Human Paradigm

The world is cast in shades of yellow.

Look to the west, beyond the smoke that chokes the city. A golden smear drifts lower in the sky.

The scream of your gun echoes in the valley, off the limestone ridges and barren hills, a mindless scream that says nothing and demands everything. Others join it in a staccato symphony. Listen to the rattle, the roar, watch as glass shatters and buildings heave and bodies come apart like bundles of straw.

Smell the air, thick with dust. See the blackened pines bristling from the earth around you.

Does it make you wish for the time before, when the city streets hummed with life? With motorcars and wayfarers?

But even then you were sightless, moving from nowhere to nowhere, consumed by your own existence, seeking meaning where there was none to be found.

Up on the highest tower I would roost and watch you, wondering if you knew how small you were. If you understood such things.

I have a theory that you do, and it is as follows:

I believe you do know, and the knowing upsets you. This is true for all Humans. It makes you quick to violence, and it is why you fight, and why you hate. War is how you make sense of your smallness. Your insignificance.

It is why this city burns.

~

You watch the light drain from the sky and pool at the edge of the world, then vanish altogether. Darkness fills the empty spaces, the roads and alleyways, the pavilions of shattered stone.

Everything black, save for the quivering patches of orange where fires burn.

Hear the sound of machine guns wane.

You find yourself bleeding against a wall while your comrades pause their killing and retreat toward the east, where they crouch in crumbled basements and in the bowels of tanks, in territory they control.

You are left in no man's land.

Look around. Memorize every detail:

the white-tile floor stained red with blood, the empty shelves, the ceiling that sags above you.

This was a supermarket, once.

Now it is your grave.

Listen to the growing silence.

Sit in the darkness and think about the days you will never get back—when you moved through life so assuredly, when you moved with purpose. It is only now that you realize your purpose is as tenuous as a house of cards.

Embrace it.

Look outside.

See the blackened shells of motorcars. The mountains of rubble.

The lonely road you follow is a network of ashen veins through the ruined city blocks. Let go. There is nothing left for you here.

~

I watch you bleed from the shrapnel wound on your thigh, and you sink lower against the flaking wall, trembling. There will be no salvation in this place.

While I wait you whisper three words, blood bubbling between your lips.

"Who are you?"

I think about this for a moment and then I say,

"I am the Raven, I am Death, and I am many things besides. My kind waits in the shadows, and when you pass on it is us who will pick you apart."

I am surprised by your reaction.

You simply nod.

~

Now dawn comes, and still you live. I can hear your laboured breathing, your heart rattling like a faulty motor in your chest.

I see you pull something small from your breast pocket and look at it. Something silver.

Your gaze slides over to me and there is an emotion flickering behind your eyes that may be anger, or perhaps resolve, or perhaps something else entirely.

I am not certain, and this troubles me.

~

Brown light filters through the broken windows overhead: midday in the city.

Gunfire echoes beyond the walls of your hideout, waves of it, followed by the boom of heavy artillery.

You have fashioned a tourniquet of cloth cut from your uniform and, after wrapping it around your thigh, the bleeding stops. You cannot walk, but still you hope.

The sun dips below the horizon.

You sit on the floor where you have sat for the last thirty-six hours and again you cradle the thing in the palm of your hand. Is that a smile playing on your lips?

I flap my wings and hop closer, but you have already slipped it back into your pocket.

~

"Human," I say on the second night in the supermarket. "The world has cast you aside. You have nothing; you are nothing. I have never asked a question, so let me ask one now. What is it that makes you live?"

A pause.

Then,

"It is many things, Raven."

I tilt my head. "Many things?"

"Yes."

From your breast pocket you pull a length of delicate chain fixed with a silver pendant.

"These are two reasons," you say between wheezing breaths. "Here. Open it."

You hand me the pendant and I find the catch and ease the clasps apart with my beak.

A faded photograph inside. Two Humans, one young, one older.

I find myself curious. "Who are they?"

"My partner. And my daughter. Beneath the Eiffel Tower."

"Ah. Of course."

You look at me, and your face is tired.

"Another thing I have noticed about you Humans," I say. "Your sentimentality. How you become attached to things just as small as yourselves. Smaller, even. Things that make you vulnerable."

You smile and your eyes shine like beads of glass. "It can be difficult, sometimes. But it's worth it. In the end. I don't... expect you to... understand."

"What is worth it?"

"Everything." Your eyes are half closed now, your face pale as moonlight. "Life."

And you do not elaborate.

The darkness presses around us.

For a time your breath hisses between your lips.

Then it stops.

I stand next to your body, slumped there against the wall with the locket open at your feet.

I mull over that word.

Feel the chaos of it on my tongue.

Life.