windswept, weightless.

Do you miss our old life, or was it a prison to you? Perhaps it wasn’t you who changed at all. I feel foolish all over again. What kind of love tries to fix someone the moment they show you what they are?

People who go down there come out something else, I hear my grandmother say. If I came back now, could you forgive me?

My return to the mouth of the cave should have taken longer than the descent, but I am lighter now. By the time I reach it I have shed something of my old self - a skin that stays behind in the darkness. I skim the crags and crevices as I rise.

The world I emerge in is brighter than belief. The wind is brisk, and I feel it on every last one of my feathers, and the spaces beneath my wings. They are jet-black like yours, dark as a tomb beneath the earth, but iridescent too, reflecting back every color under the sun.

I see you wheeling overhead, where you have been all along. I rise, soaring, to meet you.

THE END

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