No One Rides Without the Crow
by Audra Giedoti
When night came, the huge crow ducked its head beside her bed, and she rolled onto its warm back. She knew now to quickly grasp fistfuls of its feathers and position her body belly down without fuss. Seconds later, she felt the bird tense, pump its wings, and raise them both with a gentle rustle through the sliding glass doors which it had opened with a jerk of its bill. Would this be the night she didn't come back? Or would it return her at dawn, with stories she couldn't speak, of bright, seething cities she'd swooped through and wave-torn cliffs she'd perched on? "She seems to want to say something," her grandson had said yesterday. "Don't even get your hopes up," her husband said. He snatched up her tray and left the room, not noticing or maybe not caring that he'd dropped a white paper napkin. It took several seconds to float to the floor. She wondered how to ask the crow, and if it would agree to this, if they even spoke the same language in the first place, whether her husband could be brought along for just one trip.
Audra Giedoti is the granddaughter of Lithuanian immigrants, a mother of three sons, and a survivor of a windy Wyoming childhood. She received the MFA in creative writing from the University of Arizona, which proved little help in getting published but ensured she gets calls for donations from the alumni association. She works as a technology editor and paints landscapes and abstract paintings, which she hopes one day to sell for a lot of money.