Horizon by Peter Schlacte

We have sex on the couch, which is the first time we have sex in weeks. It is her suggestion. “Maybe something will be different?” She asks, as if I know the answer. It is different, I guess. I keep groping not at the usual places but at the feather that appeared on the crown of her head the day before yesterday, sprouting from her knotted hair one night while we slept, the way a flower pushes through rich earth. “Well?” I ask afterward. “How did it feel?” She scratches her neck, appraises me. “Larger than normal.” “Larger?” “Maybe.” “But the feather. Did you feel me touching the feather?” “I guess I wasn’t thinking about the feather.” “You weren’t thinking about the feather?”

I tell her it looks like a common raven feather, which feels like an insult even though it’s factual. From a distance the feather is an oily black but when I examine it closely (often while she sleeps; I am sleeping far less these days) I find streaks and speckles of purples and blues, iridescent, shimmering. “Ravens are smart, aren’t they?” She asks, batting at the feather with her index finger, straining her eyes upwards to catch a glimpse of the feather, although it is only visible to her with a mirror. 

After the first feather grows, she calls out sick from work for a day, then a week. It is unthinkable, teaching algebra to seventh graders with a feather flapping about in the air conditioning. We visit our friend who teaches zoology at the local community college and memorizes facts about birds the way other men his age memorize statistics about football players. He makes a joke about bird flu, which isn’t funny. He holds a ruler up to the feather. It measures eleven inches. “A common raven feather,” the friend says. There is a second feather too, smaller, sprouting from her chest. 

We return home and I stand behind her while she sits on the couch we bought together over half a decade ago and I ask, “Ready?” “Ready.” I snip off the feather with a pair of scissors. And the one on her chest. She winces. She says it feels like yanking a strand of hair from her head. I throw the feathers in the trash. They grow back within two days, along with three more feathers. She quits her job. She sits on the roof for hours. She goes out—I don’t know where to and when I ask, her answers are vague. “Oh, the store.” She waves my question away with one hand. “The park. Just for a walk. Fresh air, and all that.”

There is a week or so where I wonder if all this, this whole feather situation, might be a good thing. We have more to speak about than we have in months. We are laughing more. She is telling more jokes, and I try to match her. I make a joke about learning raven so we can continue to communicate, and she laughs and laughs until it gives her the hiccups. I make a joke about putting worms in her food and she says, “Yes please, I’d like to try that very much,” and I think she is simply going along with my joke right up until we are pulling weeds in the planter box in our backyard and she sifts through the dirt to grab a flailing, fat worm. She slurps it into her mouth. 

“Does it hurt?” I ask one evening. We are reading on the couch. She is squinting at her magazine. Her eyes have shrunken. They are black, entirely black. It’s unsettling to look at her. “No,” she says, sounding surprised. “I don’t feel a thing.” 

“Am I ugly?” She asks, staring at me with those black eyes. I don’t know how to respond. I shrug. “I guess so.” She used to have wide, brown eyes. When I drew sketches of her, I focused most on the eyes, shading them just right, honey brown, glowing. I try to walk back my words. “But if I was a raven, maybe I’d feel differently.”

I keep my sketches of her in a canvas folder under our bed. Some are the size of post-it notes, postcards; others are expansive enough to occupy half a wall. There are hundreds of drawings. Each of them is a single point, snapshots of how we looked on a specific day, at a specific moment, how we felt. Taken together, they are a record of us. We are not linear the way time is—there are recent drawings where my love still spills off the edges of the paper, the same way the ancients thought the world spilled off the edge of the map. Perhaps if I studied my earliest drawings and compared them to now, I’d find that love is too shallow a word to contain all the types of love I have felt.

One night, not long after her skull begins to shrink, leveling into the more gradual curve of a raven’s brow, but before she begins collecting twigs and leaves and pillows and blankets to build a large, cup-shaped nest on our roof, she hugs herself against me, wraps herself around me entirely as we lay in our bed. Our bodies are pressed together. She holds me. She smells of dirt and sweat. She doesn’t shower anymore. She falls asleep like this and only awakens briefly when I extricate myself from her. For that night, the sadness threatens to swallow me. I wonder what she’ll look like in the morning, what new change might have stolen over her body or her mind. 

Her arms shrivel like dried corn husks. Her back is hunched. Her body is in a general state of atrophy. I catch her storing caches of food scraps in cabinets, under the bed. Where her mouth once was, her lips begin to protrude into a beak. It is hard for her to form words. We speak little now. She spends even less time in the house. She leaves without saying goodbye and sometimes when she is gone and the house is very quiet, I drive around town telling myself I’m not looking for her. Sometimes, I find her—she is with other ravens in public parks, near dumpsters, under overpasses. I don’t linger. I don’t wait for her to spot me. I don’t want to speak with her. I just need to see her. 

The final time I draw her, it is at her request. There are sleek wings beginning to blossom where her arms once were. She flaps them tentatively, inquisitively. They aren’t yet able to lift her from the ground. She is unable to move far on what remains of her legs. She perches atop our bed while I draw her.

I expect it will be hard to draw her, but perhaps because we both know this is the final time, I find myself drinking her in, greedy for all her details. She is something not entirely human and not entirely animal. Her transformation feels inevitable. If ever we could have reversed it, with some medicine, some prayer or incantation, that time has passed. 

I ask her what she thinks of the drawing after I’ve finished. She studies it. “Are you scared?” she asks me. Her voice is raspy. I am scared. For her. For myself. For myself without her. The horizon of decoupling, how it stretches out, this frontier of possibility but emptiness too. And then she croaks out a laugh. “You drew me like I have a disease.” 

I want to ask if she is scared too, but she has always been braver than me. 

One morning, she is screeching from the bedroom. I’ve long since moved to the couch. She sounds hoarse. I hesitate at the door, consider knocking. She is perched on the bed flapping her wings. She is less than half the size she once was. Her wings have grown. I watch as she takes off from our bed and smashes against the window. She scrabbles back across the carpet, rises onto the bed and launches again, smashes the window again. I shout at her to stop, but she is already rising to attempt her flight for a third time. I hesitate at the window for only a second and see that she is preparing to hurtle into it, and I heave open our window and she launches from the bed and she glides through the window and I stare out after her, afraid she will plummet, afraid she won’t return. She wobbles in the air, that empty space, and then she rights herself, slipping through the tarpaulin sky, floating, not so much testing the air as she is claiming it. When she returns, coasting through the window a few minutes later and alighting on the floor, she fixes me in her beady eyes. I can see what remains of her mouth and tongue working to form words, but I cannot understand the sounds she garbles out.

I’m uncertain the exact day she becomes a raven. Was it that first morning when we awoke and there was a feather suddenly protruding from her skull? Or is it the day, months later, when she loses her final pinky toe, shedding it completely, replaced by a talon and its hard sheath of keratin? That same day, I let her out through the front door, and she hops across the threshold. For a week, she returns nightly. I leave the windows open so she can enter as she pleases. We sit in the living room together, watching television, her favorite show that we can quote whole scenes from, beside each other on the couch, not touching. I glance at her, this raven sitting not two feet from me. Her eyes are impenetrable. We still laugh at some of the same jokes. Her laugh is a bubbling croak, the hackles on her throat splaying out. After that first week, she stops returning. Is this the moment she becomes a raven? It feels important to pinpoint. I find no answer in the philosophy books or the Bible or fairytales. Our old friends don’t understand. There is no answer in the birdsongs I record and replay.

Sometimes, I see her around town, or I think I see her. She is with her unkindness. I expect she recognizes me too—they say ravens have excellent memories. I wave, smile politely. She dips her beak toward me. People ask me what happened to her. I shrug. “She turned into a raven,” I say. They think it is a joke or a metaphor. But it’s neither of those. It’s something that happens, like the changing of the weather. An oncoming storm, approaching and then sweeping through, soaking you cleanly, and then passing on, and what remains are those glittering, fat raindrops collecting on windows and windshields and leaves and light poles, and the asphalt is glittering with newness too, and the clearing sky, becoming clearer still—look at it, how blue and wide it is. 

Peter Schlachte is a writer from Washington, D.C. by way of North Carolina. Previous fiction has been published in New Delta Review, The Pinch, and Porter House Review.

31 October 2025