I came home from a book swap and tried to sleep. I had exchanged five books from the Endless Reads 2012 list for four others, donated just like mine. Two anthologies, one a great slab of English Literature so heavy that carrying it made me tilt to one side, the other Scottish. Two novels. It was a fine haul, and I was pleased to meet members of the Society of Young Publishers who had organised it, and drink white wine, and banter about books and life.
Why couldn’t I sleep, when I came home?
Something was building inside. A realisation. Perhaps all those books, all that talk of writing. Late at night I lay awake fretful. My current book needed something. It needed relaying of veins and wiring. It needed to glow far less defuse than it did. Luminescence, or aiming for that, anyway. I set to work cranking and adjusting and ripping out and heaving and trying to fire sparks out of my fingers, trying to refine and distill as much as I could. Trying to be a mechanic of words, rather than a painter. I showed what I’d written to D, to see if I was not careening wildly off the mark and he agreed this was far better.
Aida slipped off her skin and underneath was Astral, covered in fishscale silver. Her eyes are slier and her mind more livid. I have hopes for her, energy to devote to her. Those water droplets on the window may in fact be from drying clothes, but feel like they came from the effort of this ondine thing crawling up to be reborn.
