The Crow Girl

           We used to have one in our own home. It lived in the basement and pecked at my five-year-old feet as I whisked about on my bicycle. I see them now, glaring through the scratched windowpane of the peeling door. Crows flying in the daytime and flying through the night. My heart races, "Oh they are too easy to love," I hiss, crouching on the corner of the broken cement.
           Jena says that the Pennsylvania variety is actually called sterling, but I refuse to believe her. I like the cold sound of "crow," much better. I like the way that my tongue must push the sound from the bottom of my mouth, outward, like it is searching for something.
           One day I talk to the crow that lives near the house here. He flies way up in the pine and stares at me. I can feel him looking at me but I can not look back, he is a far away piece of lightning, dead eyes, dead feet. He flies down onto the bleak stoop and cold, gray winds rush up my curls. The tiny hairs that sweep up my neck stand at attention.
           He tells me that I look sexy today, and won't I take my hair down?
"Just for a moment," he hisses, slyly stepping forward and back up again. Little crow claws near my knee, pinching me now for nothing.
           "Of course," I stutter, being pick-pocketed for my locks.
           I remove one hairpin and the crow snatches it up in his beak, sending it into the air. My fingers grow faster, dared by his glances. I remove them now like a nimble pianist, undoing the morning's fashion so quickly.
"Faster, girl!" he chants, his feathers puffed out and upright.
           Surrounding me is a pile of metal like discarded crucifixes stacked and shining. How many nights had I slept with my hair this way, pushing more pins into my skull each morning? I dug and dug, my hand a shovel in a diamond mine.
           He's looking kind of mean, and I am halfway done. He is scratching into the ground with his black feet, spelling my name in enormous cursive letters in the dried, cropped grass. He is beginning to lose his feathers. In a moment I catch my breath, a halo appeared on my eyelids, crow's blood stains the skin.
           Piles of hairpins surround me; he is stacking them into perpendicular towers of lusty wealth. He alternates between coos and violent squawks, forcefully plucking some from my head as well.
           "Ow! That hurts," I exclaim as he takes bits of hair along with the pins. My fingernails are singed black, my hair feels lighter and lighter. The bird begins to jabber again, this time in verse:
           
                      Below the metal, Below the line
                      Cherries sour on the vine!

           The crow is freeing me. The clouds break as I remove the last three pins from my hair, curls dropping well below my shoulders.
           The name spelled into the earth begins to glow at my feet, M-E-L already on fire. I stand with my hands wrapped in my curss, feeling something pushing outwards very quickly. My mane grows longer and longer in seconds, stretching out across the yard and wrapping around trees and pinecones. It covers the earth and moves out into the street, braids itself around the lampposts and car tires. If only I had known the power of those pins, if only I hadn't listened to the crow. How will I ever break free? In my careful styling I had prevented it from growing, a now unstoppable force.
           I hesitate and then recite the verse, mixing some of the words in my hysteria.            
            The crow comes back for me, one metal pin in its clutches. It drops it from high above and never looks down again. I reach for the pin, and as it touches my hand, my hair recedes.
           When I return home I find myself in a dusty hallway mirror examining my newly freed tresses. To my horror, the once-golden brown curls had transformed themselves into coarse, black strands of soot.

by mindy roth