Raven

by Nicholas Grider 

I looked so different from the others, my mother always said, because I had the soul of a crow and they had the souls of tigers, and I never asked her why, and never asked why crow and not raven, because when I was old enough and finally bled in the field behind the house it was the black of a raven, not the ordinary red of a crow.

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Nicholas Grider is not clever. He is, however, an artist and writer whose first book, the story collection Misadventure, will be published by A Strange Object in February 2014.