author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

A huge black crow swept across the sky accompanied, half a mile below, by its shadow on the forest of apartment building roofs. For half a second the distance between the two birds grew and then shrank again as the crow's shadow passed over a clearing, a small square of soil between the buildings. The bird's wing blocked the sun and flickered in a woman's eye. She blinked and cast above her for the source of the irregularity, squinting against the sun's rays, but the crow had gone, well on its way towards whatever it is crows seek.

Nothing grew on this patch of soil. It had been years since the woman had tried. Now she simply sat there for half an hour out of this day or that, imagining herself a flower that tried to grow in the barren would-be garden. She saw herself a green shoot that sprang up from the half-buried seed, saw her questing tip put forth leaves and then a bud--but she couldn't get the bud to open into blossom. She could not see herself bloom.

Because it provides context. It provides a frame. If one writes bedtime stories last thing before sleep and then wakes to make more stories out of what dreams one remembers, these activities form a sort of contextual bracket around the day. It becomes a day in the life of a writer, and not merely a day in which one writes.

That's why.

And so, that settled, good-night.