Newford Stories (9 page)

At first he shook his head, but then his
gaze lifted and the strip of sky above the alley went dark with
crows. A cloud of them blocked the sun, circling just above the
rooftops and filling the air with their raucous cries.

“Wow,” Jilly said. “You’ve got a great
imagination.”

“This isn’t my doing,” he said.

They watched as two of the birds left the
flock and came spiraling down on their black wings. Just before
they reached the pavement, they changed into a pair of girls with
spiky black hair and big grins.

“Hello, hello!” they cried.

“Hello, yourselves,” Jilly said.

She couldn’t help but grin back at them.

“We’ve come to take you home,” one of them
said.

“You can’t say no.”

“Everyone will think it’s our fault if you
don’t come.”

“And then we won’t get any sweets.”

“Not that we’re doing this for sweets.”

“No, we’re just very kindhearted girls, we
are.”

“Ask anyone.”

“Except for Raven.”

They were tugging on her hands now, each
holding one of hers with two of their own.

“Don’t dawdle,” the one on her right
said.

Jilly looked back at the buffalo man.

“Go on,” he said.

She shook her head. “Don’t be silly.”

For some reason that made the crow girls
giggle.

“There’s no reason you can’t come too,” she
said. She turned to look at the crow girls. “There isn’t, is
there?”

“Well…” one of them said.

“I suppose not.

“The door’s closed,” the buffalo man told
them. “I can feel it inside, shut tight.”

“Your door’s closed,” one of the girls
agreed.

“But hers is still open.”

Still he hesitated. Jilly pulled away from
the crow girls and walked over to him.

“Half the trick to living large,” she said,
“is the living part.”

He let her take him by the hand and walk him
back to where the crow girls waited. Holding hands, with one of the
spiky-haired girls on either side of them, they walked toward the
mouth of the alleyway. But before they could get halfway there…

* * *

Jilly blinked and opened her eyes to a ring
of concerned faces.

“We did it, we did it, we did it!” the crow
girls cried.

They jumped up from Jilly’s side and danced
around in a circle, banging into furniture, stepping on toes and
generally raising more of a hullabaloo than would seem possible for
two such small figures. It lasted only a moment before Lucius put a
hand on each of their shoulders and held them firmly in place.

“And very clever you were, too,” he said as
they squirmed in his grip. “We’re most grateful.”

Jilly turned to look at the man lying next
to her on the sofa.

“How are you feeling?” she asked.

His gaze made a slow survey of the room,
taking in the Kelledys, the professor, Lucius and the wriggling
crow girls.

“Confused,” he said finally. “But in a good
way.”

The two of them sat up.

“So you’ll stay?” Jilly asked. “You’ll see
it through this time?”

“You’re giving me a choice?”

Jilly grinned. “Not likely.”

- 8 -

Long after midnight, the Kelledys sat in
their living room looking out at the dark expanse of their lawn.
The crows were still roosting in the oaks, quiet now except for the
odd rustle of feathers or a soft, querulous croak. Lucius and the
crow girls had gone back down the street to the Rookery, but not
before the two girls had happily consumed more cookies, chocolates
and soda pop than seemed humanly possible. But then, they weren’t
human, they were corbae. The professor and Jilly had returned to
their respective homes as well, leaving only a preoccupied buffalo
man who’d finally fallen asleep in one of the extra rooms
upstairs.

“Only a few more days until Christmas,”
Cerin said.

“Mmm.”

“And still no snow.”

“Mmm.”

“I’m thinking of adopting the crow
girls.”

Meran gave him a sharp look.

He smiled. “Just seeing if you were paying
attention. What were you thinking of?”

“If there’s a word for a thing because it
happens, or if it happens because there’s a word for it.”

“I’m not sure I’m following you.”

Meran shrugged. “Life, death. Good, bad.
Kind, cruel. What was the world like before we had language?”

“Mercurial, I’d think. Like the crow girls.
One thing would flow into another. Nothing would have been really
separate from anything else because everything would have been made
up of pieces of everything else.”

“It’s like that now.”

Cerin nodded. “Except we don’t think of it
that way. We have the words to say this is one thing, this is
another.”

“So we’ve lost…what? A kind of harmony?”

“Perhaps. But we gained free will.”

Meran sighed. “Why did we have to give up
the one to gain the other?”

“I don’t know for sure, but I’d guess it’s
because we need to be individuals. Without our differences, without
our needing to communicate with one another, we’d lose our ability
to create art, to love, to dream…”

“To hate. To destroy.”

“But most of us strive for harmony. The fact
that we can fall into the darkness is what makes our choice to
reach for the light such a precious thing.”

Meran leaned her head on his shoulder.

“When did you become so wise?” she
asked.

“When you chose me to be your companion on
your journey into the light.”

A Crow Girls’ Christmas

(with MaryAnn Harris)

“We have jobs,”
Maida told Jilly when she and Zia dropped by the professor’s house
for a visit at the end of November.

Zia nodded
happily. “Yes, we’ve become veryvery respectable.”

Jilly had to
laugh. “I can’t imagine either of you ever being completely
respectable.”

That comment
drew an exaggerated pout from each of the crow girls, the one more
pronounced than the other.

“Not being
completely respectable’s a good thing,” Jilly assured
them.

“Yes, well, easy
for you to say,” Zia said. “You don’t have a cranky uncle always
asking when you’re going to do something useful for a
change.”

Maida nodded.
“You just get to wheel around and around in your chair and not
worry about all the very serious things that we do.”

“Such as?” Jilly
asked.

Zia shrugged. “Why
don’t
pigs fly?”

“Or why is white
a colour?” Maida offered.

“Or
black.”

“Or yellow
ochre.”

“Yellow ochre is a colour,” Jilly said.
“Two colours, actually. And white and black are colours, too.
Though I suppose they’re not very
colourful
, are
they?”

“Could it be
more puzzling?” Zia asked.

Maida simply
smiled and held out her teacup. “May I have a refill,
please?”

Jilly pushed the
sugar bag over to her. Maida filled her teacup to the brim with
sugar. After a glance at Zia, she filled Zia’s cup as
well.

“Would you like
some?” she asked Jilly.

“No, I’m quite
full. Besides, too much tea makes me have to pee.”

The crow girls
giggled.

“So what sort of
jobs did you get?” Jilly asked.

Zia lowered her
teacup and licked the sugar from her upper lip.

“We’re elves!”
she said.

Maida nodded
happily. “At the mall. We get to help out Santa.”

“Not the
real
Santa,” Zia
explained.

“No, no. He’s
much too very busy making toys at the North Pole.”

“This is sort of
a cloned Santa.”

“Every mall has
one, you know.”

“And
we
,” Zia announced proudly, “are in
charge of handing out the candy canes.”

“Oh my,” Jilly
said, thinking of the havoc that could cause.

“Which makes us
very important,” Maida said.

“Not to mention
useful.”

“So pooh to
Lucius, who thinks we’re not.”

“Do they have
lots of candy canes in stock?” Jilly asked.

“Mountains,” Zia
assured her.

“Besides,” Maida
added. “It’s all magic, isn’t it? Santa never runs out of candy or
toys.”

That was before
you were put in charge of the candy canes, Jilly thought, but she
kept her worry to herself.

* * *

Much to
everyone’s surprise, the crow girls made excellent elves. They
began their first daily four-hour shift on December 1, dressed in
matching red-and-green outfits that the mall provided: long-sleeved
jerseys, short pleated skirts, tights, shoes with exaggerated
curling toes, and droopy elf hats with their rowdy black hair
poking out from underneath. There were bells on their shoes, bells
at the end of their hats, and they each wore brooches made of bells
that they’d borrowed from one of the stores in the mall. Because
they found it next to impossible to stand still for more than a few
seconds at a time, the area around Santa’s chair echoed with their
constant jingling. Parents waiting in line, not to mention their
eager children, were completely enchanted by their happy antics and
the ready smiles on their small dark faces.

“I thought
they’d last fifteen minutes,” their uncle Lucius confided to the
professor a few days after the pair had started, “but they’ve
surprised me.”

“I don’t see
why,” the professor said. “It seems to me that they’d be perfectly
suited for the job. They’re about as elfish as you can get without
being an elf.”

“But they’re
normally so easily distracted.”

The professor
nodded. “However, there’s candy involved, isn’t there? Jilly tells
me that they’ve been put in charge of the candy canes.”

“And isn’t that
a source for pride.” Lucius shook his head and smiled. “Trust them
to find a way to combine sweets with work.”

“They’ll be the
Easter Bunny’s helpers in the spring.”

Lucius laughed.
“Maybe I can apprentice them to the Tooth Fairy.”

The crow girls
really were perfectly suited to their job. Unlike many of the tired
shoppers that trudged by Santa’s chair, they remained enthralled
with every aspect of their new environment. The flashing lights.
Jingling bells. Glittering tinsel. Piped-in Christmas music.
Shining ornaments.

And, of course,
the great abundance of candy canes.

They treated
each child’s questions and excitement as though that child were the
first to have this experience. They talked to those waiting in
line, made faces so that the children would laugh happily as they
were having their pictures taken, handed out candy canes when the
children were lifted down from Santa’s lap. They paid rapt
attention to every wish expressed, and adored hearing about all the
wonderful toys available in the shops.

Some children,
normally shy about a visit to Santa, returned again and again,
completely smitten with the pair.

But mostly, it
was all about the candy canes.

The crow girls
were extremely generous in handing them out, and equally
enthusiastic about their own consumption. They stopped themselves
from eating as many as they might have liked, but did consume one
little candy cane each for every five minutes they were on the
job.

Santa, busy with
the children, and also enamoured with his cheerful helpers, failed
to notice that the sacks of candy canes in the storage area behind
his chair were dwindling at an astonishing rate. He never thought
to look because it had never been an issue before. There’d always
been plenty of candy canes to go around in past years.

* * *

On December 19,
at the beginning of their noon shift, there were already lines and
lines of children waiting excitedly to visit Santa and his crow
girl elves. As the photographer was unhooking the cord to let the
children in, Maida turned to Zia to ask where the next sack of
candy canes was just as Zia asked Maida the very same question.
Santa suggested that they’d better hurry up and grab another sack
from the storage space.

Trailing the
sound of jingling bells, the crow girls went behind his
chair.

Zia pulled aside
the little curtain.

“Oh-oh,” she
said.

Maida pushed in
beside her to have a look herself. The two girls exchanged worried
looks.

“They’re all
gone,” Zia told Santa.

“I’ll go to the
stockroom for more,” Maida offered.

Zia nodded. “Me
too.”

“What
stockroom?” Santa began, but then he realized exactly what they
were saying. His normally rosy cheeks went as white as his
whiskers.

“
They’re all gone?” he asked.
“
All
those bags
of candy canes?”

“In a word,
yes.”

“But where could
they all have gone?”

“We give them
away,” Maida reminded him. “Remember?”