He leaned back in his chair. The air hung empty and dead, like a corpse from the gallows.
He wondered if Edgar was dead yet. It felt too stagnant without him making revolutions in his swivel chair and cracking the frequent dirty joke, occasional playful insult and rare opening of a textbook.
It was a behavior Nathan didn’t fully approve of- not studious enough, major still undecided, too rebellious and arrogant to be told off by any professor. His essay and scores must have been riotously excellent to have made it into an Ivy League school, Nathan mused.
He probably had it coming, in the end. He failed to show up for most of his finals and what classes he did appear in were spent in feverish paranoia of a hallucinogenic threat.
It was all rather disturbing. Somewhere along the line Edgar became convinced a murder of crows was stalking him. He stayed indoors for an unhealthy amount of time, wasting away his life and time staring at writing on the walls or windows. Sometimes he would whimper something crazed and incoherent about the crows, always about the crows.
Nathan had first thought of it as a practical joke. He had seen Edgar breaking into cold sweats more that was normal (it was early winter), becoming incessantly twitchy, and flinching at loud noises, sudden movements and large birds. He had laughed when Edgar came to him on his metaphorical knees, begging him to believe that the crows were truly after his soul. It didn’t help that when he looked outside at the moment there was not even a pigeon in sight.
It did become bothersome when Edgar began to complain of being able to do his studies, pencil trembling whenever he tried to take notes until it outright clattered from his maladroit hands. Nathan reckoned it only worsened from there, but by then he had stopped paying attention. Finals were slowly slithering closer. If his roommate was a schizophrenic, that was someone else’s problem.
Edgar completely fell apart a little after finals. His grades plummeted like a plane shot into the ocean, his life sinking to dark failure and uncertain future. Edgar had stood against the window with his head in his palms, perhaps crying, but the only sound Nathan heard was the trickling stream of mad nonsense that dripped unsteadily from between his cold fingers.
The night before Edgar’s suicide, he had approached Nathan with desperate pleas and ambiguous phrases laced in. He kept shaking his head and repeating how much their smiling had thrown him. The most sane thing he said (which wasn’t saying much) was when he giggled, “I’ll make it mean something, Allen, but they’ll have me nevermore!” as Nathan exited the room as politely and as quickly as he could in his fright.
The next morning they found Edgar in a bloody puddle right below his third-story window. He had broken his neck.
One thing still bothered Nathan. No, two. The first one was that Edgar hadn’t died yet. Somehow his injuries weren’t fatal and he was only dead to the world. If he had really died, he probably would have achieved a mental peace of sorts, but the crows were still out there plague him.
That was the second thing. Throughout Edgar’s entire corvid-ridden ordeal, Nathan could never tell whether Edgar had simply lost it or was actually being monitored and assaulted by a group of crows. It was somewhat true that after Edgar’s initial panic attack, Nathan had indeed seen an unusual amount of shaggy black birds flapping about whenever they went for lunch or classes. But there had always been crows. A large number of them was nothing unusual. He hoped. He had an infuriatingly difficult time convincing himself. Were there already extremely common? He couldn’t remember so many being around before Edgar came down with paranoia.
It was nonsense. There were always crows around. He just happened to notice them more often after Edgar brought them to his attention. He put down the calculus textbook. Perhaps a walk would clear the illogical fears from his head.
Nathan walked stiffly downstairs and out the door. He had hardly taken a few steps when he was compelled to look up.
Inky black birds splattered the paper sky, and every one of them was grinning.