The Newford Stories Read online

  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?”

  Zia nodded. “We were supposed to.”

  “So that’s what we did.”

  “Because it’s our job.”

  “And we ate a few,” Maida admitted.

  “A veryvery few.”

  Santa frowned. “How many is a few?”

  “Hmm,” Zia said.

  “Good question.”

  “Let’s see.”

  They both began to count on their fingers as they talked.

  “We were veryvery careful not to eat more than twelve an hour.”

  “Oh so very careful.”

  “So in four hours—”

  “—that would be forty-eight—”

  “—times two—”

  “—because there are two of us.”

  They paused for a moment, as though to ascertain that there really were only two of them.

  “So that would be…um…”

  “Ninety-six—”

  “—times how many days?”

  “Eighteen—”

  “—not counting today—”

  “—because there aren’t any today—”

  “—which is why we need to go the stockroom to get more.”

  Santa was adding it all up himself. “That’s almost two thousand candy canes you’ve eaten!”

  “Well, almost,” Maida said.

  “One thousand, seven hundred and twenty-eight,” Zia said.

  “If you’re keeping count.”

  “Which is almost two thousand, I suppose, but not really.”

  “Where is the candy cane stockroom?” Maida asked.

  “There isn’t one,” Santa told her.

  “But—”

  “And that means,” he added, “that all the children here today won’t get any candy canes.”

  The crow girls looked horrified.

  “That means us, too,” Zia said.

  Maida nodded. “We’ll also suffer, you know.”

  “But we’re ever so stoic.”

  “Ask anybody.”

  “We’ll hardly complain.”

  “And never where you can hear us.”

  “Except for now, of course.”

  Santa buried his face in hands, completely disconcerting the parent approaching his chair, child in hand.

  “Don’t worry!” Maida cried.

  “We have everything under control.” Zia looked at Maida. “We do, don’t we?”

  Maida closed her eyes for a long moment, then opened them wide and grinned.

  “Free tinsel for everyone!” she cried.

  “I don’t want tinsel,” the little boy standing in front of Santa with his mother said. “I want a candy cane.”

  “Oh, you do want tinsel,” Maida assured him.

  “Why does he want tinsel?” Zia asked.

  “Because…because…”

  Maida grabbed two handfuls from the boughs of Santa’s Christmas tree. Flutteri
ng the tinsel with both hands over her head, she ran around the small enclosure that housed Santa’s chair.

  “Because it’s so fluttery!” she cried.

  Zia immediately understood. “And shiny!” Grinning, she grabbed handfuls of her own.

  “Veryvery shiny,” Maida agreed.

  “And almost as good as candy,” Zia assured the little boy as she handed him some. “Though not quite as sugary good.”

  The little boy took the tinsel with a doubtful look, but then Zia whirled him about in a sudden impromptu dance. Soon he was laughing and waving his tinsel as well. From the line, all the children began to clap.

  “We want tinsel, too!” one of them cried.

  “Tinsel, tinsel!”

  The crow girls got through their shift with great success. They danced and twirled on the spot and did mad acrobatics. They fluttered tinsel, blew kisses, jingled their bells, and told stories so outrageous that no one believed them, but everyone laughed.

  By the end of their shift, even Santa had come around to seeing “the great excellent especially good fortune of free tinsel.”

  Unfortunately, the mall management wasn’t so easily appeased and the crow girls left the employ of the Williamson Street Mall that very day, after first having to turn in their red-and-green elf outfits. But on the plus side, they were paid for their nineteen days of work and spent all their money on chocolate and fudge and candy and ice cream.

  When they finally toddled out of the mall into the snowy night, they made chubby snow angels on any lawn they could find, all the way back to the Rookery.

  * * *

  ”So now we’re unemployed,” Zia told Jilly when they came over for a visit on the twenty-third, shouting “Happy eve before Christmas Eve!” as they trooped into the professor’s house.

  “I heard,” Jilly said.

  “It was awful,” Maida said.

  Jilly nodded. “Losing a job’s never fun.”

  “No, no, no,” Zia said. “They ran out of candy canes!”