I knew a man, a dead man who was nameless, and a spectre that every sane man forgot. He told me his story in my nightmares and my dreams and he’ll repeat it to me every goddamn day.

The days long ago were harsh and black; every man’s life was more a dead living then living until death. In this time, there was a young man, a defiant man with eyes of the bluest, deadest ice.

No one knew his name, no one could care, and life was too much of a struggle to be involved. This young man was taken away as prisoner for a crime to his dying day would say he did not commit. He was a lonely man by any means, a quieter man you’ve never met yet a friendlier one you’ve never seen, but there was a scent of madness on this man. It was in his skin, his breath, his essence, it was the scent of a dead man walking and he knew it but he’d fight it to the end.

They took him in cuffs to his court room drama, and he fought it all the way. The guards, they tore at him and ripped his clothing to shreds. With both hands tied, he broke their skulls with his head alone but for every man he broke in survival, he lost every chance, every possibility of walking free.

Fate pulls at the heartstrings in all of us, but it seems only the worst of luck would place a laughing judge behind the desk in front. A Judge, a Jury and a Warden, and whose corruption was at peace with the time of the world, when money and numbers meant everything and names and lives meant nothing. The prisoner fought telling the court he was innocent, innocent.
“I’m Innocent!” He cried.

It was all in vain. The jury just laughed with jeering cries, calling for a harsher punishment, calling for death and execution. All the while the judge just sat behind a quiet smirk, for of course he knew he was getting his money and his time was not wasted.

The guards eventually subdued the young mad man, and when they had him on all fours, they didn’t waste a second on him, for he was scum in their eyes. They beat him to an inch of his life, let the blood pool in his kidneys and his lungs, pummelling against flesh and bone, for they enjoyed it all. They enjoyed beating the animal senseless.

To them, he was filth, just another criminal, another piece of trash on the street, garbage as if the world wasn’t full of it and each and every one piece protesting their innocence. They cried and sobbed, still yelling their innocence until their throats was raw. He was no different.

Blindfolded, his pride destroyed; they stripped him down and dragged him to his cell. The guards opened the door, threw him in wrapped only in a small loincloth made of rags. The cell was cold and damp, a reminder this wasn’t just a prison but a camp.

Slowly the man was broken down. For that first day his screaming would not stop, instead it would turn to sobbing or hysteria and who could blame the prisoner? Stripped of everything and left in the cold to die like an animal, would you not cry your sanity away as well?

Two years passed and the prisoner had lost his words. He could think, he could hear, see and smell. He could touch and feel and he knew where he was, but he would not talk. After that first day in his cell, no man ever heard him utter another word. Instead he remained in a near catatonic state, always on the very edge of sanity. Until one day in his second year of imprisonment his world changed.

The guards were always cruel and for their own messed up reasons, he was their special prey. They always made sure to include him in their sadistic games. One special occasion, a guard had a twisted game for his meat. Armoured and tall the guard strode in; rifle under one arm and a red fountain pen in the other. The pen was small, thin and sharp but solid and strong.

The guard told the prisoner to make it easier on himself, that he would exit the cell and give the prisoner enough privacy to kill himself quietly, provided he wouldn’t make too much of a mess and for  the first time in his life, the prisoner had an option could think about even if it was only briefly.

Slowly the prisoner nodded his head to the guard, indicating he wanted to go through with it. Laughing savagely the guard wandered off, leaving the man with a choice.

The prisoner sat quietly on the cell floor, both hands wrapped around this pen full of bloody ink. He thought about everything his life had once been, about everything that had been taken away from him.

Half an hour later the guard came back and found the prisoner asleep. He looked through the bars in the door at the prone figure, swore quietly to himself about people being weak and stalked off.

The prisoner lay sleeping and for the first time in a long time he found himself dreaming, not just sleeping but actually dreaming pictures and words. He found himself dreaming for one thing: freedom.

The next morning the prisoner awoke his new weapon in hand. From morning to night, night to morning he tapped the butt of that god forsaken pen against every inch of wall in his cell, always listening closely for any hollow noises, anything to indicate a weakness in the walls. The endless TAP, TAP… every few seconds was enough to drive those still sane mad.

For ten years the prisoner tapped every morning and every night. For those ten years his other prison-mates complained. One night in his tenth year, the prisoner heard a hollow noise from his tapping; weakness in the wall just above his bed frame, maybe from water damage or heating. He tapped as a mad man, the echoing thuds loud enough for everyone to hear. This prisoner had the scent of hope, and hope is something no prisoner should hold, at least not in the eyes of their keepers.

His keepers, his guards dragged him from his cell in the eye of the morning to a room in the back, a place away from passing patrols and surveillance cameras. They beat him, they beat him so hard. They pummelled him with batons and broke his ribs with their fists and boots. The morning air was filled with the sound of bruised flesh and breaking bones. He had been close to death many times before but not as close as this. They flayed his flesh with whips and stabbed him in every area not vital with glass and nails, anything they could use to take away his hope.

Torn asunder in mind and body, they left him there to die, and die he did until a petite figured nurse with blonde and black hair found him. She was beautiful and rare, something the prisoner could barely see through eyes so swollen. She spoke about everything and anything while she worked and he loved every moment of her company, but the hours passed too quickly and his keepers came to claim him to his cell.

Days went by and she was all the prisoner could think about. He wanted to escape, to take her away from this devils paradise. The more he thought about her, the quieter he became, a fact his guards hated. He would give them no response; no gasp of pain even a goddamn glance. They laughed at him, jeered at him because they knew he could never speak a word.

Night by night they beat him and they laughed and every night he woke to the voice of the petite blond and black haired nurse. She spoke words he could not comprehend, but only hear in blurs and muffles in his broken head and deafened ears. Through blood-cracked lips… he smiled.

The guards were ruthless in their taunting, in their effort to break him. They would point and laugh at him, knowing he had no words to come back with; until one day... he snapped. A man already broken can snap, and when he does death is always waiting close by for him and those around him. He walks beside them all but when a broken man cracks, death breaks into a run and the scent of agony fills his senses with ecstasy.

The prisoner pointed at all of them with fingers snapped in all directions and he laughed. He laughed beyond everything and all he was for a moment was hysterical, hurting laughter. It was as if every beating, every hurt his heart had felt was coming back up in his bray, like he was telling the world and the guards to get lost, to go screw themselves and lose themselves in their pathetic lives.
He could not talk, but he could think and this laughter was the closest thing to true defiance he had ever had before.

This scared the guardsmen, it scared them in a way they had never known. The beatings came faster and harder every hour and every day, and every day he’d wake and laugh. He’d laugh so hard and so hysterically through bloodied lips and cracked ribs. Blood would pool on the ground from teeth that had been knocked out, from cuts and scrapes and skin in strips, but still he would laugh. He knew what he was doing in his own mind. Because every time he’d laugh, they would beat him and he would wake up in the arms of his lovely nurse. The pain was worth it, the beatings were worth it just to wake up in the arms of company.

Her small expressions of kindness were enough to get him through his days, to help him weather the pain of his own life. He thought that if he could do this long enough, maybe he could grow stronger and accept that he was a prisoner, he would never truly leave his cell behind.

But the keepers were not stupid. They caught on to his fondness for the nurse, the game he played. For a time they stopped their beatings. They never came to take him away to the back room, away from the world. Even when he laughed and pointed at them, they walked away.

He never could understand why until it was far too late and this time, they would not hold back. There was no back room this time; there was no hiding from other patrols or the surveillance.

This time it was pure, raw hatred for a man who they saw had wronged them, had used them. In front of the crowd of in-mates they beat him worse than they had ever. They broke both his legs and shattered his kneecaps to being useless. They broke every bone in his body and saved the spine to last, just to watch him squeal and scream and he held on. He held on with every part of his soul, all because of his nurse.

Little did he know of the news they held back. They waited for the right time to tell him. They waited three weeks til he woke from his battle coma. They smiled at him and waited eagerly for his reaction as one of the smaller ones piped up.

His nurse was gone, they sacked her for stealing. She lost her job, her references and any hope of survival. They made sure she’d never work again. They’d beaten her and raped her, scarred her face with their sharpened knives meant for unruly prisoners. They’d made sure she would never earn a dollar on the streets even, for no man would take a night out with a hooker with a carved mask for a face.

To their delight, their hard work paid off, for at the start of their shift that day, they found her body in the street; malnourished and frozen, she lay on the staircase to their entrance her fist frozen to the door, her pleading to be let in still caught on her still-beautiful face.

The looks on their faces that day when they shared their news with the prisoner, they giggled and laughed and made every crass joke under the sun. They watched him cry and plead, something he had not done for a long time.

With broken legs they dragged him one last time to his cell. With broken legs he dragged himself through the cell door, his legs like splintered ivy, bones shooting off in all directions.

For three days he lay there on the floor, on his stomach. For three days he cried.

On the third night, a small fountain pen with red ink rolled out from under his bed towards him. He wondered how, for there was no one in his cell. Without light he could tell there was no one beside him.

The guards that morning heard his tapping, the endless procession of eerie, tiny taps and then the loud thudding began. Hope in his heart, he had found the weakened wall again, but he wanted them to know. He wanted to see their eyes when they knew he had discovered his hope again. He wanted them to be scared, to be terrified of a man who had lost all and only recovered the maddening of a slim hope and so he pounded that pen against the wall, against the weakened mortar.

They rushed to him and he waited. He waited for their yells, their curses. He waited until they had just pried his cell door open. He waited until they bent close to him, and tried to grab his arms.

To this day, be it my dreams or my nightmares, the strength behind a desperate act still scares me, as did the look in this man’s eyes. He has left his soul behind and now only clings to his flesh.

As the guards bent down, his will returned. With broken arms and fingers splayed in all directions, he fought them off. The sheer power in those broken hands was enough to snap his captor’s wrists as he pried them off. Slowly he stood on broken legs with agony passing through every vein. The guards… they cried out for help, any one to stop this mad man, but on that day time came to a slow. The first step he took, he nearly fell, but he regained his balance quickly as the second step came down faster, and in a heartbeat later he was close to running.

His keepers stood in silent fear, in a world of awe as he charged full speed at that weakened wall. A man’s cell is his prison, as is his heart; but that day the prisoner was free from his jail. Six inches of mortar and brick become dust as the prisoner hit. A demolition crew couldn’t break that wall like the prisoner did that day.

He was free...

But freedom comes with a price, and this is something we all know. For some of us the price is too high and we choose keep being prisoners from our own fear. For others, the price is just right and they pay it willingly.

For ten years the prisoner had never known the layout of his jail, for ten years he had never known how high or low he was off the ground, and that there was his mistake. A mistake he would pay for with his life and this he knew at the very end.

As he fell through the wall, his momentum carried him on and before he fell, he turned himself over to look at his captors once more. He looked into their eyes one last time and kept their glance, laughing all the way down. With tears in his eyes, his thoughts were chaos, all but two.

His last thoughts were two things a second before he hit –
His blonde and black haired nurse, whose beauty he would never forget, but name he had never known.
His very last was – “I’m finally free...”

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Stop smoking or smoke til the black cancer takes you away...

stop smoking...

We be telling him the same thing. Many a times we be whispering in his ear. You'd think he'd take a hint after what happened to Frank. Oh Frank? Put it this way, he didn't listen to us and he paid the price. He be nothing but bones, ash and tar but that's the price you pay. Somehow we think it must scare Robert a bit. He keeps looking around to see where this disembodied voice be coming from. Well, we be ghosts. Ghosts of the long dead and these days we share no single identity. We be smokers from long ago. We took the black cancer in our lungs, and felt every dead breath. We felt our lungs weaken, staring at the blood on our hands, in our tissues.

We denied it, told it to ourselves that we were ok. Are we to blame? No... Humans are foolish to a fault, we deny our health, we deny our well being for fear of being weak. Are we trying to save this Robert fellow? Maybe... Maybe not... "Stop smoking..." we tell him. We whisper it every day, on the dot of every hour. We whisper it in our dead throats, we whisper it in his empty mind. He doesn't listen. Every day we tell him "Stop smoking..." Every fucking day; heh heh heh. "Stop smoking, stop smoking. STOP SMOKING!" It don't sink in do it? Oh but wait. Rob will fall. They all do.   How'd we die? We tell you while you wait. While we wait for rob to pass.

How long has it been since our death? How long ago were we single souls? We don't remember. We remember the taste of the smoke, the taste of the filter on our crusty lips. We remember it so well. I be...who was I? I was...who be I? Stop smoking. That phrase just echoes in our corporeal heads. Who were we? I remember...My name was John. A journalist always looking for the next big thing. I remember...1930's, I remember smoking those beautiful cigars, that sweet scent of tobacco in my throat and lungs I remember my name was Mark. Manager in home sales. Taking money from the poor every turn I got... hah hah ha. I too loved the scent of the cuban cigar on my lips, that motion of inhaling, exhaling like all my problems disappeared with smoke in the air.

We died together... We died as one... We felt the cancer so rotting our bones, our flesh. The coughing that started and wouldn't stop. Breaking bones, breaking ribs. Lungs descimated, world ending. We remember death. We remember dying together, we died together... We knew to stop smoking. We couldnt.... we couldn't.... we couldn't.... we couldn't...   I died in my chair. Blood from an aneurysm in my brain. So painful, so agonising yet so slow was death. Death was crawling towards me on all fours, laughing and pointing and telling me I was weak, I was weak, I was weak. I cry and say no, this can't be happening but it is, it is, it is... I can't stop him, i can't stop what he's doing. I feel his touch so cold and hot, that cold fire sucking away my soul and my life.

I can feel the tobacco leaf in my mouth, feel my face melting away from the fire in the leaf, burning away my nose and eyes. It hurts, It hurts, it hurts so fucking much. I am Mark. He was me.   I remember dying in my car, my heart had given out. I felt the agony of my chest exploding within, my heart popping. I remember the feeling of the knives driving into my chest, I see death on my bonnet and he's laughing. He's laughing at me and he won't stop, he won't stop no matter what I do, I can't take it, I can't take it. I start sceaming, but my lungs are filling with blood and there's nothing i can do. It hurts so goddamn much. It hurts so fucking much... I am John. I was he.

 Stop Smoking...

But that was yesterday. That was today. Time means nothing because it blends together. There is no clock when you've been dead all for so long.   Would you like to know about our victim? Our ally? Robert was the same as us. An executive in a tobacco company. Rich as all hell. Robert has an ex wife. Robert has two kids and a second wife. He cares about none. None is how he cares. None is his thoughts, none is his heart. Tomorrow is the day he dies. We tell him stop smoking. He doesn't listen. We see Robert in tomorrow, we see him right now. He sits at his desk, reading through everything from sales to budgets and everything in between. He feels the tickle in the back of his throat. It's reflex that he begins to cough. Little does he know his body is so goddamn rotted on the inside. His insides are so gangrenous, so eaten away. It doesn't take much for to fall apart.

He coughs, coughs hard. His diaphragm spasms rapidly, he doesn't think anything of it. Its starting. The beauty of death is starting. It's so goddamn beautiful. The coughing intensifies and he coughs up the first sign of trouble. Blood splatters into his cupped hands, and he begins to clutch his chest. His ribs break and splinter under the strength of rapid movement. Blood is everywhere, he can't stop it. His ribs one by one just shatter, so weakened by the black death that sits so quietly in every cell of his body. His bones beacon the end,  all to dust, his skeleton slowly disintegrating. Oh but he can feel it. Robert, our dear boy. The look of terror on your face as you cough up a half sectioned lung. Does it hurt? The feel of that gooey organ, bleeding its life away between your fingers and yet you can't stop coughing. You're choking on a portion of your own intestine that's buried in your throat. Oh but we see it all.

The moment of terror when the coughing snaps his spine. His vertebrae simply explode on the inside. Blood pools around his still form, his eyes still open, still seeing around him. Its muscle memory now, he can't move an inch but still he chokes, still he coughs. Again and again.   We see the beauty of this. We see how this happened. The black cancer, the tar. It weakened his body on the inside, it just didn't show on the outside until it was too late. A body that falls apart in one coughing fit, on burst of muscle movement so harsh bought on by something so little as a tickle in the back of the throat. We see the irony, we see the beauty. Maybe next time he'll listen to the dead, listen to the ghosts, listen to the bodiless voice that yells, that yawns, that speaks, that dies with the words "stop smoking on its ethereal lips."

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Smile

Smile...

Like it's really that easy. Ten years ago, they told my son the same thing.

"Smile and the pain will go away. Keep it there, don't move it." They say to him.

"Don't be so human. It doesn't really hurt."

The world has changed so much since I was young. These days the folk are literally chained to their place of work. They drive a solid metal bar through the gap between the bones in both wrists and attach a chain. From then on, you don't move from where you work. You don't get paid, you're so close to starving it ain't funny.

All the while they tell you to smile. The moment you stop, the pain starts. They start the pressure easy at first, until you get the hint. If you don't get the hint the pressure starts to build and the longer you let it build the more they start to pull hard.

All the while they tell you to smile...

Like its that easy to smile through the pain of having your arms slowly torn from their sockets.

Chris was a special case. He passed every test of pain given and they hated him all the more for it. Big companies like this, they don't care for their workers. You are a slave. You are nothing more or less. You have no rights to life, your life is forfeit in return for your place of work.

Its either that or you're out on the cold dark streets with anything mechanical looking to clean the streets, and you're the goddamn trash.

So what did they do to my son I hear you ask?

Well, that's easy. They had more chains attached to him, one solid bar in between the bones of each ankle. See they got these smile raids. One line of managers, all devoid of anything remotely human standing in a line. They tell you to smile and you do exactly that. You smile until they tell you to stop and that can easily be days.

Every time you stop smiling before their count, the pain expands and it gets stronger til you push your face muscles back together and smart smiling again.

But my son had no chance from hour of that day, the first smiling raid of that day. Like always a big line of corporate men and women, all dressed to the hilt. Clothing that said "we're not going through a recession. Humans aren't slaves, how can we be with how good I look?". They say smile, and he smiles. He does everything he can to keep his face locked in that god awful expression, but it doesn't matter cause the pain starts and the pressure begins to increase.

It hurts, I watch because I can see it all. They line us up like live stock to the slaughter but we don't get stunned to be killed humanely. Hell nah.

Chris is in agony, but he smiles. I'll never forget that look on his face. I knew he'd be defiant even in his death, and god knows he knew it was coming right for him. For most people death comes at a slow walk, for Chris; that bastard was breaking into a dead run.

Still Chris smiles. I can see the shoulders slowly dislocating from their joints, and he's crying. There's tears running down his face but still he smiles because he wants the pain to go away. A minute later they start pulling on his legs too and he's still smiling.

These fucked up corporate coats just stare. Their eyes show nothing, like there is nothing at all left of their souls, should they ever have had one.

It gets worse and everyone around me starts yelling. They're all telling the managers to stop, some even offering their own chains to be pulled. No one's listening and Chris is crying so gosh darn hard now.

You never wanna hear the sound of skin, flesh and muscle that actually tears, because it sounds gastly, wet and usually its followed by hideous screaming. This time its my son's screaming to be exact.

Blood starts pooling and you can see the flesh around his joints tearing, slowly tearing away. Muscle and sinew you can start to see and all the white stringy nerves and tendons. The screaming becomes frantic, to the point I cover my ears and just like that I stop smiling too.

But my own pain starts and I have to force my face again, like I'm some kind of monkey in a zoo having to make stupid faces to keep the crowd happy.

My son is bleeding out on the ground, one shoulder completely seperated on the floor a couple inches away, the other half hanging off and my beautiful kid is still fighting, still holding on some way some how. He's bracing himself off the ground with that one arm still barely working.

Both legs are now stumps, just pissing out blood.

But there's no paramedics, no first aid. There is nothing but the cold hard silence of the truth.

That truth is horrible, that truth is absurb because I don't want to believe it. I can'tbelieve it. My own son Chris is dying in front of my eyes, torn to pieces and bleeding his life force away.

We are slaves to life. We are slaves to our work, slaves to the price of money. Money that doesn't even exist in our  own world's anymore.

Our only reward is the illusion of freedom. That if today's work is finished before the end of the day, maybe we can go home early. Fools cling to their illusions, fools cling to their hopes. But I won't.

My son died that day. My only son in the entirety of the world died for what?

Because he chose to defy his captors. He chose to hate with what was left of his heart. Maybe that hate gave way to anger, and maybe that anger gave him a stubbornness. That stubboness let him hang on just those few seconds more. Enough to say - "Fuck you." to his captors.

My son died this day. Torn limb from limb. All the while what did they tell him?

"Smile..." Like it's really that easy.

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This hanging of the iron crows story takes place in the harsh era we call the Second World War. This was a time of misery, of lies and corruption. Any man with a grain of salt or sanity would tell you that war was beyond a bloody one. In those desperate days, it wasn’t unheard of for people to go missing. It wasn’t unheard of for people to turn up dead without a mark or a scratch.  Such was the suffering of those during the war, that fresh terror that seeps into a person’s very heart and soul; it wasn’t uncommon for a healthy man to die from nothing but a loss of hope. Some people cannot imagine a future and so they give their lives and spirits away for nothing.

Sometimes it's all in the wings, all in the movements, all in the rust, the mechanical beast with gears that drive their wings, those rusty rusty Iron Crows, those bastard Iron Crows

Life is too hard to live they say, no more, please no more

Sometime that suffering wakes up a demon in a person. That demon lives on cruelty, on a sadistic drive to watch a dead man squirm. Well this demon had just woken fresh from its long nap, and woken inside the body of a young father. Mark Ranisteri be the man’s name. I remember him like it was only yesterday I saw him.

Alas when I spoke to him all those years ago, he seemed like nothing but a good man. An honest man seemed he. I had no idea he was a devil. No one could ever think such a thing, but its human nature to inherit our animal ancestor’s brutality. You see Mark was a father for the second time, and it was this month, august in which his son was born. I could see how the boy had changed him, it wasn’t an easy thing to see but it was that blur, which flicker behind his eyes that told me all I needed, or really wanted to know. Mark was a completed changed man after his son Alfred was born. He loved his daughter differently, punished her for the tiniest of things yet cared nothing for bad school reports or school incidents. It was the cruelty in his eyes that spoke sometimes, the way he hurt his animals, his pets.  It was here in his basement he kept lots of birds, namely crows. So fascinated by them was he, he tried to replicate them with mechanics. He failed every time, leaving nothing but soulless, rusty projects that spoke with no love, simply staring away as they rusted, those rusty Iron Crows, those empty, lonely Iron Crows.

Those bastard Iron Crows!

Jayne was such a sweet girl, such a beautiful little flower in a sea of copy cat petals. She began to act differently to her father, so damn defiant, so angry. Her screams would echo some days from the house, but we chose to ignore them as old fools do. Oh lord, she so loved those birds. She hated her father all the more for the beatings, the breaking of their wings. She hated those iron and steel imitations of life, to her those Iron Crows were nothing but devils in the form of toys, she so hated those Iron Crows, those Bastard Iron Crows.

I guess at the end of the day, us old fools, we ignored her and for that we will be forever sorry.

I remember one day the screaming started again, high pitched, angrier than I’ve ever heard before. This time I couldn’t help myself. I told my wife I was heading out to see the fuss and something in her eyes told me I should go prepared. So that’s what I did. I loaded my six-shooter and headed out on to the porch to get a glimpse. Well that was all I really needed to understand the situation.

Fear the Iron Crows!

It was worse than I could have possibly imagined. Jayne lay on the living room floor, covered in blood. Her screaming was so alien, so full of rage. The cawing of a raven was the only thing I could think of, that indignant, malicious crying.  Blood covered her face where she’d been beat. But that was only the true tip of the iceberg.

Stop watching me, please stop watching me! I can feel the pressure, I can feel the fear, I can feel them coming, those bastard Iron Crows!

I saw her father there, hanging from a noose tied to the rafters in the ceiling. He jerked and kicked as he did the last man’s dance, but the most terrifying was the look on his eyes. That inhuman hate, that power knowing he had just destroyed his own daughter’s soul and filled the void with a rage none would understand. I shot his rope, and untied her bonds but he was gone to this world. She chose to turn those eyes on me instead and that was enough for me. I ran as fast as an old bugger could run. That was enough for me.

Those iron feathers, those cawing cries, those rusty Iron crows!

After the incident with her father, well... Jayne changed, of course any kid would after such a thing but this... this was different. She grew so much angrier. Many days and many a nights I’d hear her crying, screaming and every time it was the sound of a crow cawing. That maddening, deafening noise that those bastard birds make when they don’t agree or simply you have what they want.

Some days I’d visit the child; fore she never left the house after the incident with her father. Her brother passed away not long after, her more even before that. There was no one left for that lonely, frightening child. Her one suitor after the death of her father left her with his eyes bloody, blind as a bat ‘fore she clawed ‘em out as soon as he said he was leaving. That’s a rage that won’t ever die, that’s a rage that won’t ever be forgotten; not by us and never by her.

Those days I did, I saw more evidence of my fears then I had ever before.  Long, black feathers would blow away in the breeze that filled the open windows. Sunlight streamed down on those greasy, darkened daggers. Her beauty changed, and I beg your forgiveness in my saying but the child grew ugly. Her features decayed, become more alien. That rage ran behind her eyes in ugly blood coloured rivulets, always behind her dead brown eyes. It was if you were looking through a window, a thin film of rust flecked over the glass and behind it dark, featureless figures always arguing, always fighting like puppets on strings. Her face became like a thin sheet of rusty iron, so damming - the Iron Crows are coming.

Her voice became more and more like a caw. Eventually that’s all it became. Her face never moved beyond ugly, not quite raven but not quite human. Those feathers coated her arms from her shoulders down and I know now if she had the strength she would have flown away, maybe freed herself from the pain of it all.

She died in the house, died a lonely, angry soul. She hung herself; in face she used the exact same rope her daddy hung himself from, same rafter and all. Irony is a bitter flavour in that respect.

Somehow I think she’s still there, I think she always will be. Christ knows that no one wants to be anywhere near that house. It wasn’t til long after her death, I found out the terrible things her father had done to her. Things I will not speak of here, lest I insult the poor child’s memory. She deserves to keep her memory at least, she deserves that much.

Those Iron Crows watch me, they watch me! Some days I see her sitting on her rocked chair, cawing away. You see it through the window, the one that has been smashed. Some days all you see is a dark blur and a face. Some times on a clear day, I can still hear that cawing. Some days I can hear scratching on my door at night. Maybe she’s come back to say hello, maybe she’s come back to attack me for my history lesson on the child. I don’t know and I hope I never will. I’ve woken with the feeling of a noose around my neck too many times to count now. I guess she’ll never be at peace. Those crows so still like rusted steel, like rusted iron., they watch me, oh those Iron Crows watch me.

The funny thing is that since her death, the crows come in many a murder and they all sit, and they all stare. Neither a muscle nor a move; not until you hear the cawing, that awful murderous cawing. Yet I’ve never see them voice a sound since moving there.

Maybe they’re scared too?

They won't stop watching me, those bastard Iron Crows.

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