There was no reason in the world not to kill her, I must confess. Her constant littering of the hallways with dropped sentence fragments, the participles left dangling from her lips, the millions of infinitives she so carelessly split ... in the end, there was no other choice. So I chained her to a wall in the basement of our house on Amontillado Drive, and began the laborious process of immurement.

Later, in the upstairs sitting room, before a fire that cackled more than it crackled, I was visited by a dark and ominous metaphor. Shaped like a raven, the symbolism spoke to me, not in the comforting words of absolutism, but in ambiguities and uncertainties. I would have given anything to hear a solid "Nevermore!", but the most this raven could offer was a non-committal "Perhaps", and "It may be". It was so typical, I reflected ... so very "raven".

Why couldn't I at least be visited by a flying fowl hell-bent on giving an inflexible answer, instead of this, the Magic 8-Ball of birds? We argued for the better part of the evening, as I slogged my way through his torrent of non-answers: "Ask again later", "It may be so", "Reply hazy", and "Cannot tell".

It finally occurred to me why this was happening. Perhaps if my ex-lover had been called "Lenore", the raven would have something with which to rhyme, and maybe I would have received the coveted "Nevermore!"

Instead, I settled for a woman called "Nadine", and this left my haunting visitor with very few options:

Quoth the raven, "Caffeine."

Quoth the raven, "Marine."

Quoth the raven, "Saline."

Quoth the raven, "Sun-screen."

I'm not sorry for what followed. But even now, to this day, I sometimes think that I can hear the dead bird's heart, quietly thump-thumping away beneath the floorboards.