By Mac Mckechnie
The village had forgotten her.
Mara lived in the last house before the fields turned to forest, a crooked stone cottage with warped shutters and ivy swallowing the windowsills. No one came out this far anymore. There were no children to chase foxes through the hedgerows, no bells from the chapel, no knocks at her door. Only the wind, and the crows.
They gathered by the dozens in the trees behind her home—perched like black fruit on bare branches, watching. She never chased them away. She fed them scraps, stale bread, bone ends. Sometimes, she swore they blinked at her in something like recognition.
It had been seven years since her son died.
Since then, Mara had grown thin and pale, like wax left too near the fire. She spoke only to the birds. Her voice was soft from disuse, like pages worn thin in an old book. Grief and loneliness had become her furniture—settled in the corners, familiar, undisturbed.
Each day was the same:
She lit the stove.
She boiled tea she never drank.
She tended the garden though nothing grew.
And she sat.
She sat for hours in the parlour, arms crossed over her chest like a shield, listening to the scratching of claws on slate roofs and the low murmurs of feathers rustling in trees.
Then, one dusk in early autumn, came the knock.
Not on the door. On the glass.
She turned, slow as old bark cracking in winter. At the window: a boy. No more than ten. Hair dark and tangled, eyes pale as river glass. He stood barefoot in the garden, motionless. There was no expression on his face. Just stillness.
She opened the door without thinking.
The boy stepped in without speaking. His clothes were threadbare, hanging strangely on him, like they weren’t really his. Wherever he walked, he left faint trails of feathers—small, black, iridescent things that shimmered in the low light.
Mara said nothing. She didn’t ask who he was, or where he’d come from. Loneliness had made questions feel dangerous. Besides, some part of her recognised the hollow shape in him.
He sat by the fire, legs tucked beneath him, hands folded neatly.
She cooked porridge and served him a bowl. He didn’t eat.
Still, she left it there.
When she woke the next morning, the boy was gone.
The bowl was empty. Only a single feather remained on the chair where he’d sat.
She picked it up, held it between two fingers, and closed her eyes.
Outside, the trees were full of crows.
But none of them were singing.
He came back the next evening, just after the light had gone soft and coppery, just as the first crows began to gather on the wires.
This time, Mara was waiting.
She had lit the lamps early, drawn the curtains, and prepared a second bowl of stew she hadn’t expected anyone to eat. She didn’t ask where he had gone or why he had returned. He stepped inside as though he belonged, barefoot again, silent.
He sat by the hearth, as before.
This time, he ate.
Slowly, mechanically. As if learning how.
Mara watched him from her chair, not speaking. The fire crackled between them like a pulse. She noticed, now, how his hair caught the light—iridescent, almost feathered. His fingers were thin and long, and when he blinked, it was just a beat too slow.
He didn’t speak, but there was no unease between them. Only stillness. And in that stillness, Mara felt something she hadn’t known in years.
Not comfort.
But company.
She named him Ash, though she never said it aloud. Just thought it quietly, as she folded blankets and poured tea, as she picked burs from the garden path so he wouldn’t step on them.
Ash came every evening.
He never knocked.
Sometimes he sat by the fire, sometimes he stared out the window with his chin resting on the sill, eyes following the flight of the crows. She began to talk to him in small pieces—stories of the village as it used to be, her son’s laugh, the garden that once bloomed.
Ash listened.
He never answered. But the crows did.
She began to notice how their caws shifted. They echoed her words back to her in rhythm, not meaning. They repeated the cadences of her voice. Once, one of them mimicked a laugh—her son’s laugh—and it stopped her cold in the middle of stirring porridge.
She turned and found Ash watching her.
His expression unreadable.
She began to dream again—fragments of feathers in her sheets, dark wings brushing her skin. She would wake to find a single black plume on the pillow beside her, or tiny claw prints on the windowsill.
And slowly, something else began to change.
There were fewer crows in the trees.
Where once a dozen had lined the back fence, now there were two. The branches no longer bowed under their weight. The roof was quiet.
Ash’s eyes were changing too—less pale now, more human. His voice, still unused, seemed to press against his throat when she told stories, as if something inside him wanted to speak.
He smiled once, faintly.
It was enough to break her.
Mara sat in the parlour that night long after he’d gone, hands trembling around her mug. The warmth inside her chest felt like joy, but she didn’t trust it. She had loved once before, and the world had taken that love from her.
She looked out into the dark.
There were no crows.
Just the sound of wind through bare trees, and the memory of feathers brushing against her feet as Ash walked silently away.
Mara searched the woods for three days.
She carried a torch, though the days were grey and damp, and the nights colder than they should have been. She whispered Ash’s name into the trees, though she had never spoken it aloud before. Her voice cracked from the effort.
There were no crows.
No rustle of wings. No black shapes in the trees. The world had gone still, as if the birds had taken sound with them.
On the fourth morning, she found him.
At the base of the old shrine in the grove beyond the village—a moss-covered relic of stone and ivy, long forgotten by everyone but the birds. Ash sat curled beside it, his skin grey-blue in the mist, his limbs folded like broken wings.
He looked up at her, and his eyes were dim.
She rushed to him, dropped to her knees, held his face in her hands. His skin was colder now. His frame thinner. His breath shallow, like wind through reeds.
He didn’t speak, but his lips moved.
She understood anyway.
“I stayed too long.”
His body had become almost fully human. No feathers now, only bruised skin and hollow bones. But he was fading.
She pressed her forehead to his. “Stay,” she whispered.
Ash’s eyes filled with something that might have been sorrow. Or relief.
And then she understood.
He had been made from mourning.
From the ache of every night she sat in silence, from the thousand things she never said, from the grief that had clung to her like smoke. The crows had gathered it all, woven it into a shape her soul could recognise. But love — real love — had made him fragile.
The more human he became, the more the magic failed.
If she kept him, he would die.
If she let him go, she would be alone again.
She held him tighter.
“I’m not ready,” she said. “Please.”
But even as she said it, her arms loosened.
Ash leaned forward, pressed his forehead to hers again, and closed his eyes.
A breeze stirred the trees.
Then the wind rose, and the sky filled with wings.
A hundred black birds burst upwards from the forest floor, spinning and crying and swirling into the air like a single, shattering exhale. Mara’s arms closed on nothing.
He was gone.
Only a scatter of feathers remained on the ground.
She knelt for a long time.
Not crying. Not yet. Just breathing.
Spring came late that year.
The trees bloomed shyly, the frost melted slower than usual, and Mara stayed in her garden, tending the soil with quiet hands.
Each morning, just as the sun began to rise, a single crow landed on the fencepost beside her.
It never cawed. Never stirred.
It simply watched.
She smiled at it.
And in that moment, she no longer felt lonely or alone.
Author Bio:
“It Came Out Like This” – Again
Stories, Poems, and Echoes of the Heart
Book 2 of the “It Came out Like This” series consists of Eighteen original short stories—some uplifting, others unsettling—are threaded together with poetic bridges that hum with nostalgia, heartbreak, and hope. Together they form a tapestry of lives lived and nearly lost, of loves remembered, choices made, and the mysterious spaces that sit between silence and sound. The Boy Made of Crows is just one of those stories. The book is available in Paperback on Amazon.
Mac Mckechnie is a Yorkshireman and lives in Barnsley South Yorkshire. Now aged 75 he has the luxury of sufficient time on his hands to go back to his love of writing. He leads a creative writing group in Barnsley, and a lot of his ideas are sparked from work within that group.
Mac is a family man at heart, has a few hobbies, is a member of the organisation u3a, which is an organisation for older people, where he leads a group with the sport Kurling, and also the writing group. Mac is an active Christian, and the Pastor of his local church in Barnsley.
Mac has written several books, Sci-Fi being his favourite genre, but confesses that he is drawn to simple animal adventures from his younger days. This book is a simple collection of short stories and poems, owing much of its creation to stories from Bu3a creative writing groups that Mac leads. His next book in the series “It Came Out like this for the Last Time” (The third in the series) is out soon on paperback and will also be available on Amazon.
Contact Author:
I can be contacted on mckechnie31@btinternet.com
