Quoth the raven:

Today I unrolled by blinds for the first time in maybe a week or two, my hair still flush with that warm damp air of the hairdryer and the tips of my fingers cold. As I looked out of the window into the park of my childhood a flash of black flew across the windowpane –– a raven, plump with food, dark feathers slick with this morning's rain like oil slowly pouring across –– he was joined by a second, which spread its wings too as it adjusted itself to land, its body filled with a kind of heaviness. So much more graceful in flight than on ground. They waddle across the grass seeped with wet greenness like fattened ducks whilst sparrows flit about in the trees –– carefree. A third and a fourth arrived and then one left, and the three stood in triangle composition around my past –– one at the picnic table that gave me splinters –– one at the ping pong table that sheltered myriad weeds underneath where we played attrape-pieds –– one at the football goal with the dilapidated netting where we used to play and sit and that we used to drag around. There used to be another bench that we'd put near the slide set so we could swing off the pole and use it as a landing pad to spring onto the ground, clambering around, our limbs swift and agile, like we owned the world. Once I asked my friend –– if you could paint the sky –– how would you do it? She said she'd use pulsing blues and stark purples, clouds like Mantegna, a night sky scattered with stars that stretched out thin like cling film. A few years later we became too old to make the effort. Next-door neighbors who saw once another maybe once a month. Their parents divorced. Their father used sit on the doorstep in the evenings to smoke a single cigarette under the porch's yellow light.