Newford Stories Read Free Page A

and Zia. You’ve
caught a good likeness of them—especially Zia. I love that crinkly
smile of hers.”
    “You can tell them apart?”
    “You can’t?”
    “I never saw them before tonight. Heather
and I were in the Cyberbean and there they were, just asking to be
drawn.” She added a bit of shading to the underside of a jaw, then
turned to look at Geordie. “Why do you call them the crow
girls?”
    Geordie shrugged. “I don’t. Or at least I
didn’t until I was talking to Jack Daw and that’s what he called
them when they came sauntering by. The next time I saw them I was
busking in front of St. Paul’s, so I started to play ‘The
Blackbird,’ just to see what would happen, and sure enough, they
came over to talk to me.”
    “Crow girls,” Jilly repeated. The name
certainly fit.
    “They’re some kind of relation to Jack,”
Geordie explained, “but I didn’t quite get it. Cousins, maybe.”
    Jilly was suddenly struck with the memory of
a long conversation she’d had with Jack one afternoon. She was
working up sketches of the Crowsea Public Library for a commission
when he came and sat beside her on the grass. With his long legs
folded under him, black brimmed hat set at a jaunty angle, he’d
regaled her with a long, rambling discourse on what he called the
continent’s real First Nations.
    “Animal people,” she said softly.
    Geordie smiled. “I see he fed you that line,
too.”
    But Jilly wasn’t really listening—not to
Geordie. She was remembering another part of that old conversation,
something else Jack had told her.
    “The thing we really don’t get,” he’d said,
leaning back in the grass, “is these contracted families you have.
The mother, the father, the children, all living alone in some big
house. Our families extend as far as our bloodlines and friendship
can reach.”
    “I don’t know much about bloodlines,” Jilly
said. “But I know about friends.”
    He’d nodded. “That’s why I’m talking to
you.”
    Jilly blinked and looked at Geordie. “It
made sense what he said.”
    Geordie smiled. “Of course it did. Immortal
animal people.”
    “That, too. But I was talking about the
weird way we think about families and children. Most people don’t
even like kids—don’t want to see, hear, or hear about them. But
when you look at other cultures, even close to home…up on the rez,
in Chinatown, Little Italy…it’s these big rambling extended
families, everybody taking care of everybody else.”
    Geordie cleared his throat. Jilly waited for
him to speak but he went instead to unplug the kettle and finish
making the coffee. He ground up some beans and the noise of the
hand-cranked machine seemed to reach out and fill every corner of
the loft. When he stopped, the sudden silence was profound, as
though the city outside were holding its breath along with the
inheld breath of the room. Jilly was still watching him when he
looked over at her.
    “We don’t come from that kind of family,” he
said finally.
    “I know. That’s why we had to make our
own.”
     
    * * *
     
    It’s late at night, snow whirling in
dervishing gusts, and the crow girls are perched on top of the
wooden fence that’s been erected around a work site on Williamson
Street. Used to be a parking lot there, now it’s a big hole in the
ground on its way to being one more office complex that nobody
except the contractors wants. The top of the fence is barely an
inch wide and slippery with snow, but they have no trouble
balancing there.
    Zia has a ring with a small spinning disc on
it. Painted on the disc is a psychedelic coil that goes spiraling
down into infinity. She keeps spinning it and the two of them stare
down into the faraway place at the center of the spiral until the
disc slows down, almost stops. Then Zia gives it another flick with
her fingernail, and the coil goes spiraling down again.
    “Where’d you get this anyway?” Maida
asks.
    Zia shrugs. “Can’t remember. Found