A man died crossing a river on his ranch. He was walking across it with his horse when his heart exploded, sending red-black spatters in a rain against his ribs. The man fell, crumpled, with his ankles splayed. His good pocket watch, the one that had cost his wife twenty five good dollars a few years ago, cracked in the fall and filled up with river, ruined. Then the water lifted him up and carried him downstream away from his horse, bouncing him and bumping him along the way until it finally washed him up on a shallow bank against a meadow far way from where he originally fell. Not, of course, that he minded.

His eyelids, which had been too surprised to close, stayed open wide. The man�s eyes began to get the glazed look of a corpse that comes from the membranes losing moisture to the air. Luckily, a raven came by before the eyes had been exposed to the dry air long enough to do more damage than that, and so was able to swallow them while most of the juices were still intact.

The black iridescent bird perched itself on the man�s forehead, its talons wrapped around the ridge of his eyebrows. It pecked the membranes out and they slid down the bird�s throat. The raven, had never before eaten human eyes, and puzzled a little at the flavor.

The man�s hand, which the river had tossed up near his face, had a gold band. Its sheen drew the raven�s eye and then, its beak. After pecking at the ring for a bit, the raven was unable to get it off the flesh. It pecked at the ring some more.

Across the field, a wind kicked up, carrying the death smell to nearby coyotes who chased off the raven before it had time to make up its mind about the eyeball flavor and decide to eat any other bits of the dead man.

One day passed. Two, a third. The bird flew erratically, when it flew at all, because the dead man's eyes refused to be digested. Instead, they sat heavy in the bird's stomach, rolling jerkily around every time it tried to use its wings. Disconcerted, the dark bird hacked and gagged, trying to vomit them up and thereby be rid of them. In this, too, the eyes remained intractable.

By the end of a full week, the bird had lost weight, precious ounces evaporated off its pencil bones. Panic pulled it back to the man's body, picked clean by now, thanks largely to the coyotes. A glint in the field showed where the corpse's wedding band had fallen when the coyotes pulled and tore the body to eat it. This the bird gulped up, hungry for the weight it provided.

Then, finally, it could almost fly straight again. Only almost, though. So long as it flew north, it could fly as easily as breathing, but as soon as it tried to turn to this side or that the eyeballs leapt and jerked, empathetically protesting the change in direction. So, the raven flew straight, not having the strength to fight.

Before too long, the bird cast its shadow on the roof of a sun-bleached house. Here, the membranes in its stomach again directed the bird's movements, refusing it passage beyond. They jumped in its stomach with such ferocity that the raven fell to the ground in the dirt of the back yard.
Trying to right itself, the bird flapped, clawed at the air, and cried out. Put together, these actions were enough to call the attention of a woman inside the house, who stepped out into the yard with an apron on and a haggard look in her eyes. Not that the bird noticed this, it was far too preoccupied with its struggle with the things in its gut to notice details. All it registered was a human shape picking it up, then lifting it. The woman made noises with her mouth.

As the noise came out of the woman, the ring and eyeballs reacted. They jerked to life, pushing their way up the bird's throat and out of its mouth as the creature spasmed, spilling them out to land in the dirt before the woman's feet. She let out a startled yell.

She looked down at the eyes. They had landed with both irises facing up, so they stared back at the woman. Their pupils contracted for a moment in the sun, then relaxed again as they lost the last bit of life they had saved up.
The wedding ring fell beside them. Faintly, an inscription could be seen on the inside of the band. Now the woman wailed, for she recognized what the bird had brought her. She flung her hands up to pull at her hair, launching the bird away from her.

Free now, of the woman's grasp and of the dead man's eyes, the raven alit on the air. Its wings caught, held, and carried it away. Filled with the pressing need to put as much distance between itself and the troubling incident, the raven went north and north and north to the lands where people were scarce and dead man's eyeballs were scarcer yet.