Jenny never wrote in a zone.  She was a disciplined writer, even when the words were flowing fast and furious.  She was conscious, deliberate, structured…as a writer, she was everything she could not be in her everyday life.  She was also not prone to having two-way conversations with wayward characters.  Even when madly inspired, her characters were usually well-behaved.

She sometimes thought maybe it was the occasional recklessness of her day-to-day living that informed and balanced her writing style.  At least that’s what she told herself.  So she was all the more stunned when she leaned back and read what she had written.  She fell back in the chair and slammed the laptop shut, pressed the lid down with her hands ‘til her knuckles blanched.

Where the hell did that come from?

She wrapped her thin shaking arms around herself and began to rock, scalp prickling.  Is this a flashback?, she wondered, remembering all the ‘shrooms she’d eaten on her meandering journey back after Tim had abandoned her at the motel.  No, she thought, this is real.

Bang!The damned bird was still pecking at the window, pulling its black head back, looking in with its bright black eyes.  Jenny didn’t want to look but her body was no longer obeying her mind.  Her head swiveled slowly to the right and she saw the raven or crow or whatever it was looking at her, right at her! 

She jumped up, walked over to the window and pounded on the glass, trying to scare it away.  It gave a harsh guttural five-syllable cry and pecked at the window again.  Once, twice, three times.  Jenny banged the glass again.  The bird ruffled its blueblack wingfeathers and clung to the outside sill, ticking its head right, then left, then right again, eyes aglitter with some cunning that frightened her. 

It took far more effort than she thought to pull the curtains shut, turn around and walk back to her desk, trying to ignore the intermittent squawks and pecks.  It’s just a fucking bird,  she reminded herself.  She sat down heavily in the chair, reached tentatively toward the laptop, hesitated, opened it.  The story of Sarah’s resurrection slowly reappeared on the screen.  Jenny read it again as it printed, feeling her chest go cold with dread.  A line from an old Bob Dylan song scrolled through her mind: