A shop that shouldn’t exist.
A name that speaks to the soul, not the rational mind.
What would an unkind raven be? Why is that so profound?
Like a name you knew from long before. The feeling of bicycles haphazardly sprawled across a front yard. The acrid taste of water from a hose in endless summer heat. An old friend you forget where you met, but have always known. Like a lover’s scent on the pillow next to you. A half-formed memory—half thought, half dreamt.
The young person working the counter shouldn’t be in this shelter. The spooky museum off to the right of the entrance hints at a long heritage going back to the 1800s. Old photos and newspaper clippings. A mannequin dressed as a flapper. An anachronism. A phantasm. A ghost from a past I never knew. Standing in the corner, her bags packed and sitting by the door. She is ready to go haunt someone else’s liminal space. I leave the historical area as my head reels around me, the nausea rising up from the depths of my stomach.
I stumble into a sitting room. Raven paraphernalia abounds.
A battered couch that has seen better days mocks me—the physical manifestation of my battered soul.
Threadbare and worn by the asses of a thousand faceless souls that have passed through. You could almost see them: an infinite procession of nameless beings sitting, reading, thinking, crying, loving, dying, fading, finding meaning, losing hope, making connections… with the person on the other side of the couch, or maybe with themselves.
The room is oddly barren, not crammed with marketing materials or things to buy. I don’t remember seeing a price tag, as if the items were not for sale. They were treasures—won in battle from old, forgotten gods. And some postcards. Three for ten dollars.
There is the “quote the raven” that I was braced to find. Only one reference to Poe, which is strange. The child at the front desk will tell me that her favorite author is Poe, but be unable to name another of his works… if I could be bothered to ask.
Light blues and faded lilacs. The intricate, faded floral designs on the couch float through my memory like cherry blossoms giving up the fight and spiraling along ley lines of forces they cannot understand.
I spiral, my head filled with images and the vague knowledge that this place is a cancer to my Catholicism. I stumble into another room: a table set for no one. Small alcoves littered with relics for those who know. A Sigmarine beginner’s set. Stones and rocks for various purposes. Stacks of poems from lovers and the suicidal. And an exit.
The outside. A small area, secluded yet on display. Alone, but surrounded on all sides.
A respite.
I sit for a second, hoping the punch-drunk feeling will pass me by.
Back on my feet, I stumble into a pantry of the soul. A small, five-foot-long, three-foot-wide space, with books labeled “antiques” by hand-drawn signs with opaque tape holding down the corners. It is here I may have died. Maybe reborn on the same spot.
I felt at home like never before. I wanted to lie on the floor. I wanted to be surrounded by these old books, the stench of moldy pages filling my lungs as I slept for the first time… maybe in my entire life.
I started to cry.
I stood in the center of this room, clutching my chest, wishing I could curl up on the floor and let it all out. Let out the strangled scream of forty-two years of it being wrong. All of it.
I couldn’t help it, and refused to try.
I stood and let the tears come.
Wrenched my face into the ugly face of a broken man.
I cursed my god. I cursed their god. I blasphemed and spat profanities to bring down all the evils of the world onto the gods that have forsaken man.
Forsaken me.
Me.
No one else.
I felt the shift of a soul that wanted to burn it down. To watch the stars drip down and destroy everything I held dear.
A sob. The sound reverberating back from somewhere far away, from someone that sounded like me. Another sob.
It was me. I was sobbing.
I stifled the sobs. Wiped away the tears. Pushed down the blasphemies, the pain, the soul, the self—and went back into this twisted… store?
I still don’t know if it was a store or a moment in time.
A little pocket dimension, made just to whisper a truth I had forgotten:
“I’m not ok.”
I could spend a thousand hours trying to find the logic that the hundred or so books were organized with. But why?
I pull myself together and approach the clerk. She gently lets me know that she is one of the owners. She talks about her heritage and her background. She tells me more than strangers should tell each other. I gush about the store and demand answers strangers shouldn’t demand.
The answer—“What is an Unkind Raven?”—was more than I could have hoped for. My soul exploded like a yogi in samadhi. My chakras annihilated and my ego destroyed.
Brilliance is not the word. It cheapens how beautiful and shining the answer was.
She had no right to be that clever. That intelligent.
She’s just a child. Barely a zygote.
She explains that she is also the marketer and made all the marketing. We review her logo, and I can only gush about how incredible she is. Each layer of the design only adds to my adoration.
I had sworn off material possessions, and even in that, she met me with humility and beauty.
I was back in my car. Maybe twenty minutes had passed since I went in. Not different—but never the same.
The Unkind Raven is out there, calling me back to myself.