FICTION
The Woman and the Raven
There is a woman — sixty years old, though she wears it lightly, as if age brushed past her without quite settling in. Her days are full, her life vibrant with color. She is generous with her time and her words. She feeds the hungry. Her home is open to those who need shelter. She writes things in hopes of making people feel seen. She creates spaces of quiet beauty, where even sorrow can take off its shoes and rest awhile.
She is not lonely in the usual sense.
Her house is not empty. Friends visit. Children — grown, but still hers — call regularly. Her calendar holds lunches, volunteer work, Bible studies, dinners, mission trips, long walks, and slow afternoons spent on porches with people who love her well enough. The kind who bring soup when she’s sick, who remember her birthday, who pray for her by name.
And yet.
And yet there is something missing, and she feels it in her bones. Not like a sharp pain, more like a low hum — persistent, familiar, unanswered.
Her husband died four years ago. He was the only one who ever really got her. Well, mostly. There were still times she would try to explain some thought too tangled or too fast or too ancient for words, and he would squint and nod, trying to care, while his eyes gave him away. But still, he tried. He wanted to understand. And he stayed. He stayed every day of their married life, and for that alone, she loved him more than words could carry.
She does not want a replacement. That’s not what this is.
What she longs for isn’t just companionship — it’s communion. The kind of mind-to-mind fellowship that dives deep into the questions most people don’t even think to ask. She wants to explore the space where science and Scripture meet, where string theory brushes up against the concept of Heaven, where entropy might be the shadow of sin, and where the Garden before the Fall could be described in terms of perfect homeostasis. She wants to ask whether the Bible’s claim that “God holds all things together” could be scientifically literal — rooted in the mystery of quantum glue and the unknowable essence of gravity. She wants to talk about how an egg emits a spark of light at the moment of conception and ask, without irony or hesitation, is that the moment a soul is born? But to do that, she needs someone rare — someone knowledgeable enough to join the conversation, intelligent enough to follow it, and curious enough to want it in the first place. But she has not met anyone like that in four years. Maybe not ever, not really.
She feels ungrateful admitting this, even to herself. How can someone so loved, so surrounded by blessing, still ache? It feels like a betrayal of the good things. Like asking for a feast while already holding a plate full of manna.
She walks early in the mornings, before the sun has fully lifted its head. One such morning, the sky still pearled with fog, she wanders a bit farther than usual. Through a field, past a fence, into the woods behind the old chapel.
That’s where she hears it.
A click. A caw. A rustle of wing and black feather.
A raven, perched just above her on a gnarled pine limb, stares down with eyes too sharp for comfort. There’s no one else around.
The woman stops.
“Well,” she says softly, “aren’t you beautiful.”
The raven tilts its head. Its voice, when it comes, is not a voice at all, and yet she hears it just the same — not with her ears, but with something older.
“You are not ungrateful.”
The woman blinks. She says nothing, but her heart lurches.
“You are hungry.”
She lets out a slow breath. “Is it wrong to be?”
“Was it wrong for Elijah to be hungry in the wilderness?”
She shakes her head.
“Was it wrong for him to want to be understood?”
“No,” she whispers. “He thought he was alone.”
The raven’s black eyes blink, once.
“He wasn’t.”
The woman stands very still.
“There are others. Not many. But they exist.”
“I don’t know a single one,” she says.
“You don’t have to. Not yet. It is enough that they are.”
She swallows. “Then why does it hurt?”
The raven leans forward, almost amused.
“Because you remember Eden. Your soul remembers walking with God in the cool of the day, with nothing hidden and nothing broken. You were made for that kind of knowing.”
The woman’s eyes sting. She does not cry, but her hand drifts to her heart, pressing gently, as if to calm the ache.
“You are not a problem to be fixed,” the raven continues. “You are a reflection of the divine. Even your longing is sacred.”
“I thought I was just ... a unicorn. Too much for this world.”
“Even unicorns need rest,” says the raven. “Even prophets need bread. Even you, wise and strong as you are, were made for the garden. And it is not here. Not fully.”
She lowers her head. “Will I always feel this way?”
The raven pauses.
“Perhaps. Until the day when you are known as you are fully known.”
The wind stirs through the trees.
“But between now and then,” it adds, “you will have moments. A sentence here. A glance there. A silence that says everything. Don’t despise them. They are echoes of home.”
The woman lifts her eyes.
“Will I find one of them? One of the others?”
“Perhaps. Or perhaps someone will find you.”
And then the raven lifts off, cutting through the morning fog with the grace of something that remembers the beginning of time.
The woman watches it vanish into the lightening sky.
She does not have answers. But she has something else now.
She has permission.
To ache. To hope. To remember Eden.
And to keep walking, one sacred step at a time.
Victoria Stewart is a Southern writer with a heart for stories that explore redemption, identity, and the quiet strength of everyday people. She recently published her debut novel, When It Reines, a work of Christian fiction set on the fictional Reine Island, and is currently working on a follow-up novel as well as a series of chapter books for older elementary readers. Her writing blends warmth, depth, and a touch of mystery, as seen in her short story “The Woman and the Raven.”
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