Don't try to scare the crows away

When she woke up, the bandages prickled like straw but she was new again and he would love her. A 46-year-old baby blinking ahead at a fresh century of life with no more crow's feet. It hurt to smile. At home, they watched a Hitchcock with bottles of beer, she all wrapped in bandages. The belly and the invisible woman. He liked classic movies, Lana Turner, and intelligent women like his pilates instructor. He told her she'd lost weight. "Just wait till you see the new me." Death and decay would scatter like birds, she was that new.

The weekend they unwrapped her, they walked in the country. She stood in a cornfield, arms in her new oatmeal pashmina held out to the sun. A crow flapped past and dropped a pellet of crap. She would have screwed up her nose but she was as stiff and rigid as a stake driven into the earth. He left her anyway.