Living With Ravens

HAVE YOU EVER WONDERED how some people can be Mean Girl behind the scenes while publicly charming? Leaving you in a wilt? I attended a writers workshop the other day and there SHE was. Mean Girl with her smiley face a square on my computer screen. She smiled and charmed, and was oh-so-helpful and witty and wise while I spent six hours wondering why I could not function. I couldn't even manage to speak. Six hours! Why could I not get myself together? What was wrong with me?

MY COUSINS WERE ALMOST HOME, pushing their bikes up the last of the hill. It was a winter evening early in the new year of 1974, and a slight drizzle hurried them along; Patty was thirteen, Christine eleven. Lights from the kitchen window could be seen through the trees. Nearly home.
 

A car driven by a young man blinded by the setting sun came suddenly gunning up over the ridge. Patty ran the half block home screaming. Uncle Stan, the town doctor, was paged. Christine had been in an accident.