First person's wonderful for some stories. It pulls you right into the action, makes you complicit in the decisions of your protagonist. Better to wrap this particular story up in another layer of abstraction.
I, in the first person, will tell you a story.
I am Sam. I am not to be trusted. Do you see how I've chosen a name that could be used by a man or a woman? That's deliberate; I am whichever of those you find least trustworthy. Perhaps you can see the faint line of a playing card stuck up my sleeve. Maybe I have placed a human skull on the table in front of me and therefore right on top of your dinner. Perhaps it does not look particularly old. Or entirely clean.
I might be making that all up, though. We established that I was a liar, remember?
In any case, I will be telling, as myself, this story to you, as yourself. It's about someone else entirely, who is distinctly unlike you in many important ways. What happens to her, you see, is not the sort of thing that could happen to you. Your personal qualities, I am sure, forbid it in every respect. It's important you trust that as the truth.
I made you distrust me too early, didn't I? Damn. Now you won't believe me about anything.
Perhaps that's for the best.
The story is about a woman who reads the wrong sort of story. (Not a woman like you, if you are a woman. A completely different kind of woman! If you're not a woman, do you see how different she is already? She is nothing like you.)
The story she finds is called 'The Broken Crow.' It's a folk story. I won't go into the details of the story for you, but suffice it to say that the woman who reads it finds it extremely compelling. I'll call her Ms Six from now on. I'm pretty sure none of you are called Six.
She finds the book in a perfectly ordinary box and it's never entirely clear how it got there. Six is just clearing out her dad's place, after he's died, and in one of Six's boxes of notes from her more scholarly days she finds this ratty old book. She sits down to read it, as you do.
When she's finished, it takes her quite a long time to stop crying; long after the emotional weight of the story has moved on, she finds fat tears running down her cheeks when she blinks. She tries to find it funny that a silly old story has affected her so much.
Over the next few days, she has meeting after meeting at work. They require her input and her attention, and she cannot provide the latter; she doodles the broken crow, the sad old used-up thief, in the corners of her notes. She labels the broken crow with one of the names the crow uses in the story.
One of her colleagues asks, under his breath, what the word she has written down means. She smiles and is about to tell him when she starts to cry again, quite unexpectedly. She has to leave, grinning and confused, face and cuffs damp with tears.
Six finds she no longer thinks the broken crow's name, the one she wrote down, in her own voice. It cuts across her thought processes exactly as she heard it said, a masculine whisper entirely not her own.
It all gets a bit worse for Six, from here. I like to think that you would burn the book before you read it, that you would break your pen before you drew the broken crow, that you would grasp your colleague by the neck and throw him to the ground, stamp on him, break his voice before you allowed him to whisper that name out loud. You are very different to Six. I do not think my faith is misplaced.
I should also remind you at this point that you should not trust me; that I have already lied about this story, that I have already warped the events beyond recognition, that even now I am obscuring vital clues that would lead you to a different conclusion than the one to which you are being led.
You are being lied to.
Remember that.
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