Raven in the wood

“We heard that if you split a raven’s tongue, it’ll talk like a parrot,” said the beautiful girl studying my raven drawings. My breath caught and fluttered in my throat like a trapped bird. She’d already told me that she used to steal raven nestlings in Ruidoso where she was raised up. Then she cut her eyes at me, “but that didn’t sound like fun, so we didn’t do it.”

Raven in the wood carved by Beth Surdut  2012