You Went Searching for the Crows
Maeve W.
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"You Went Searching for the Crows” is a piece of speculative flash fiction, which explores, as central themes, the ideas of home and belonging (or lack thereof). While the otherworldly setting of the piece might feel unfamiliar and — intentionally — a bit nebulous to readers, my hope is that it is not so far removed from phenomena, experiences, and images of our own world as to make it completely unrecognizable. For instance, while maybe we don’t frequently hear about instances of regions ravaged by human-eating birds, our world certainly experiences its share of natural disasters that devastate cities, and even entire countries, forcing large communities to resettle. Many of the ideas and questions on which the story is built are ones that I think of as universally human. I think that at an innate level, most – if not all – humans are curious about their origins, and feel a deep desire to belong and to gain an understanding of their past, an understanding which will ultimately inform their sense of self and perspective throughout their entire life.
On a grammatical level, I experimented with a few new techniques when writing this piece, namely using a second-person narrative perspective, and shifting tenses. While I’ve written a bit of poetry in the second-person, this was my first piece of fiction that used second-person narration, and especially a series of events which hinged so crucially on this narrative perspective. In a similar way, a clear shift in tense, from past to present, near the height of the story aimed to build suspense and advance the plot.
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I use writing to fulfill a duty to myself. It is a form of catharsis, a way to explore the joys, pains, and intricacies of what it means to be human, and a way to express the unique beauty I find in the little details of day-to-day life.
