"However, we have talked enough. There is no story to tell, no story to hear. Sometimes the heart leaves its place. It catapults into the darkness of the mind. It sleeps between the eyebrows, it has the untamed between the legs. Then the only story you can tell, the one you want to hear, is the story told by the one who saves himself and is heard by whoever leaves, leaves. Phrases with the soul in the mouth, words that push, as if one wants to hide behind the other, silences that deafen you. That's why the story told by the one who saves himself and is heard by whoever leaves, leaves, has no backbone, a cat melted on the road, it doesn't take you anywhere, a round of death without death."

The black vulture (scientific name aegypius monachus) is an endangered species of vulture that lives in the forest of Dadia in Evros. Imposing, monogamous, it feeds on carcasses. Similarly, the narrator-protagonist of this novella is a voice on the verge of extinction that feeds on dead or decomposed stories, stories that summarize with comic despair the devastations of memory and life.

In this feverish text, Michel Faïs parodies his own thematic obsessions and deconstructs his narrative techniques with the ultimate goal of pushing his writing to its limits. Deep down, he devises ways to distance himself from his fundamental demon: autobiography.

A pivotal work in the author's literary journey, reprinted and revised twelve years after its first edition, enriched with the most significant reviews that accompanied it and with photographs from its stage adaptation (2003 and 2010).