S.O.S. by Teresa H. Janssen

They arrived the summer after Celine’s divorce, when the Asian pear bore ruddy fruit that she hadn’t the vigor to pick. A pair of ravens swooped in to glean the rotting pears beneath the tree. They built a nest in the fir above her garden—those corvids that mate for life. She marveled at the glint of light on blue-black feathers, like splinters of steel, the whoosh of wind against wing as the two flew overhead, the one’s raucous call across the field and the other’s instant guttural response.

He had beseeched her, begged her to try again, had promised to be kinder, more understanding, more present. He had learned from his mistakes. But Celine had been too tired to listen. Too languid to respond.

One morning that fall, she found the male, dead on the edge of the field. It had caught a wing in a wild blackberry vine and, in its panic to be free, become ensnarled and strangled itself.

Celine had heard raven cries that very dawn, urgent, repeated. She had ignored the din, rolled over, and gone back to sleep. If she had awoken, pulled herself from bed, and gone to see, she could have untangled the vine from the wing. It haunts her still, her lazy disregard of an S.O.S. and a relationship she might have saved.

Teresa H. Janssen has an M.A. in Linguistics from the University of Washington. Her prose has been named a notable American essay and has received the Norman Mailer/NCTE nonfiction prize. Her writing has appeared in Anchor Magazine, Zyzzyva, Tiferet, Lunch Ticket, and Camas, among other publications. Visit her website at www.teresahjanssen.com.