Newford Stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

held, then unwittingly, broke his heart.
    “No,” he says.
    His wife stirs, her features her own again.
She blinks sleepily at him.
    “Wha…?” she mumbles.
    He holds her close, heartbeat drumming, more
in love with her for being who she is than he has ever been
before.
    Outside, the crow girls are lying on their
backs, making snow angels on his lawn, scissoring their arms and
legs, shaping skirts and wings. They break their apple cores in two
and give their angels eyes, then run off down the street, holding
hands. The snowdrifts are undisturbed by their weight. It’s as
though they, too, like the angels they’ve just made, have
wings.
     
    * * *
     
    “This is so cool,” Casey tells her mother.
“It really feels like Christmas. I mean, not like Christmases we’ve
had, but, you know, like really being part of Christmas.”
    Heather nods. She’s glad she brought the
girls down to the soup kitchen to help Jilly and her friends serve
a Christmas dinner to those less fortunate than themselves. She’s
been worried about how her daughters would take the break from
tradition, but then realized, with Peter gone, tradition is already
broken. Better to begin all over again.
    The girls had been dubious when she first
broached the subject with them—“I don’t want to spend Christmas
with losers ,” had been Casey’s first comment. Heather hadn’t
argued with her. All she’d said was, “I want you to think about
what you just said.”
    Casey’s response had been a sullen
look—there were more and more of these lately—but Heather knew her
own daughter well enough. Casey had stomped off to her room, but
then come back half an hour later and helped her explain to Janice
why it might not be the worst idea in the world.
    She watches them now, Casey having rejoined
her sister where they are playing with the homeless children, and
knows a swell of pride. They’re such good kids, she thinks as she
takes another sip of her cider. After a couple of hours serving
coffee, tea and hot cider, she’d really needed to get off her feet
for a moment.
    “Got something for you,” Jilly says, sitting
down on the bench beside her.
    Heather accepts the small, brightly-wrapped
parcel with reluctance. “I thought we said we weren’t doing
Christmas presents.”
    “It’s not really a Christmas present. It’s
more an everyday sort of a present that I just happen to be giving
you today.”
    “Right.”
    “So aren’t you going to open it?”
    Heather peels back the paper and opens the
small box. Inside, nestled in a piece of folded Kleenex, are two
small silver earrings cast in the shapes of crows. Heather lifts
her gaze.
    “They’re beautiful.”
    “Got them at the craft show from a local
jeweler. Rory Crowther. See, his name’s on the card in the bottom
of the box. They’re to remind you—”
    Heather smiles. “Of crow girls?”
    “Partly. But more to remember that this—”
Jilly waves a hand that could be taking in the basement of St.
Vincent’s, could be taking in the whole world. “It’s not all we
get. There’s more. We can’t always see it, but it’s there.”
    For a moment, Heather thinks she sees two
dark-haired slim figures standing on the far side of the basement,
but when she looks more closely they’re only a bag lady and
Geordie’s friend Tanya, talking.
    For a moment, she thinks she hears the sound
of wings, but it’s only the murmur of conversation. Probably.
    What she knows for sure is that the grey
landscape inside her chest is shrinking a little more every
day.
    “Thank you,” she says.
    She isn’t sure if she’s speaking to Jilly or
to crow girls she’s only ever seen once, but whose presence keeps
echoing through her life. Her new life. It isn’t necessarily a
better one. Not yet. But at least it’s on the way up from wherever
she’d been going, not down into a darker despair.
    “Here,” Jilly says. “Let me help you put
them on.”
     

 
    Twa Corbies
     
    As I was walkin’ all