5 word challenge 4/14/08 - The Crow

From ancora impara comes this week's Five Word Challenge.

In honor of Billie Holliday's birthday today, all of today's new words are pulled from her moving song entitled

Strange Fruit.

This week's words are: fruit, crows, south, flesh, breeze.

If you wish to participate, compose a poem, essay, story, reminisce or stream of consciousness using those words, and highlighting your usage of those words in bold.

Happy writing!

Edited to add:  This is for the group 5 word challenge.  If any of my neighbors are interested in this, I invite them to go over to that group to contribute a piece of writing."

Here is my submission:

As the storm bullied the house outside, Carmen sliced the fruit for Mason's cake.  Her thoughts wondered through the past 10 years of her life.  She remembered the wide-eyed wonder in which he stared at her from the recieving blanket on the night of his birth.  The sweet smell of his breath and the warmth of his flesh, as real to her today as it was then.

She nicked her thumb with the knife and pulled it quickly to her mouth.  Sucking gently, she could taste her blood as the breeze from the ceiling fan made her shiver.  Running warm water over her thumb in the sink and then wrapping a paper towel around it, she walked to the wall and turned off the switch for the fan.  The temperature must be dropping outside, she thought to herself.

That was part of living in the South.  One moment it could be a humid 80 degrees and the next a storm could blow in and bring rain, ice and snow with it.  This was as true in October, as it was in April. 

April 1998.  The night Mason was born.  It was storming that night too.  Tornado warnings blasted during the local news.  Carmen had been asleep, dreaming of having tea with a crow.  Crows, like angels, were once believed to be the messengers of the gods.  Some believe it indicates fortune-telling.  The crow in her dream told her she'd have a son and that he would die on his 10th birthday.  She awoke in labor, drenched in sweat, her heart beating wildly from the pain and the dream.  Mason was born less than two hours later.  She almost didn't make it to the hospital.

Mason was 10 today and she was making his favorite cake.  For the first time in 10 years, she dreamt of the crow again last night.