In the Left Branches

by Marisca Pichette

Miga is a patchwork. Her hair is spotty and her teeth are uneven lengths. She is tall. She is thin. She leaves bodies in her wake.

Miga disturbs pine needles, their sharp bodies cringing up from the earth to nestle between her toes, hugging, holding. She spins, kicking orange into the air.

As she comes down, falling through slanted sunlight, needles fall with her, rustling retreat.

Above her the body swings from strips of burlap. Miga stills the head with her reddened hands. Holding on, she spins and spins.

Blood snakes over her fingers to the ends of her elbows, her toes twirling in pine needles.

Snap. Blood pours over her feet.

“Wasteful,” says the crow.

Miga looks up past the swaying corpse, neck dribbling blood like a teething child dribbles spit. The crow perches on a bare branch to her left. Reflective eyes watch her.

“What do you mean?” She lowers the head, her muscles tightening as they always do after. Too soon after.

“Leaving the trunk,” says the crow. “Such a waste. Have you never been hungry?”

Miga smiles, goosebumps straining through the blood on her arms. “I’ve never been anything else.”

Miga moves smoothly, the corpse cradled in her wings. The crow rides on the empty neck, talking too much.

“Where are we going?”

“I’m hunting,” Miga tells it. She is coated in thin hair, ice-white, as if her skin has been colonized by frosted grass. As the body bleeds, her hair absorbs it, her body turning from white to red.

The crow remains black.

“You’ve already hunted,” the crow observes from its bloodied perch. Miga stops and unfurls her furred wings, letting the body hit the ground.

It has already begun to stink, and her stomach has already begun to growl. The crow pecks at discolored flesh, keeping one eye on her. It is too small for her to feed on, and it knows this.

Miga retrieves her sledge from where she left it in the shadow of a holly tree. It is worn by sleet, mud, and silt. Dragging it through fords and under spruce trees, its wood has scratched stones and been carved in return. The sledge’s cord is frayed. The wood that makes it was fished from Miga’s once-house. After.

After Miga was made and her journey began.
The crow tears a flap of skin from the corpse. “Why not put it on the sledge?”

Miga twitches her wings. “Blood gets wasted that way.”

She considers killing the crow, ending its presence and its questions. She flexes her clawed hands, stretches her furred wings, red fading already to pink. Looking at it, she tries to recall her last real conversation, an encounter fueled not by hunger, ended not by blood.

She strings the nude woman to the lowest branches of a maple. Twisting away the head, she drinks the blood. When she has finished, she leaves the body swaying in the dappled light.

The crow is waiting on the corpse next to the sledge. Miga picks up the rope.

(There is nothing on the sledge. Only memories.)

“This is too much for me,” says the crow. It has only pecked away a fraction of the flesh circling the vacant neck.

Miga turns northwest, red already beginning to fade from her hair, hunger replacing satisfaction, muscles tightening once more.

“If I come along, I can take from what you kill,” says the crow, flying from the corpse to the left branches of a birch. “Then there won’t be as much waste.”

“There will be waste. There’s always waste.”

The crow drops from the birch to land on her shoulder. She meets its reflective eyes.

“Not as much,” it says.

Miga drinks blood from a fresh neck, the body suspended by its ankles. As she feeds, her skin changes from white to red.

The crow, though, remains black.

Marisca Pichette stands outside on winter nights, listening to stillness. More of her work can be found in Strange Horizons, Fireside Magazine, Apparition Lit, Flash Fiction Online, PseudoPod, and PodCastle, among others. Her speculative poetry collection, Rivers in Your Skin, Sirens in Your Hair, is forthcoming from Android Press in April 2023.