An Enchantment of Ravens

by Margaret Rogerson

Therefore I beg you to excuse my foolishness when I say that suddenly, I wanted that smell more than anything I had ever wanted before.

They looked like a pair of cupids who had decided they liked shooting people with real arrows better. They were horrible. I loved them so much.

“If you must stare at something for hours on end, I’d prefer it to be me alone.”

I knew that part of him existed, but I didn’t want to see it. And that sentiment was more dangerous than all the enchantments he could offer me combined.

After he left, I couldn’t shake the notion that he’d insisted on ravens for a reason. I was almost finished cleaning up by the time the explanation occurred to me. My cheeks warmed, and a wistful pang plucked a sweet, sad chord in my stomach. It was simple, really. He didn’t want me to forget him once he’d gone.

only to find out that for her, each passing minute was a year. Each second, an hour. She would be dead before the sun rose the next day.

but human sorrow, bleak and endless, a yawning chasm in his soul.

Walking along a blade’s edge was only fun until the blade stopped being a metaphor.

Then it happens to you, and you understand you aren’t any different from those girls after all.

Our worlds are small, our lives are short, and we can only bleed a little before we fall.

and I’m not proud to say I ended up watering the honeysuckles right then and there.

He went to grab my shoulder, but his hand froze a hairsbreadth above my dress.

“Perhaps you ought to know,” I added harshly, “because it’s over and done with now, that two days ago I thought I was in love with you.” His eyes sharpened, striving through the haze of pain to focus on my face.

and wondered whether the stories would have gone any differently if the princesses had been the ones telling them.

I ignored the affronted look he gave me at the word “festering,”

I love you wholly. I love you eternally. I love you so dearly it frightens me. I fear I could not live without you. I could see your face every morning upon waking for ten thousand years and still look forward to the next as though it were the first.”