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the last months they’ve become too vivid and powerful to merely dismiss, but she doesn’t have a clue what they mean, although she suspects they do mean something. She supposes they’ll eventually go away as mysteriously as they’ve come.
    She rouses, is about to pull away from the wall, but there’s another burst of laughter from the kitchen. No, she doesn’t want to go there, she wants to — what? Follow that dream woman to some place where — where there are no strawberry teas, no farms needing seeding, no baffling husbands. Resolve deserts her. She slumps back against the wall, again lets her eyes close.
    She’d been wakened by a crow. Barely dawn and it had come, calling faintly from a distance, its voice confused in her mind with the early morning twitter of songbirds and the elusive sounds of her fading night’s dreaming, growing louder as it drew closer to where she lay motionless on her side of the bed in the upstairs bedroom she now rarely shared with Barney, her husband of nearly thirty years, his half of the quilt depressingly smooth and untouched. She’d listened, her countrywoman’s senses aroused. It couldn’t be a crow, surely it was too early for crows to be back? But it drew closer and closer, cawing as it came, and then it was against her window, must have lighted on the poplar branch that in the wind would rasp the window frame. From there it cawed peremptorily into her very ear, stentorian, three times:
Caw! Caw! Caw!
    She couldn’t fail to note — a slightly accelerated heart rate, a stillness that was all listening seizing her — it was as if the bird had been sent to speak directly to her, a messenger from regions she’d not yet been to, and she waited, bewildered, but feeling sure from the sudden uneasy stirring in her gut that there had to be more. But all she could read in the strident finality of its voice was that she should rise and go about the business of the living.
    She stretched one leg toward the edge of the bed. The crow had now retreated some distance, its voice growing fainter, its crowing no longer having rhythm or pattern — or maybe it was a different bird? Or maybe she’d dreamt the whole thing? She pushed the lilac quilt back, and the flowered sheet, kicking to free her legs, and sat on the side of the bed.
    The clock, sitting beside the crystal-based lamp and the mauve phone with the imitation gold trim on her bedside table, read six in the morning and by the clarity of the light filtering under the blind Iris was able to tell that it had stopped raining. She groaned softly in response to another morning, another Barneyless day, and straightening, placed one hand under each breast, as if to weigh them, not in pounds, but in womanliness, to reassure herself of her existence. She listened, heard the familiar chatter of small songbirds beginning in the trees, a tiny embroidery of sound on the vast silence of her house. How she hated waking each morning now into its emptiness,the wide oak dresser, the white-painted door, the mauve satin-covered chair that Barney complained of as useless, that he was always stumbling over, looking stranded, homeless, even though they’d always been there.
    And the crow’s toll had disturbed her, its harsh cry had torn an opening in the blurred shadow of her most private self which she kept hidden because she who had everything, who had always had everything, had no right to unhappiness, to these puzzling, seemingly objectless yearnings, these unattached dissatisfactions. She kept them all shoved down well out of sight, telling herself, surely everyone has this bundle of wide, nameless desire, surely everyone has to live with this mysterious, powerful undertow?
    Realizing she still held each heavy breast cupped in a palm, she dropped her hands, embarrassed. She stood slowly, reaching for her dressing gown. As her fingers touched the cool, bright silk it came flooding through her that Barney had failed once again to come rushing up