It was cold, and wet. The day had started off with no promise of sun, no blue in the sky, no song birds. Those had long left, leaving my only companions, glaring, hungry ravens. They were the birds of war, of slaughter, which on this pewter coloured day seemed appropriate. My only companions were a murder of ravens.

I threw the closest bird a crust of bread. It darted in, took the bread and flew away, pursued by a half dozen other birds. One bird, however, didn’t budge. It had been sitting all morning on the trash can, just staring at me. I was beginning to wonder it the thing was alive.

“You’d like to eat me, wouldn’t you?” I addressed the bird. It was more an offer than a simple supposition. It was the consuming despair inside that made me speak to the creature so.  Nothing could replace what I had lost, my will to live was gone. The great irony, was that the kindness of strangers were conspiring to keep me alive, and I was too much of coward to take my own life. So here I was, on the street, dressed in rags, sans legs, sans will. I threw my one arm wide and held out my hand. “Peck my eyeballs out and have at it. Then I don’t have to see myself.”

Then for the first time, the bird moved, tilting its head as though suddenly listening. It blinked. Taking to the air it landed in front of me, gave one hop and examined me in an oblique way. Its scimitar shaped beak glistened in the muted light. Was there a teardrop in the corner of the bird’s eye?

“Don’t cry for me,” I murmured in half self loathing.

And the bird jumped up onto my shoulder.

I tried to ignore the it, but it just stood there tightly gripping my shoulder. Instinctively I went to move my right hand to knock it off, but it wouldn’t respond. It was as though it was in rebellion against my body. I tried to laugh at the betrayal. It was a sad and broken sound but that was all the levity I could muster.

Then the sound of someone walking by, stopping, and then the clink of something landing in my empty cup caught my attention. I tended to stop looking at people a long time ago. To look was to view the pity in their eyes, but I did look at the money in the cup. I fumbled the coin out of cup and held it up.

“I suppose a raven sitting on the shoulder of a cripple is worth something.”

Then the raven snatched the coin out of my fingers and flew away.

I laughed again. My father used to have this saying, when misfortune occurs, no matter how bad any event could be, it was better than a kick in the head. Well, I was sorry to confess, the old man was gravely mistaken; I had been kicked in the head so many times that my brain was nearly liquid.

Safety fled when the street lights came on. That was when the predators came out. They were the refuse of society, the ones who would have no compulsion of attacking the weak and the poor. In fact, this was entertainment for them, to inflict  pain and suffering on others greater than the internal devastation that was occurring within their own beings. To avoid sounding poetic, they were just shit rats.

Every night I had to find a new place to hide, some place of refuge where I could become invisible. Any camouflaged depression in the ground, surrounded by foliage, was preferable, and to get that I had to drag myself to the park.

Lifting myself up onto my old, beaten roller board, I began to knuckle it down the sidewalk. Making sure there was no traffic I rolled across the street, turned right and dragged my carcass down into a gully that was densely packed with bush, enough to conceal me. It was wet near the pavement, and I supposed this was what dissuaded any of the other dispossessed from taking up residency. After stashing the board, I dragged my body into the densest part of the brush. I had cut out an rough womb for me to rest.

I wrapped my filthy, grey scarf over my face and slept.

It had gotten suddenly cold, so cold that my nose began to go numb. I wiggled my toes to get some circulation back in them, and remembered I didn’t have any. Even now after more than a year I was still having ghost feelings in my lost limbs. My breath was steaming up into the air in a thick, curling mist. But it hadn’t been the cold that had woken me. It was the muffled scream.

Rolling over, I pulled myself up the small gully through the brush to where it became thin. In the park, beneath the muted glow created by a broken lamp light there were two figures, one prone, one squatting. The upright figure was struggling with something at its waist.

The lethargy inside vanished and an anger welled up inside me, and without thought I yelled, and pulled myself out into the open. What I was going to do, I didn’t have a clue.

Pausing, the squatting figure turned its head in my direction. The form beneath it squirmed and the creature on top struck out, knocking the one below senseless. It was then that I realized I was totally defenseless. The first kick was aimed at my head, but I managed to twist to the side and the blow caught me on the shoulder.

Funny, how you can dwell in the world of the emotionally dead for years, and when something terrible happens, you are called back by some brazen trumpet, and the training kicks in. A man may be tall, strong, quick, but he’s vulnerable from the waist down.

The next kick, I took in the chest, but wrapped my arms around the leg and twisted. I felt the man’s knee buckle and he was down, at my level. Welcome to the filth. Even though I was a shadow of myself, I was enraged and the adrenalin was fueling it.  Rolling up on top I flailed out with my fists. Bruce Lee was phenomenal not because of his strength, but because of the speed in which he could deliver his blows. I had a black belt in Karate, 4th dan, so I knew how to hit. My first blow busted the man’s nose and warm wet blood splattered onto the frost covered grass. The second one smashed in his front teeth tearing the skin on my hand. While the third blow missed pounding into the grass. Perhaps it was good it missed, because it was a killing blow. I screamed at the fleeing form to come back, to fight, to come back so I could kill him. In that moment he was the enemy, the one who had cost me my legs, my eye, my life.

Strange, the beauty, the tragic beauty of the moment. There are moments in life that we hold up and say, ‘this I shall remember forever.’ I remembered a lover standing, dressed in black, floating against the white backdrop of winter. How wonderful she looked, the large snowflakes falling onto the black before melting into the fabric. She was beautiful and I knew it wouldn’t last.

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I dragged my body over the grass, the frost was numbing the bottom part of my torso where part of my hips remained. Although still unconscious, the prone woman moaned. She had her leggings pulled down exposing the crescent of her bare  buttox. I tried to reach out up pull them back up. Just then she came to, twisted and scrambled away from me a terrified look on her face.

“It’s all right,” I said holding up the open palm of my bloodied hand.

She wasn’t mollified and it was only the hard trunk of the tree that stopped her from backing away. Terror forced her eyes open, unblinking. I suppose if I had been assaulted into unconsciousness and woke up to see a mutilated man in rags reaching for me I’d be terrified to. I didn’t get a chance to say anything else because she twisted away, frantically pulled her leggings up, rose and fled.

With the surge of adrenalin fading fast, I collapsed on my back, drained and exhausted onto the cold grass. Steam was rising from my mouth curling up into the air. Either I would freeze to death to night, or the shit rat I had beaten would come back with friends and finish me. Either way I was done. Closing my eyes, I waited. I came to when someone kicked me in the chest. Death was welcomed. Rolling over I began to laugh. I never saw who or how many there were before I went unconscious. Death had been my wish for so long that now when it had come, I just laughed and cried. Giving into the darkness and the pain, I let go.

Then I woke up.

Everything about me was covered in a blotchy film of red and black. It was the world seen through lethal pain. I had been here before, when they had cut off my mangled legs, saved my life. This was no hospital and the earth was damp with my blood. I must have been stabbed somewhere. Opening my eyes I tried to see through the red puff of inflamed flesh. One of my eyes wasn’t working.

On the the ground, at eye level stood the raven. It was eyeing me in an oblique way. It blinked at me and hopped closer.

“Don’t get any ideas,” I grunted incoherently. The last thing I wanted to experience on this earth was a raven pecking my only eye out. Then I heard it.

It was a language that transcended speech and entered into my mind with such clarity that I was startled by it. The force was like a light dispelling the blackish-red shadows about me, dissipating them.

“I’m full of a lot of ideas, John. I just have to decide which one is best for you.” The raven blinked.

I wasn’t on drugs, so it must have been my life draining out into the soil that was causing me to hallucinate. I closed my one good eye and muttered, ‘go away and let me die in peace.’

How long I floated in darkness, I don’t know. It could have been a moment or it could have been an eternity,

When I opened my eye, the bird was still there. “All right, what do you mean, best one?”

“Oh, in the old days it was simple: give them booze, women and sharp instruments and let them loose. At the end of the day, resurrect them and repeat, ad nauseum.”

Part of me knew what the raven was talking about, but the other part refused to believe. Yet was there any harm in believing in a hallucination? After all, I didn’t have long.

“Odin?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“What’s it like, seeing?”

“Painful, but not as painful as not seeing.” The raven hopped forward looking at me curiously. I wonder which one it was. Two ravens accompanied Odin: Huginn and Muninn. Huginn was thought and Muninn was memory.

“What do you mean?”

“Man has always been a brutal, vicious, carnal beast. The only species that given a half-baked excuse will extinguish itself. Those who are blind will kill and find an excuse to validate themselves. Those who are blind are always justified in their atrocities. Those who see, those who think, those who remember know what they’re doing.”

“But they still do it.”

“Yes, but seeing is the world. Let me show you.” The raven hopped forward and with a deft movement of its scimitar like beak pecked out my one good eye.

I screamed not because it hurt; I was beyond that. I screamed because I thought that was how I was supposed to react.

Blackness engulfed me and then...

The world changed and I was standing, bathing in a bright, golden light. I had legs, arms. I was healthy and strong. I breathed in the air and it was sweet. My bared feet revealed in the feel of the grass. A figure was standing close to me, also bathed in light so exceedingly bright that I had to squint to see his features. I had both my eyes.

“Odin?”

The figure shrugged. The raven that had picked out my eye was perched on the man’s shoulder. “See what I mean by seeing.”

I noticed he was motioning to the green sward on which we stood. The grass wasn’t perfect, but instead marred with black, slug like creatures that were wrything about.

“These are those who can not see, who can not think.”

“Everybody can think,” I said rather dismissively. I wasn’t in the habit of giving too much credence to illusions, no matter how realistic they were.

The raven gave a rich, metallic croak and I knew it was Huginn. It glared at me in disapproval. The slug like figures were frozen in form unable to break away from all the ugliness. Then they began to change, growing sprouting limb, arms, legs, heads. Even though they stood, fully formed humanoids the ugliness remained.

“Thinking, true thinking is more than stimulus and response. It involves the questioning of our very existence,” mused Odin.

Suddenly Odin lashed out with his right hand. Mass plus acceleration creates force. The force with which Odin hit me sent me stumbling across the grass. I accidently stepped on one of the freshly made humanoid forms, crushing it into a pasty jell mess. The quick motion had startled Huginn who flapped up into the air croaking. I looked at the bottom of my foot in disgust and wiped it on the grass.

“Nice punch.” Odin hadn’t even moved. A punch with that much energy had to come from somewhere.

“They leave an awful mess don’t they, humans.”

I stopped wiping. “You’re not telling me that this mess is…was…”

“A human? Yes, he was. Not a very good one, by the stench a rather bad one.”

I noticed the redolent smell. It was as though I was standing next to a cesspit. If I accepted this, it would not have been the first time I had killed, still, to kill had a price, a dreadful price. A price that kept adding up with each death. There was a reckoning, and the reckoning had to be paid. Was this delusion part of that reckoning.

“You still don’t believe this is happening, do you?”

“To be perfectly honest, no. I think I’m dying on the grass, legless, penniless and without hope.”

“She came back, you know.”

“Who came back?”

“The young woman you sacrificed your life for, Freya."

“So I am an Einherjar?”

"No. You will be so much more. If you let the Norms weave your fate."

"I have a choice?"

"Everyone has a choice."

Huginn gave me another angry glare and croaked.

Odin tapped his temple and looked at me. His sight penetrated with searing intensity. “I need warriors that think. Without thought everything will be destroyed.”

“The final battle, Ragnarok. The battle where the Gods die.”

Suddenly, to my surprise Odin laughed. It was a deep, rich laugh that began down in the depths of his stomach and burst from his lips. Head thrown back, Huginn took to the air and gave his own staccato version of laughter. Eventually, Odin quieted down and wiped away the tears from his one good eye, which he then bore into me with.

“The Gods are already dead. That’s why I need you.”