He sits at her bedside, his face expressionless and his breathing strong and even. She is dressed in an old grey sweatshirt, and lies back, knees hiked up as though to give birth. The sweatshirt is overlarge, allowing her bony shoulders to peek through the neck of the garment. There is a stain that dribbles down the front, and some obscure football team has lost its logo to countless scrubbings with laundry soap.

She leans forward and grips her knees, white knuckled, coughing until her lips stain pink. Skin streaks with sweat and is on fire with the heat of exertion.

He turns away, and leaves the room. The door slams, and his footsteps fade on the concrete, tapping, dying away into the distance. He does not stop outside the door and trace her name against the paint, longing to say what he can’t voice.

She pulls the sheet to her chin, shaking and chilled by her isolation. She lies back and straightens her legs, stretching them under the covers and pointing her toes.

Turning slightly, she looks out through the window, past the yellowing white paint, and the scuffmarks near the windowsill, the faded floral curtains that are never quite the same length.

The pain is more regular now, thrumming like the beating of her raven’s wings, when they leap from the fence outside and soar into the sky. She counts them now, sitting like old men with their arms folded, chattering to each other as though they are waiting for the next bus. They sit on that fence, its wire strands cutting the window into four neat bands, spots of shiny black against the grey autumn sky.

There is a swishing sound, and she turns towards the door in time to see it open. An orderly clatters in with a white enamelled trolley that has black dots on it from the chips on the rails. Trays are stacked high and it's time for her to eat. The woman shuffles through the room, and her soft-slippered feet make almost no sound as she pads towards the window and opens it. The atmosphere changes immediately and the static of the room crackles away in the cawing of a now solitary raven sitting on the wire.

She is given a bowl. White ceramic, and the spoon clinks dully against the warm side of it with her movement, spilling a few drops. It is tomato soup, and it leaves crimson drops of oily liquid slowly soaking into the grey of her shirt. She feels nausea, but swallows the sickly-flavoured food slowly, allowing it to grate past the tortured membranes of her throat in small glugs.

The raven watches her, moves his head from side to side disapprovingly.

“What do you want me to do?”

He looks back at her, and narrows his gaze.

“I have to eat.”

His eyes sparkle in the fading light, brought even closer to her by the open window.

The woman leaves and the door closes softly behind her. She is left alone with her bowl of rapidly coagulating soup and the clotted blood rim that it leaves as the level drops on the inside of the bowl, painful swallow by painful swallow.

She imagines stroking the glossy purple black feathers that he lazily stretches across her vision, taunting her and daring her to DO something!

“What do you want from me, huh?”

She looks around the room and lets the bowl slip with her disgust. It slips quietly over the side of the ridge that her legs have created in the covers and rests against a fold of fabric that holds it upright. It has not spilled a single drop. She licks the spoon before setting it down.

The raven stares.

She looks away, to the cracked green linoleum, to the buzzing fluorescent rod that flickers in a parody of light, the water stain that creeps across the ceiling, in the shape of a sleeping child who has tucked itself into a ball while still sucking on a warm sweet thumb.

Another spasm of coughing grips her in a miser’s fist and her lungs scream in hurt.

The raven stares.

He walks down the passage, guided by the lines painted along the lower half of the walls. A colour-coded map of where to find her. His shoes slap against the flooring, and he sticks his hands into the pockets of his trousers. He wants a cigarette, and then pictures her face as she turns purple, gasping for air. He reads the numbers on the doors and follows them blindly, not realizing until he is three doors past that he has walked too far. He turns, annoyed, and finds the correct door.

A doctor passes in the corridor, looking at his clipboard in fake importance. He wears glasses and has a surgical mask hanging limply around his neck. He has a pointy nose, and a sharp rat-like demeanour.

He fumbles a little, and checks that the door number is in fact correct this time. He faces the generic door and lightly traces over the cold metal number with his fingertip. The metal burns his skin, and leaves a faint grey stain, from the polish that an old mother of three used on them a week before, just after her lunch break, when she needed to look busy for a while.

He hesitates. No part of him wants to face her again, to see her sallow skin, to watch the life leaching out of her. Every sinew, muscle and synapse propels him forward.

He prepares himself and touches the door handle, his fingers closing around the steel and squeezing tight.

It creaks slightly as he leans on it, gently pushing it forward. His eyes are tightly shut, and he pushes the door and enters the room. The curtains billow in the wind from the open window, swishing across the tiny room. He looks around and she is not there.

On the bed, with the sheets flung aside, lies a single black feather.