One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow

by Olivia Hawker

Clyde had always seen his farm as a necessity, the center of an unadorned life that sustained him and his mother but gave little more than what he put into it. The land had always been, in Clyde’s reckoning, a simple machine—functional, but lacking in elegance or beauty. Never before had it struck him as something lovely; but now, with the pattern of life imprinted in his mind, woven into awareness, he saw not the spiritless machine but the intricacy of its workings. Sun and soil and leaf and root, animal and stone, bone, human strength, human weakness, all moved together, worked together, dictating one great pattern of dependence. Each creature and plant, every person, fitted into its place. The perfection of the weave sped his pulse; his ears roared with awe. He was pressed down into the mystery that held them all, pressed like a track in river mud. And like red mud, like the richness of damp soil, the substance into which Clyde was pushed flowed and fitted around him, held him precisely in his place, sited him in the great and intricate order.