House Sitting

The house clearly hates me. For whatever reason, it has taken against me, and objects to my presence here. Perhaps it has forgotten me. It has been a while. None of the light switches control the same lights that they used to. The hatch to the attic creaks ominously whenever I walk underneath it. Keys don't open the locks that their keyrings say they should. Nothing quite fits right.  Everything is slightly off; slightly out of tune. 

There’s a menacing crow that sits beneath the bird feeder in the garden, not eating, but staring straight at the kitchen window. Straight at me. I have had experience with a crow like this before, when I worked in the morgue. The morgue was a separate building spereate from the rest of the hospital, down a little road in the woods. Isolated. Silent.  He’d wait outside on the grass, staring in the door at me. I could sense his malevolence. He hated me, because I kept him from the meal he craved. I kept him away from the dead. Could it be the same crow? It's been fifteen years since I worked in that place. I have no idea how long crows live. I thought back then that it was the death that attracted him, but there are no corpses in this house. What does he know that I don't? 

The last time I stayed here, they still had the dog. I miss the dog. The dog was good company. The dog kept the worst of the loneliness at bay. She would be feeling sad and abandoned and would look to me for comfort. I understood; we all feel like that sometimes. If I was on the computer in the spare room, up the far end of the hall where she wasn’t allowed to go, she’d sometimes creep up on her belly as far as she thought she could get away with, and lie there for five or ten minutes, before creeping forward a little more, eventually making it all the way to the spare room. If I spotted her, and called her up to me, because she wasn’t the only one looking for company, she’d bolt back down to the kitchen, because sometimes training wins out over loneliness, and she wanted to be a good dog. Ten minutes later, the game would begin again. She wasn’t a good dog, she was a great dog. But she’s gone. Now it’s just me and my stalker crow, and the light switches that hate me. I may not survive this fortnight…