The Girl Who Bargained With Crows

There was once a girl named Maren who lived at the edge of a forest so old it had forgotten its own name.

Her mother had died in the winter, and her father had remarried by spring, which Maren thought was either impressive efficiency or a very bad sign. The new wife was not cruel in the way of stories — she did not assign Maren impossible tasks or forbid her from attending balls. She was simply indifferent, the way a river is indifferent to a stone it rolls over, smoothing it down year by year without ever noticing.

What Maren missed most was not her mother exactly, but the version of herself that had existed while her mother was alive. That girl had been loud. She had laughed at inappropriate moments and asked too many questions and eaten the last of things without apologizing.

The current Maren was quieter. Smaller. She took up less space and found that no one noticed.

It was the crows who noticed.

They gathered on the fence posts around the property — seven of them, then nine, then twelve — watching her with the unsettling patience of things that have plenty of time. Crows live longer than people expect. They remember faces. They hold grudges. They also, on certain rare occasions, make deals.

"What do you want?" Maren asked the largest one, a bird so black it seemed to have its own weather system, a small personal shadow that moved independently of the sun.

"The better question," the crow said, tilting its head in that way crows do, as if the world makes more sense sideways, "is what do *you* want."

Maren had been raised to be polite, so she didn't point out that the crow had started the conversation by staring at her for eleven consecutive days. She considered the question seriously.

"I want to not feel like a ghost in my own life," she said.

The crow was quiet for a moment. Then: "That is a medium-difficulty want. Not the hardest we've encountered, not the easiest. Retrievable thing, probably. But our services are not free."

"What do you take as payment?"

"A memory."

"Which one?"

"We don't choose in advance. We take one at random. That is the bargain. That is the only bargain we offer."

Maren thought about this. She had memories she would willingly surrender — a particular argument, several embarrassing moments from age thirteen, the exact expression on her father's face when he told her about the new wife, as if he were apologizing to someone who had already agreed to forgive him.

But a random memory was different. A random memory could be anything.

"I need to think about it," she said.

"We'll be on the fence," said the crow, as if this were not already obvious.

---

She thought about it for three days, which the crows endured with their characteristic stillness.

On the third night, she dreamed of her mother. Not the end — she had dreams enough of the end — but a Tuesday afternoon from years ago, her mother teaching her to make pastry dough, the way you had to work cold butter in with your fingers and keep your hands cool, the specific press-and-fold motion that Maren had practiced until it lived in her palms.

She woke up and her hands still knew it.

What if the crows took that? What if she lost her mother's hands in her own hands?

But then she lay in the dark and thought about what it actually meant to feel like a ghost. She ate meals at the table and said appropriate things and went to school and came home and did it again, and at no point during any of it did she feel like the events were happening *to* her specifically. She could have been anyone. She was a placeholder shaped like a girl.

Her mother would not have wanted that.

Her mother, frankly, would have made the deal without three days of deliberation.

---

In the morning she went to the fence.

"Alright," she said. "One memory. Random. In exchange for — what, exactly? You haven't described what you actually provide."

The large crow ruffled its feathers with what might have been appreciation. "You are more careful than most."

"I've had time to think."

"We restore what's missing. Not your mother — we want to be clear about that, we don't deal in the dead, that's a different