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I. The Old Woman
There once was an Old Woman who made pies everyday. She made
blueberry pies and strawberry pies and mulberry pies and pickleberry pies
and chocolateberry pies and marshmallowberry pies and brickberry pies
and jazzberry pies and flatberry pies and sharpberry pies and softberry
pies and richberry pies and poorberry pies and timeberry pies. Into every
pie, she baked her dreams. The Old Woman put all her thoughts, all her
day and night ideas into the pies and baked them until they were bubbly
and hot. Into the pies went her memories of muddied dresses and springtime
laughter on the porch. She made one pie every morning at exactly the same
hour, when the sun was just rising over the hills behind her little house,
but since the sun and the hills were behind the house, the sun lit up
the world so that it could have been setting, for it let loose the same
soft, yellow-grey-purple light of dawn and dusk. Every morning when she
made her pie and put it on her windowsill, she would look out over her
rolling fields and the way the sun, rising from behind her house, scattered
golden tufts of light about them. And every day, every time she put a
pie on her windowsill the crows would come and eat up the whole pie. And
even though the Old Woman was quite aware that the crows ate up all her
pies, she would still put them on her windowsill day after day after day
and watch the fields turn from gold to green.
Now, some people think that crows are dirty, ugly birds. Some people think
crows are just awful creatures. The Old Woman did not think this, though
she didn’t think much about them at all. She didn’t think
they were pretty, and she didn’t think they were ugly. She really
was quite indifferent towards the crows who found such beautiful berry
breakfasts on her windowsill day after day. That is, until one day. That
one day the Old Woman looked outside, and saw the crows that had once
flown and hopped around her little house now scattered about her front
yard, fat as fat hens, pecking at the ground like pigeons. They were so
fat from her pies that they could not fly! A yard full of bowling ball
birds. Oh my, said the Old Woman. What have I done?
What the Old Woman had done was filled them up with so much human love
and despair. Their poor feathered bodies could not digest all the hopes
of one Old Woman. The Old Woman knew she had to reclaim her thoughts,
so she got to thinking. She got out all her old dusty books from her old
dusty shelves, books on science and books on French architecture and books
of Greek myths and she flipped through the pages until she found just
what she was looking for, tucked away in the lines of an old poem she
hadn’t read since she was a child. First, the Old Woman went outside
and collected all the fat crows in a thick woven basket. Then she dug
many holes just circular enough for them all around her lawn and into
each hole, she planted a crow. There they were, half in the mud and half
out, cawing in surprise, their open beaks miniscule compared to their
bloated bodies, but seemingly trusting of the Old Woman. The Old Woman
stayed with them all the rest of the day and into the night, until she
fell asleep while reading them rhymes. Under the Moon lay a few dozen
planted birds, a sleeping Old Woman, an open book, and a little house.
The Moon heard the Old Woman’s breaths in sleep, and looking upon
this scene knew what it had to do. The Moon breathed its Moon breath and
sung a sad song and, like a dream catcher, lifted away all that human
sorrow and other cares that had somehow got into these birds and swelled
them up. The Moon breathed upon them like mist, like twinkling water-light,
like fairies dancing between the land and the Moon. And when the sun began
to rise behind them all, and the sky turned a yellow-grey-purple and the
fields and even the Old Woman began to glow gold, the Old Woman awoke
to find her holes empty and her birds flying about, waiting patiently
for her to make another pie of dreams.
II. The Crows
Once there were a slew of crows that flew around an Old Woman’s
house. They flew around this Old Woman’s house and not another’s
because this Old Woman put pies on her windowsill every day. And even
though the slew of crows ate up the pies every day, she did not change
her course, she did not get angry, she did not close the window and she
continued to feed the birds. And so the Crows loved this Old Woman and
flew for her and did dances and crissed and crossed and learned figure
eights. They were a regular synchronized flying team. They thought that
she loved them too until one day there was no pie. They thought, well,
she must be ill, and there will be a pie for us tomorrow. But the next
day there was no pie. And they thought, well, her cold must have gotten
worse and she did not want to breathe on the pie and get us sick. But
the next  day
there was no pie, and the next day, and the next day, and the next day
the windowsill was still empty. So the Slew-of-Crows Leader (or at least
that’s what he thought) flapped his wings in front of the other
Crows in order to get their attention. He said, I know what we must do.
And so the Crows followed him through the Old Woman’s open window
where the pies used to sit, all flying through in a line not unlike a
beautiful black silk scarf. The Crows heard unhappy little sounds that
they followed with their crow ears. They hopped down her hallway like
tiptoeing children and peeked inside her bedroom door. There she was!
All coughing and wheezing and sputtering with tissues flying everywhere.
Her head looked half its normal size with all the pillows billowing around
it. The Slew-of-Crows Leader, with a little dance, hopped up on her bed
and said, I know what we must do. And with that, they got to making.
They tried to make her tea, and bring her medicine, and wash her face
with a warm cloth and nice smelling soap. But being Crows, they did it
in a Crow Way, which is awkward when performing human tasks. And being
a Crow Leader, the crow leader did not tell them exactly what they must
do, and it is not certain that he would have been heard if he had. Crows
have a tendency to not listen when they are being spoken to. And even
with best of intentions, as they had now, they got distracted, and befuddled,
and defiant, and flummoxed. They all had their own ideas on how to make
the best cup of tea. On top of this, they had wings that made quite a
mess. (It is not easy to hold a tablespoon of cough syrup without a thumb.)
When some of the Crows, in their excitement, started to pull at her blankets
and nip at her toes to get her out of bed, the Old Woman finally spoke
up. That’s enough! she said. Just let me rest, she implored. With
their heads tucked between their wings, the Slew of Crows sulked out of
her bedroom to the kitchen in their tidy row. But before they got to the
window one crow (not the crow leader) lifted his wing and said, I know
what we must do. And it was decided: what the Old Woman needed was only
what she always had – but they could not do it in a Crow Way.
Like acrobats they piled into the kitchen and climbed on top of one another
in order to make a figure that quite resembled that of the Old Woman,
and with their wings, all working together, they found the flour, and
the butter, and the berries, and they pre-heated the oven and began to
mix and soon, when the sun was just rising and lighting up the world,
there was a pie on the Old Woman’s windowsill. They all but ran
outside to eat up the pie as they were used to and expected the Old Woman
to sit and watch them as she was used to. But she didn’t come. And
it took the crows a bit of time hopping from one foot to the other, waiting
for her, to finally decide out loud: since the Old Woman cannot come to
her windowsill, we shall bring her windowsill to her. In all their gracefulness,
the birds danced the pie into their Old Woman’s bedroom. While it
was cooling they showed her tricks and crissed and crossed and the Old
Woman giggled like a little girl and clapped her hands and she and the
birds had their breakfast.
III. The Neighbor
Once there was an Old Woman who made pies every day for no one in particular,
in particular not herself (for she was a diabetic), and she put those
pies on her windowsill and she sat and watched the crows eat them up.
Every day she did this. She baked and when the sun rose and the pies were
ready, she put them on her windowsill, sat down, and watched these black
birds eat her morning work. When she sat she did not have any particular
expression on her face, she simply watched and was quite content with
this ritual. She was quite content with this ritual until one day a neighbor,
a source I deem quite dependable, came by “just to check in”
just as the Old Woman was putting her pie on her windowsill. This Neighbor
Lady watched the Old Woman in action with scrunched up eyebrows and a
wrinkled nose. When the Old Woman sat down and observed the birds eating
her pie, the Neighbor Lady ran to the half-open window and swung her arms
wildly through it, back and forth while saying, “shoo you dirty
birds, get out of here!” The Old Woman looked surprised but said
nothing. The Neighbor Lady said, “why on earth do you do what you
do?” The Old Woman just shrugged and began to clean up the kitchen
and her mixing bowl and her spoon and the Neighbor Lady left and went
home to tell someone else how strange she thought this was in a shocked-voice.
But the Old Woman did think about this question and realized how others
might consider this a little strange and so the next day, instead of waking
up and baking a pie with the sun, she slept in past noon (a thing she
hadn’t done since she was a teenager). When she awoke, the yard
was all wet and there were puddles everywhere but she never saw the rain.
There wasn’t a crow to be seen at this hour and so she sat an d
stared out her wet window at the grey, blank sky and didn’t have
anything to clean. The next day she woke up a bit earlier than noon, but
still there was nothing to be cooked or cleaned and so she sat and stared
at the crows in the far off distance sitting on the telephone wires. The
next day she found a book on her stoop that the Neighbor Lady had left
by the time the Old Woman finally, groggily opened her front door. She
read it, it was called The Jones, but she had already learned all of that
stuff years ago and did not need it anymore. She also tried turning on
the television that day, but the storytelling was all off beam and she
did not like that a bit. And so she sat, and sat, and eventually went
to bed.
That night she had a dream that the crows came and pulled her by the toes
with their beaks out of bed and to the kitchen, dragging her gently along
the floor all the while. They had already put out the flour and the berries
and had pre-heated the oven for her. She made the pie just as she had
always done, but when it was finished and she pulled it out of the oven,
it was made of sand and the birds could not eat it. And so the next morning,
after the Old Woman awoke from this dream, which ended just before sunrise,
she had to make sure that her pies were not made of sand. She got out
all of her ingredients, enough for two pies this morning, pre-heated the
oven, and set to ripping the pages out of the book the Neighbor Lady had
given her. The Old Woman mixed and mixed and used her arms and baked her
pies and pulled them out, all red and warm and still bubbling with heat.
The first one, she took over to the Neighbor Lady’s house, set it
on her stoop, rang the doorbell, and left. The second one, her own, she
set on the windowsill and then sat in her chair. The crows had not given
up on the Old Woman. They came to the windowsill, hesitantly at first
but with more and more confidence like they knew it was theirs, and they
ate the pie and the Old Woman watched.
When she saw the pie, the Neighbor Lady was quite pleased that she had
had an effect on the Old Woman and that she was now baking pies for people
instead of birds, as one should. The Neighbor Lady ate her pie diligently,
always with a smile on her face, never letting on that the pie was not
sweet enough, very fibrous, and she could swear she tasted a faint trace
of ink.[B]
CARMIEL BANASKY
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Grandma Napping
by Amy Jordan
untitled
by Sunny Rupwate
Raising
by Andy Gosling
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