The Liar, Ms Six and the Broken Crow: Part 2

Remember what I told you?

Then I'll continue.

Six has a fractured evening after the tears at work. Greasy takeaway food that doesn't quite fill her but is none-the-less too much after three bites. The sort of television programme that's really a thinly veiled advertisement, or several of them rolled together, beating at the impulse centres of her brain. Covers that are too warm or too cold or, magnificently, both at once when she sticks her foot out in a desperate attempt to create some sort of equilibrium.

She can remember something from the story, something about the broken crow. About their fingers.

I may not have chosen the name Six entirely at random.

In any case, whether I am telling the truth or not, Six wakes up at three in the morning with a sandpaper throat and a pillow that feels like it's had a pint of water poured on it. She peels her face away from it and goes to the bathroom and her eyes are red, all red and still crying, and the rest of her's so dry she feels hung over. It hurts to blink. She doesn't need to urinate. (Later, when she does? It's the colour of iced tea.)

She drinks a pint of water all at once and she starts to cry even more; but maybe the word cry is wrong. If I say cry, you think of shoulders shaking, snot and short gasping breaths. This is just the production of tears, plain and simple, turning that pint of water into something worthless as neatly and efficiently as the human body can manage.

There's a phrase in 'The Broken Crow', about how the crow dies. They drown in sorrow. It bounces around Six's mind, along with one of the crow's names, that incongruous masculine whisper.

At this point, I need to tell you a little more about the story of the broken crow, the one that Ms Six reads in the book she finds in her father's house. I assure you that I have obscured every scrap of dangerous information, much as I have in Ms Six's story. Ah! But first you need two important details about me.

Firstly, I am drinking as we speak, but it is not water, and no tears run down my cheeks. It's not anything alcoholic, either, so you can certainly trust my control over the words I say, the information I impart; if you had to guess, you would assume it was some sort of thick milkshake or fruit drink, and you would be wrong on both counts. The important fact is that I am not drinking water, and I never ever cry.

Secondly, although I am wearing close-fitting, pale gloves, I clearly have a full eight fingers.

On to the story of the broken crow, as Ms Six read it, as edited and adapted on both occasions by yours truly.

The broken crow was not always broken. They were a crow, a thief, a tomb-robber in specifics; a carrion-hunter, stealing from the dead in that space where their belongings remain their own and have not yet been gifted to family or friends or the clever and precise gentlemen of the state.

They steal a lot of things. Some of these things are more trouble than they are worth, and the crow becomes bent, not broken.

Then the bent crow steals a book. I can't tell you its title; that's dangerous, like a sudden spring storm. But I can tell you that the book is brown. Dark, battered brown and thick and heavy enough to break fingers. I can tell you that it has a cobweb painted onto its back cover and that this makes the bent crow mistake the front for the back and vice versa, and that this causes the bent crow all their problems.

We can call it the spider book.

The bent crow reads the spider book back to front, reads the upside down letters and the backwards sentences, and they make a terrible sense. There is a story crouching in the spider book, hidden from view if you read it the normal way. In the story, a theft is perpetrated by a character, and the manner of this theft and the character that carries it out strike a chord with the bent crow.

Careful, now; a name may suggest itself to you for the protagonist of the spider book, an obvious handle, a nickname that you can use to think about them. Don't use that name. Make something up. And don't tell me what it is, or write it down. Back to it.

The bent crow reads the hidden story about the theft and then perpetrates a similar theft. It is the same in heart and mind if not in specifics, and the bent crow is momentarily successful. Wealth, riches, all the success their skinny little fingers can grasp. Then they suffer a brutal, monumental failure in which they are responsible for a death. The death comes about because of the way they performed the theft; the idea the bent crow stole from the spider book.

The bent crow is not broken by this, but by a realisation; they stole the idea for the theft, and that ought to be fine by the bent crow and their strange gods. The bent crow made promise and sacrifice that they would never steal from the living, only from the dead. They realise that they must have stolen from the living. They realise that they must have stolen an idea from the thief we do not share a name for, the living thief at the heart of the spider book.

This breaks the crow.

The broken crow struggles on, but they are sorry, so sorry. They shuffle from town to town, barely staying alive. They sell nearly everything else they own but they keep the spider book. One day, for a good reason I will not elaborate upon here, they read it the right way around.

The book tells of the beauty of forgiveness, and of restitution. Of giving something back to those you have wronged. The broken crow finishes the book and begins to cry; their tears fall on the book. 'The Broken Crow' concludes:

Six drops fell from the eyes of the crow
stained the page and smudged the ink
The crow spoke:
    "I am old and broken and have only my tears
    but I give them to you; I return them to you;
    I make my restitution and I seek your forgiveness."
The ink on the pages of [the spider book] trickled
it formed the words

you are not forgiven

and the broken crow drowned in sorrow.

That's the end of the book. I've obviously switched out the name of the book with the cobweb cover for our safe little nickname for it, for "the spider book", but I can't help but recommend that if you tell this story to anyone that you switch out that name, perhaps for "the cobweb book". Perhaps it's best not to mention the cobweb at all; perhaps I made the cobweb up entirely, and you can use the exact words I used, safely insulated from the live current of the real story.

So now you know as much of the broken crow as you need to understand why Ms Six is getting worried about her big fat tears and her dry throat and the feeling of overwhelming sadness that bubbles up behind her teeth but can't be voiced.

I mention the sadness only now, but it was implied, yes? As clearly implied as the fact that Ms Six may have taken something from the broken crow.

I'm going to go and freshen my drink. You should change tables and I'll find you and we can finish the story.

Oh! When I stand up, I am intimidatingly tall. Spindly, in fact. I unfold myself from my chair and glide soundlessly towards the bar on long legs.

The Liar, Ms Six and the Broken Crow: Part 1.

It's wise not to tell this particular story in the first person.

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.