The tea in the cup has gone cold — abandoned. Both cup and saucer sit forlornly on the worn table. A tall woman stands by the kitchen window, her back turned to the half-drunk tea. Her eyes are fastened on the spectacle erupting in her backyard. She watches as a flurry of starlings streaks through the trees, erupting in a shrill chorus: alarm calls (she knows from experience) that most likely mean a hawk is circling overhead. She watches the smaller birds as they dart in and out of the branches, and their mad dance both thrills and distresses her. The woman steps closer to the window now, close enough to feel the cool spring air making its determined way through the endless cracks to her skin. The hawk is nowhere in sight, but can she feel its presence, and a strange charge of fear ripples through her body. The starlings’ cries go on for another minute, then suddenly stop; the birds scattering.

   She scans the sky again for the hawk, and then returns to the abandoned tea. It is cold. She does not enjoy tea that has gone cold: it must be drunk while piping hot, a hot that burns your throat as you drink it… the kind of hot that requires careful blowing (She has taught her children to do this so they don’t greedily lap up the steaming liquid and burn their lips and tongues). Sighing now, she picks up the cup and moves slowly toward the sink, watching as her reflection dissolves and reforms on the surface of the cold tea. She sets the cup in the sink, and as she does the front door opens and the sounds of her children filter through to her. She shifts her weight restlessly: The hawk’s visit has awakened a distress call in her, one that now threatens to bubble up from deep within her and escape in a mad cry. She swallows and, practiced in disguise, sets her face and closes her fluttering heart. She steps out of the kitchen and towards the needs of her children.

   Later, after the children have gone to bed, she sits in the sometime quiet of her bedroom. She pulls a skein of red yarn out from its basket and runs her fingers over the wool. She plans to add it into a blanket that she started when her children were young. She has been knitting the blanket for a long time. She is not an expert— it goes slowly, and the wool has changed over the years. When she began she was advised to buy all of her yarn all at the same time in order to ensure consistency. She did not heed the advice (when has she?), and instead has had to add the red wool in a piecemeal way that has made the blanket feel like a red river, flushed with crimsons, maroons, ruby, and magenta. She thinks it may be almost finished. She tugs a strand of wool free from the skein and begins to knit, and the skein falls softly back into the basket. It nestles beside a skein of blue — turquoise blue — bought on a whim (perhaps in a dream?). As she knits, she remembers the afternoon starlings’ haunting cries. A chill of recognition goes down her spine, and she feels her gaze inexplicably drawn toward… drawn into that turquoise. It floods her. She swallows, and now, bending softly, reaches for the new yarn and begins again. She will knit the river of her life.