It didn’t stop her from acting like Piotr’s familiar, of a sort. She’d belonged to Piotr’s grandmother, a tough old bird herself, but since his grandmother’s death in January, Pallas had no master. Pallas was not his, although Piotr fed her. He tightened his mouth and glanced up at Pallas, who looked back, unblinking. The silence was so profound he could hear the faint rattle of the shed door, and the shed was yards from the house. He waited for whatever it had to tell him before he realized that the message was the sound itself. Piotr listened to wind whistling through the six apple trees in the garden. Pallas, the raven, was perched on the refrigerator, but didn’t make a single noise as she watched Piotr wash his apples and leave them to dry. The only sounds in the house were his footsteps and the ticking of the clock in Aunt Elysia’s parlor. He’d put his leftovers in the oven before heading outside to check on the garden, and the kitchen had warmed up but was still cool enough to make him shiver. He pulled a sweater off the back of a chair and slipped it on before returning to the kitchen. Ominous, to those who thought of rain as bad weather instead of necessary and life-giving.Īll the same, Piotr put the apples in the sink to be washed, and then went into the adjoining dining room. He felt the message it had for him although he didn’t understand it, and paused with his armful of late apples to stare out the window over the sink. The wind hadn’t been so fierce when he’d gotten home from work. Piotr shut the kitchen door behind him, which muted the urgent howling of the wind but didn’t silence it, since the glass in the windows was thin and almost as old as the house itself.

A Little Familiar by R. Cooper