Who's Afear'd?

“Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened.” - Thomas Hardy

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Hello!

Welcome to the miscellaneous writing blog of @cassiopeiasfreckles ; inveterate daydreamer, passable ukulele player, and floppy-haired twink.

This is mostly a place to keep the bits and bobs of prose and poetry that pop into my mind, maybe occasionally other things too! Hopefully you enjoy it ☺️

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No Wiser

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Bruises

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Who By Fire

The question goes up “who’s next, who’s next?”

For another round, one more drink, one more story,

One more tripping chain of events that brought someone here,

To this table of strangers,

Warm wood, soft light,

Sawdust on the floor to soak up spilled drinks,

And tumbled words,

And the past.

One, trench dirt still under his nails,

Took his turn already,

His hair smells of smoke, and sweat,

At last here, in the warm, he is lighter,

Brighter,

His officers and their whistles silent,

No more shooting-star shells ripping the sky.

Another is soaked to the skin,

The gentle splat of the drips from her clothes

Lost under the orange-yellow hum of the room

She’s no longer gasping,

Her mouth empty of salt,

Hair steaming into softer waves, gentler,

Here she can simply drift.

Someone else is tiny, all angles and folds,

The light curdles in their aged nooks,

They smile and nod, flint-bright chips of eyes,

They left family, friends,

Community,

To be here, with strangers,

But they got the time to say a proper goodbye,

And they hold on to that like a halo.

A pair arrived together, not common here,

Wearing tarmac and glass like glitter,

The left hand stretches for the right,

Under the table,

Fingertips aching, empty, repenting,

One will not look at the other,

One won’t look anywhere else.

The final guest flinches from the lantern,

Guilty hands, thick breaths,

There wasn’t meant to be

Any light afterwards to show the consequences with,

But still, there’s awful relief,

Buried in the glassy hiccoughs,

And confessional booth tears.

In truth it doesn’t matter,

Who came by which route,

Everyone will find their way here,

Sometime,

Sooner or later,

To sit with strangers at a table,

Sharing stories to remember,

And to hope they are remembered in return.

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Never a Waste

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Sunk

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The Authors Who Inspire Me Pt 2

Hiromu Arakawa and the Fullmetal Alchemist manga

Fullmetal Alchemist was one of my very first manga/anime loves, along with Cardcaptor Sakura by Clamp, and the combination of levity, sacrifice, action, politics, science-magic, family bonds, and just trying to grow up and do the right thing is probably what has kept me in love with it for so long. Arakawa doesn't shy away from making it dark, but it's not unremittingly grim either, and I'm very much here for how she treads that line so well.

Eoin Colfer's Supernaturalist

Growing up I used to listen to audiobook as I feel asleep and I must have listen to the version narrated by Jack Davenport easily hundreds of times. There was probably a point where I could have narrated it by heart. . . It's a YA sort-of-dystopian sci-fi with themes of found family, obsession, and being an awkward teenager just trying to figure out how you fit into the world. It's quite possibly also another story that's fed into my enjoyment of good world building.

Jane Austen

A bit of a tonal hard left from what I've been talking about up until now, but I do love Austen's novels. I am a sucker for a good love story and I think you'd struggle to argue that Austen's aren't very, very good ones. The wit and social commentary are fantastic and give the books depth beyond just the romance aspect.

Georgette Heyer's Georgian and Regency era romances

I've inherited my love of Heyer from my mum and we've both read all of her Georgian/Regency era romances and most of her historical ones too (we've both less enamoured of her detective novels though). They're very much "feel good" reading with a guaranteed happy ending and plots that range from mildly silly to full on bananas, the two covers pictured above are for two books which I adore for how hatstand their premises are. Heyer was also really, very well researched in her writing and the historical accuracy is perfectly balanced to maintain readability but also make the setting feel properly real.

Some honourable mentions

The History Boys by Alan Bennet

Le Morte D'Arthur by Thomas Malory

The Black Magician Trilogy by Trudi Canavan

The Thursday Next series and The Nursery Crime series by Jasper Fforde

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Radar

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The White Hare

I run. Run and run and run. Moon and sky and earth and grass whistle passed above and beneath me. My heart beats in my chest, in perfect syncopation with the thump-thud of my paws. The front ones hit the earth first, then the powerful back ones, then the whip-crack, glorious moment of weightless flying. Untouchable, free, paler than the wraith-mist that clings low over the fields at daybreak. Geàrr. Lepus. Hara. Hare. Choose whichever name you like, I am what I am. Long-eared, wide-eyed, swift-footed, untamed, and unlike many of my kinfolk, as white as breath in cold air. We are many things to many people; tricksters, mad, a token of love, scared to gods and the Aos sí. Those like me, white hares, have been said to be the familiars of witches, perhaps even a shape-shifted witch herself, or the ghost of broken-hearted lover, unable to rest. Whatever I may be, I run. Run and run and run. Under the self-same silver light that has stitched itself into my coat. Not from anything, nor to anything, just run. For the sake of the sway of the grass rushing around me, the hiss of the night air, the fact that I am alive, unfettered, and free.

The land here drifts in gentle lumps and waves, the rolling spread of it sliced up by hedges into neat fields. A chalk river runs through the bottom of the crevice between the hills, fast and clear and cold. It twists, adder-shaped, and skirts around a clustered peppering of houses. The village and farms buildings are mostly dark by now though, just a bare few windows still red-yellow from the candle light inside. I stay away from the village, keep to the relative safety of the hillside and it’s hedges and small wood, but I can still look down and watch the ebb and flow of people as they move around like a hive of bees. It gives me something to do during the daylight hours, when it’s less safe to run and I don’t quite feel like sleeping, especially as summer is making the days sticky hot and the nights mayfly brief. Better that than the wailing wet and cold of winter though, when the mud will stain my coat and seep between my paw-pads, weighing me down to claw it’s chill into my bones and blood. I shake myself, as if the chill is already there, crystallised somewhere inside my skeleton. I still have some time until sunrise, still have some time to soak in the rush of my earthbound flight. 

Day does indeed see me looking down into the valley. The humans wade through the yellow-dry grass, the tops brushing against their knees, some swaying scythes back and forth in hypnotic arcs, others following behind along the rows of mown grass and raking it into piles ready to be forked into the lumbering hay wagons. I lie beneath a hedge, watching, my ears laying flat to my back and my paws tucked neatly under me. Some of the men were moving too stiffly, clamping their elbows to their sides and forcing all the strength of their swings to come from their core muscles, a quick way to exhaustion and aches the next morning. Others were scything too far in front of themselves, bending forwards to be able to reach and risking toppling over at best and a ruined back at worst. Many figures moved well though, upright and in even, sweeping movements that kept just the right amount of pressure on the blade and left neatly shorn stubble behind them. The satisfying swish and hum of the wicked-sharp blades through the grass whispered up my spine. The rasp and flex of the wooden handle settled warm under my palms. The air sat heavy with the heady, dry, sweet-green of the hay as gentle as bath water. I felt the rhythm in my muscles, blood, bones, all of me moving in perfect concert as the sweat slowly bled into my shirt. I blink. A vicious shudder shakes me from ears to tail and I shiver in my little hedgerow hollow. My hind legs spasm like shooting stars and I’m off, coursing along the hedge line, a blinding white smear on the hillside. I run. Run and run and run. Until I find another soft, hidden spot I can curl up in and sleep until nightfall. 

The next day sees me under the hedge again, as if pulled there by the rocking swish of the mowers like the moon does the tide. My nose twitches, fitful and jerky, and I cannot settle as neatly as I did yesterday. I watch the workers, can spot the logic and purpose behind their movements when surely they should be as impenetrable to me as my nightly sprints would be to them. The men spread out in a long line, each scything a row in parallel to his neighbours. There are many of them, old and young, tall and short, stout and rangy. One of the younger men works very well; quick, thorough, and even. He pauses, leaning on his scythe and pulls a handkerchief out of his pocket and uses it to mop his forehead. The morning sun lies over him like a lazy cat, draped in soft angles across his broad shoulders. He glances over, catching my eye and wiggling his level, fair eyebrows at me. I roll my eyes, huffing an almost soundless snort through my nose and turning back to focussing on my scythe as a smile tips up the corners of my mouth. He’s always been a silly bugger, a great big, lolloping dog of a man, perpetually pleased to see you and ever willing to play the fool. My cheeks are warm, pink from more than just the physical work. I flick my eyes sideways again, find him already looking at me and let my smile spread wider. He beams back. My heart judders in my chest and I explode into a thudding of paws over the grass as I bolt out from under the hedge again. I course along the edge of the field, everything sliding into a slick mess of greens around me, and only manage to rein myself in after I have already covered a considerable distance. I pause, my lungs trying to inhale and exhale all at the same time. My body shivers so hard my ears flap drunkenly around my head. I spare a look back at the field of people, several of them have stopped moving and one of them is pointing up the hill towards me. I canter off again, moving and moving and moving until from ear-tips to tail I have no more left in me to give.

I don’t go back to that spot under the hedge, the after-image ghosts of the things I felt and saw stick in the back of my throat. The dusty, sun-drenched smell of them fills my nose and mouth every time I breathe and so I trace a wide berth around that field. I spend the day curled up tight in my nest-like form and only run at night under the gently familiar stare of the moon. It’s softer, here, in the silver and darkness, there are no fluttering glints of sunlight off the edge of a cheekbone or a toned forearm or work-touseled hair jangling around inside my head like loose stones tumbling down a steep slope. Between sundown and dawn, blissfully, my only thoughts seem to be my own. I hop slowly through the grass eating a last few sweet, dewy mouthfuls as the rising watery light reminds me that it’s almost time to go to ground and sleep out the day. I am drifting, already thinking about which nook I’ll choose to settle in this time. The hillside around me is velvet-quiet, the dawn chorus of the birds muffled by the gentleness of the air. Everything is easy and light, until it isn’t. My ears shoot upright, pivoting towards the faint rustle behind me. I flatten myself down, turning to look over my shoulder. Low, creeping in the rosy light are a bevy of dogs, in a motley of tans and browns and russets, each one focussed with glacial precision on me and a smattering of men behind them. My heart is crumpling into itself. All my muscles shiver and tense tighter than overwound clockwork. I cannot hide, I’m too pale, too obvious. I can only run. Run and run and run.

“See, I told you there were a white hare about.” 

Over-loud, triumphant in the gloom, trailing after me as I pelt through the dampening grass. The dogs yap and clatter behind me, and the thundering footsteps of the men follow behind. My heart is tumbling so quickly the beats have become one long, screaming thrum. My legs are fraying cords, wound so tightly they’re snapping in great juddering clumps but I must keep going. I must. I must. I push on, the ground and sky melting together into a long, wavering, dripping rush of colour. I twist and turn, jinking in fits and starts at odd angles and to no earthly rhythm. I am faster than the thudding paws behind me but still my breaths lodge in my throat, thick and cloying and airless. I split through the fields like an earth-bound comet, racing for the spill of a wood that sits on the sunrise side of the hill. I hit the treeline gracelessly and I can only pray I have put enough distance between me and the baying dogs to give me a chance to go to ground. I lose myself in the scrub, the sounds of pursuit are more distant now, softened by loss of proximity but still enough to make my nerves leap and hang outside of myself. I find a hollow, deep inside a thicket and squeeze myself inside. I cannot stop my body from shuddering so I close my eyes and curl up as tight as I can. All of time stretches by me. I can hear the dogs and the men, shouts and yaps and the thrash of legs through vegetation. A thousand quivering heartbeats go by. Another thousand. The noises are further away. I uncoil a little. I breath again, finally, after so long holding every single piece of myself stone-still. 

I stay in the thicket the rest of the day, only slinking out as the sun starts to set and oblique shafts of light jut between the trees. I move slowly, barely even hopping, through the undergrowth and my mind lags behind me even at that pace. The dregs of the terror have turned my thoughts muddy and slow and I’m sure I am moving right passed tasty, sweet plants I could eat. This muddiness is the only reason I can give for how I didn’t see the Spaniel until she is almost on top of me. She yips and I lock up, eyes so wide my sight blurs at the edges. She noses towards me but then a sharp voice splits the silence of the wood,

“Betsy, leave be.”

Footsteps crunch over deadwood and I look up. It’s the broad shouldered man from the fields, the one whose face I knew without being able to see it. His slightly crooked nose, his flat brows, his spray of summer freckles all the same but there are heavy, greyish bags under his eyes and his cheeks and jaw are covered by a thickly growing in beard. He does not shine, not here under the trees, if anything the dying sunlight just curdles in the ragged lines of him. He swallows, thickly enough that I can hear it, as he stares down at me. Betsy sits, head cocked to the side and tongue lolling from her mouth. The man takes a careful, slow step forward. I jerk, bunching up to launch myself off and away.

“Please,” he gasps it out quickly, one hand stretching out to me, “please stay.”

I shouldn’t. I should run. His eyes are duller, greyer, the colour the fallen leaves turn after they’ve been frost-bitten. They never used to be like that, they’d always had life, like a candle flame, in them. His hair had been shorter too, not vainly kept but practically neat, and the skin around his nails is red raw where he’d been picking at it. Why? What had stripped the light that’d spun out from him in my inexplicable memories from him? My body is washed with prickling jitters again, my heart is clattering and I can feel the rush of blood through my veins, but my paws don’t move at all.

“Please I have to know. I have to know if it’s you.” His jaw is shaking and he shuffles closer, dropping down to his knees, “J. . . Johnny?”

My whole ribcage aches, pressing out and out against my skin. Yes. I am. I was. Before I was this I was something else, a man. A man who would scythe the row next to this one, who would look over at how the soaring sky would silhouette him and it’d make my lungs fill with swifts in flight. A man who would feel the press of this man’s thigh against his leg unseen under the table at the pub, who would slide his fingers together with this man’s as they walked home in the dark. Before I was this, I was Johnny, and I was his. So I hop unsteadily forwards, my ears slowly rising from being flattened against my back. I brush my nose against his outstretched fingers.

“Oh Johnny,” his voice crackles as he lifts me carefully, cradling me against his chest, “my love, I’m so sorry.”

I can feel his words on my skin as he mumbles them into my fur. My ribs jitter and ache, I can do nothing besides press my nose into his cheek. My bones burn even as dread-cold runs from the base of my tail to the crown of my skull. It’d been so cold that night, the wind and rain competing to see which could make the most noise. Not that we’d noticed, he and I, my Gabe and I. Not when we’d been tangled so tight around one another in the hay barn, his hands on my skin, my lips on his neck. We’d not heard Farmer Archett coming in to check the roof hadn’t started leaking again. It had only been when the light of his lantern hit us that we’d realised we weren’t alone. We’d run then, scrambling and skittering out the back and into the teeth of the weather. Gabe had taken my hand, dragging me out across the fields, both of us soaked to the bones in seconds. The storm had curdled the sky pitch-black, I couldn’t see him, only feel his fingers locked around mine. We’d run. Run and run and run. Until Gabe tripped, fell away from me and our rain-slick fingers couldn’t keep our grip on each other. He disappeared entirely. I’d stumbled around, groping blindly and shouting uselessly into the howling wind, my fingers shuddering and so numb they burned. I couldn’t find him. I couldn’t hear the river either. Not until I was in it. I can’t remember any more after that. 

Gabe holds me close, his shoulders shaking as he whispers over and over again, “I’m sorry, I’m so, so sorry, I love you, I’m sorry.”

My coat is getting damp where his face is pressed into it, and when I next groom that patch it’ll taste of salt. I nuzzle his cheek again, lick it softly, and every fibre of me wails for my lack of hands and words. My pulse beats like church bells, echoing around inside me, perhaps a salutation or perhaps a dirge I’m not sure. I would dissolve, if I could, pass outside of myself and meld into him and hold on. Hold on so tightly, in the way we didn’t manage that night, so that we couldn’t ever be separate again. But even with whatever grace or cruelty that means I am still here, dressed in my mink-white fur, black-tipped ears, and star-gazer’s eyes, it’s too late for that. For all he is holding me and I am pressing myself into him, we are apart, and we always will be now. Gabe sucks in a wavering, ragged breath, his throat clicking and grinding with smothered words. He squeezes me tighter, just briefly, and then lowers me softly back onto the grass. I sit there, head tipped back so I can look up at his face. His cheeks are blotched red, the sticky traces of tears smudged over them. I shuffle-hop forwards a little and set my front paws on one of his knees. He swallows thickly, eyebrows pulled together, and runs a shaky hand over my ears. He licks his lips,

“Be safe my lovely, be free.”

I hang, for a breathless moment, utterly still and dazed. His eyes are so, so warm, a blazing hearth in mid-winter. I melt under them still, just as I always did. Unstuck, unfrozen, I bob my head, just the once, and then I uncoil like a lightning strike. I jackknife, pushing off with my hind legs and bolt so fast all the muscles in my body crackle and roar. I run. Run and run and run.

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Making Saints

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Cardboard Heart

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The Authors Who Inspire Me

I've read a lot during my life so far, and I've been making up stories for almost as long as I can remember. It'd be almost impossible for my own writing not to have drawn from and been shaped by the books that I've loved and the authors who wrote them. So, I figured I'd talk through what those books and who those authors are!

I'm going to start with ones from my teens and childhood first seeing as they've been with me the longest and go from there.

Tamora Pierce and her Tortall universe books

I could not tell you how many times I've read these books! The covers pictured are the editions of The Song of the Lioness Quartet (left) and The Protector of the Small Quartet (right) but I have, as far as I'm aware, all the Tortall books that Pierce has released. They are glorious medieval fantasy books with anything but bland central female characters that don't shy away from dealing with the messiness of growing up, gender, war, politics, duty, honour, justice, and friendship.

Garth Nix and the Old Kingdom Series

You'll begin to see a running theme in these books that probably explains my fascination with fantasy and world building. . . so it's no surprise that a series set in a world in part so similar to the real one and in part so very different with yet more capable, interesting female leads caught me.

Paul Stewart, Chris Riddell and the Edge Chronicles

Oh look, even more fantasy world building! Also, Chris Riddell's illustration style is wonderful and I still think these books have some A+ creature design to this day. It also absolute tracks that I read these when I was young and then became a D&D playing adult 😅

Some other honourable mentions:

The Looking Glass Wars by Frank Beddor

Un Lun Dun by China Miéville

The Skullduggery Pleasant series by Derek Landy

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An Arts and Crafts life

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Puddles

You know the water you see on hot tarmac sometimes, the kind that isn’t water really at all? Those ghost-like, shimmering puddles that ripple and dance away from you no matter how hard you try to get close to them. The ones that paradoxically only seem to appear when the sky has been baking the earth dry for days and weeks until all the world is parched and gasping. Yeah, those ones. Well, what are they? Science will tell you that it’s light being bent by the density difference between the blistering hot air just above the road and the cooler air higher up. The variation messed with the refraction and splashed a reflection of the sky over the sticky asphalt. Two things we can’t see or touch, light and air, dragging the whole sky down to lay at our feet. Miracles happen everywhere, if you care to look for them. Sometimes they can nest inside one another as well, because what if I told you those puddles weren’t just bent light?

Because once, when I was sunburned, and clammy, and almost tipping over the edge of not believing in these sorts of things anymore, I watched someone climb out of one of those puddles. They hauled themselves up and out into dust-thick summer air, the kind of air that would smell of that one particular smell if it chanced to rain. There wasn’t much to them, older enough than me that my brain shuffled them nebulously into the “miscellaneous grown up” category but not old enough to go in the “old person” category. They were dressed as if it were about ten degrees cooler out than it really was, and brushed dust off their jeans and flicked star-spark drops of oil slick mirage from their battered shoes as they stood up. My lungs lodged somewhere in my throat, dry and crackling, as my heart vibrated in fits and starts behind my ribs. I scrambled towards them, tripping over myself and my tongue and teeth desperately trying to chew my words out. I needed this. I needed to know how to touch the not-there-water.

“What was that?” It fell out of me in a breathless rush, scattered over the ground like marbles.

The person turned to look at me, gave me a half-hearted once over that copped out somewhere at elbow level, “just a puddle kid.”

“But, but you came out of it.”

They hissed a sigh in through and then back out of their teeth, “yeah, I guess I did.”

“How do I do that?”

They shrugged, starting to walk passed me and down the road. I squeezed my hands into fists, fingernails digging into my damp palms. The electric buzzing of my heartbeat rippled a fizzing rush through all my bones. I bit my tongue. I breathed deep. It tasted like copper and pollen. The puddle-climber was almost at the corner where the bus stop that wasn’t a bus stop anymore was. I glanced down at the puddle again, still shifting and sky-bright in the corner of my eye, and yelled down the road,

“Please.”

The person stopped, I could see their shoulders rise and fall with a sigh as they ran a hand through their hair, “it’s all just light,” they hadn’t bothered to turn around, “figure out what the light’s got to say and then you’ll know.”

They strode off, around the corner and away. I whirled back around to the faux-puddle, the soles of my shoes making tacky, velcro-unsticking noises and tiny strings of bitumen stretching between them and the road. I reached for the water that wasn’t really even there, fingers stretching so hard it ached, but I couldn’t catch it. It skittered away, dancing across nothing until it shimmered into place again in the distance. It was like looking for the end of the rainbow, it was always somewhere else. There’s something in that, in how we go chasing after things we can’t ever reach about being human. Always searching, always looking, always hoping that next, surely next time, we’ll get it. Something in that desire to grip and clasp and hold close the thing that relativity demands we can never move faster than, that coined the wave-particle duality. We are remarkable in our tenacity, for better or for worse. 

It’s all just light. That’s all I had, so I took in both hands and ran, with my heart in my mouth and all my hope cradled tight to my chest. How do you speak to light though? How do you listen to something without a mouth or a voice? I tried to whisper to candle flames, hunching over them in a darkened room, all the hairs on my arms standing on end and my almost breathless words making the flame flicker and waver. The candle burned, the wax ran down in thick globs, I burned my eyebrows a couple of times. Nothing. My stomach sank, leaden and crumpled, and then it flared. Brighter and whiter and hotter than the candle had ever been. Not yet. I would not, could not, damn well refused to give in already. So what if the light wouldn’t speak to me yet, one way or another, I’d make it. So I turned to learning, trying my best to understand this thing I couldn’t feel or taste or hear. I started with the most important light sources in the universe. Stars. Did you know that stars are born from dust, and gravity, and heat? Tiny balls of energy that burn hydrogen, then helium, then carbon, oxygen, silicon. Burning more and more as they get bigger and bigger. Making more and more, giving us light and heat and elements. They die as well, and even then they create. Exploding white dwarfs scatter precious metals into the universe. They made all the iron in your blood. 

There’s beauty in science if you know how to look, but there’s more to stars than purely that. We’ve loved the stars for far, far longer than we’ve understood them you see. Loved them since they were just the haphazard spray of pinpricks that stopped the night being so cloyingly, terrifyingly dark, and because we loved them we stitched them into shapes and stories and gods. Again, how achingly human we are, hopeless romantics for the welcome glitter in the blackness. So much so that most of us know at least some of the shapes we’ve drawn across the sky. Like the Ursas Major and Minor with their impossible bottle brush tails, or maybe you call one of them the Plough, or the Big Dipper, or the Pointers, or whatever. What does it matter? It’s all swings and roundabouts really, or constellations and asterisms in this case I suppose. Because isn’t it wonderful, doesn’t it make the heavy ocean of history seem a little lighter; that if we point into the night and ask the Greeks what we can see they’d tell us that it’s the shape of Callisto turned into a bear, the Arabs will tell you its a funeral, the Iroquois three hunters and the bear they track, to the Koreans it is the seven loving sons of a widowed mother. No matter where, or when, we have always, always told stories. So I’ll gladly take your Dutchman smoking with the Devil, and your painter’s easel, and your four auspicious beasts.

Is this what the stranger meant? Had I listened enough yet for the light to tell me how to reach those untouchable puddles? I’ve poured years into learning and I still don’t know. I can pick out Cassiopeia, damning her own daughter to be chained to a rock, and I can calculate parallax but I still don’t know what the light itself has to say. I lie in the grass, letting the earth carry the weight of all my wondering for a while. Letting the solidity beneath me ease the ache of all those questions I knew so well I could describe the taste of them. Another summer of hunting after shimmering, refracted light, another summer where so far it’d stayed dancing just out of reach. My millennia-old friends above me, with satellites and plane lights sliding slowly in between. I hold my hand up, nails bitten, fingertips tracing out the familiar lines as if was all some sort of cosmic braille making letters for touching and not seeing. My fingers scud over the darkness, all smooth and velvet thick. One by one, like stretching cats, the grains of light rise to meet my fingers. The night turning into the reel in one of those little metal music boxes any my fingers the tines that played the song. My little finger catches on something, a ruched edge or a seam. I push it down, smooth it out but it curls up again. I pinch it instead, pulling, and the whole thing comes falling down. 

Like scales, or feathers, or polystyrene ceiling tiles cards tumble down and scatter over me and the grass around me. Thick cardstock, bigger than playing cards with constellations of holes in them. A deck from back when computers took up whole rooms and programming was done on punch cards. I gather up the stars written out in binary. Science and history and myths in ones and zeros. The Milky Way built out of “else” and “if” statements. I slip them into my pocket and carry them home. Then, when the sun’s up and the air is bright and hot again I take my cards out to the tarmac. My pulse slips sideways, fast and stuttering. I can see the hazy wavering of a puddle, colourful as bismuth and liquid as mercury. One deep breath, in and out, then I step towards it. I trip into a jog, then a run, the fools-gold water getting closer and closer until my toes are on the edge of it. Finally. I can’t breath, there’s no space in my lungs to it air alongside the weightless fizzing. I fumble the cards out of my pocket, drawing one at random, and bend down. I push it into the mirage, it ripples, and then the impossible water shows me a sky that isn’t the one above me. I slowly draw the card back out. Then, I step in.