Nevermore

If you read here regularly, you know I rarely post prose fiction. Suddenly, at the last minute, though, I caught the fever from Clarity of Night and entered this piece in Jason's 250 word flash fiction contest that uses the picture above as the prompt. I'm posting it here just because...

Nevermore

The search has gone on for days now. It’s a story made for the media – famous poet, lover of famous poet, disappears into thin air. At first, she used the cameras to plead for someone to come forth. Now, she avoids them as best she can. She’s a prisoner in her own home, fearful of coming outside lest they thrust a microphone in her face and shout for a quote to tell what she might or might not know.

And all along, she’s waiting for someone to just look up. Sometimes she wants to shout, “Can’t you see it? The damn thing’s right above your heads!” But they don’t test the sky for answers.

They think they’ll find him in the river. They suspect he wanted to imitate the one whose works he spent his life defining. Well, they burned his heart on a beach, and this black heart is swinging through the sky.

It’s funny they haven’t thought of the man she’s spent her life defining.

She thinks by now it resembles nothing so much as the silhouette of a huge bird, its large black form lifted on the breeze, swinging loose above her. And just at midnight when she feels her weakest, she thinks she hears it tap, tap, tapping.

She's grown weary of her demon lover, swinging through the sky above her, rapping on her chamber door, urging her to tell her story.

Quoth the lady, “Nevermore.”