… which sounds like an advert for a heartburn pill, but is not.
It’s the relief of a writer who, having finished up a few projects, has had empty brain and a dose of contentment for a while … and not a creative thought in sight. This is a disturbing phase, when one of the voices in the head starts to say “You’ll never write again, y’know … that was it, bimbo. You are so totally done.” It may say it so many times that you start to believe it … although I generally try to shut the inner critic up with choclit.
This afternoon, after a couple of months of percolating, of researching bits and pieces and climbing (read: scrambling) up and down a mountain and doing a bush walk in the rain avec leeches, I finally had the urge to write. Something came through.
And so, Ragged Run is beginning to take shape … in novella form, I do believe.
The night moved, liquid sheets of black spread out then folded back in on themselves. The breeze, seemingly benign in the sticky summer heat, made its way down –– Street. It picked up pieces of garbage as it went, discarded newspapers, chip packets, cigarette boxes. It plucked dirt and detritus from the gutters, sweeping all it could find into an ever-growing, rapidly formed body. It looked like a man, a rough torn thing though; a man of rags and trash and darkness.
Had anyone been paying attention, they might have noticed when it began its journey turning off Brunswick Street and rolling down the slow incline, that the sound of well-shod footsteps was audible. But as the road sloped, drew further away from the lights, as the whirlwind picked up speed and mass, the noise of anything remotely human was lost.
Almost at the bottom of the thoroughfare, almost at the glamour of the James Street precinct, the whirlwind feinted right, then turned a hard left.
The homeless man who’d been sheltering in the curve of the cement garden wall felt only a brief sting of ice reaching into his lungs, then the crushing sensation of too much air all around him as he was lifted from the ground and quickly ceased to be.
At the very bottom, where the streetlights bloomed, the sound of footsteps was once again heard.