“AUTUMN DREAM” by Lana Wynne

My mother always told me, Do not walk alone in the wood.

I listened to her, until last night. I heard a raven calling to me from the heart of the trees, and he was adamant and fearful. I knew that raven to be my friend, the boy who had died from sleeping in the snow when we were both young and friends of the cold, the both with the raven-black hair and the raven-black eyes, whom everyone had mistaken as my twin. The raven flew to perch in the waves of my hair in the dream, and from his beak there dripped the boy’s voice–gravally now, rich, and manly, as he’d grown–and I knew he needed me. I slipped out from the house, crumbs from dinner’s loaf in my hand, and I reached the outskirts of the trees. But when I tried to step into the black wood, branches extended from the trees like arms and twined around each other, forbidding my passage.

I  closed my eyes, outstretched my hands, and stepped through them, following the warble of the raven.

“Angreek87″