Chapter One

I am a wishing. I visit so many, slipping from the tips of tongues and the heath of the heart. So few hold onto me in the seamless places where they need me that I wonder why they call me at all. Sew me to your soul and I stay.









Chapter Two

Today I am a cry for help. Repeated many times and so close together that I become a drum roll I am held, as so seldom now, in the deepest, barest part of this girl. She thinks she is in the woods. I want to tell her that the wood she smells is a coffin, and the whispering is not leaves but trickling. The lid is ill fitting and she is waiting to drown in the earth she came from. She hurts because she has been misused. She is frightened because it is dark. She is dying because they wished it.









Chapter Three

She pants. They are done and there is little that is not bleeding and bruised. At first she screamed so loud that the sound had to remain inside her mind because her vocal chords could not hope to match it. Now there is only a stream of little outward gasps that jerk away from her mouth like a kite on a string.

And yet…above all this I can see that her soul is intact. It, too, is torn and bleeding – leeching colours like the vilest moulds and wrapping her not like the silk it should but like the driest lichen on the oldest tree - but it remains attached to her centre of gravity. I wonder how she has accomplished this when it should have been ripped apart along with her body.

While I am drawn inexorably to the wishing, I have never before been drawn to the wisher. What will she be to me? The thought that one of these bundles of meat and feelings should mean more to me than I to her is disturbing.









Chapter Four

I do not live in a lamp. I tried once but could not fit; one might as well try to contain an ocean in an orange skin. I realise that I am ruining a perfectly good mythical stereotype, but if you knew what it is to squash your consciousness into such confinement you would understand. I had to leave after a day and drift above a mountain pass to erase the claustrophobia.

I should clarify, that I do not live at all. I do not believe I ever did. I would remember living, I think. It looks fun. It looks beautiful. Even pain looks beautiful when you have no synapses along which to fire your electric life.









Chapter Five

The vixen pads through the trembling leaf litter scattered by the two men, her muzzle wrinkling in simultaneous distaste and interest. The thought of eating a human repulses her; they smell in some ways like other things that are made of meat but have an unnatural scent of metal and dominion about them always. But, the smell of blood is the smell of blood and it clutches at a part of her she would not have been able to describe or locate had she the words.

She digs a little where the vibration is strongest, sensing that there is something of interest less than a metre below her but unsure of how she might reach it and of her desire to do so. The tremor of a smaller, less disturbing body echoes through her whiskers and she crouches as she spies the rabbit which, in turn, has seen her. This eye contact is perhaps the most complete of the animal world; hunter and prey – will you kill me will I escape you? – eye to eye while their cells and tissues wantonly give in to the surge of endorphins and impulses. One chooses to run, the other to pursue.

Her cubs are pleased with their meal when she returns to her earth.









Chapter Six

The girl, aware that another life had tried to reach her for a moment, mews in frustrated need and scratches more violently at the wood above her face. Splinters fall into her eyes but this minor pain does not register. Possibly the pain of having her eyes turned backwards in their sockets overrides anything further to this grievous insult to her flesh. Possibly the adrenaline coursing through her is close enough to an overdose to simply blot out all pain. Is it also possible that something, greater even than I, has taken pity on her and granted her a reprieve of some kind?

If the last is true, then the universe is proving to be more charitable than my long experience has told me is likely. If it is not, then the time in which I may help her can now be counted in minutes.









Chapter Seven

You might suppose at this point that I am the girl. That I have dissociated myself from the horror and the pain and the dark. The opposite is true. The only way I can help her, this being so separate from myself, is to trade places with her. I can only do this if the other being wishes to be me. Right now she wishes she could trade places with anyone. That is enough. Now I will see how exquisite pain is. I will know. For sure and for certain. The beauty of it. What she will know is the loneliness and the wonder.

The only certain I am not sure of is what will happen to me when the body dies. Will I be this again?









Chapter Eight

She cannot know I am here. And yet she is reaching for me with everything left of what she was and every possibility of what she may be. She still wants to trade places but she no longer wants to be saved.

Now I see. How this being could survive such treatment and not surrender herself to the amorphous nothing they tried to send her to. Her soul is stitched to her magnificent heart with a shimmer of gold that humbles me with its splendour.

She wants to save me.









Chapter Nine

As I melt into the small space I feel her pass through me and I rejoice that I have been allowed this touch. Aeons spent in contemplation and wonder mean nothing compared to the radiance that bathes me as we switch.

As I settle into my new surroundings I feel her move out and up and I become aware of the greatest source of her pain. They had cut off her wings. I weep not for myself or for her but for the limitless possibility of all things. Then I weep for the pain.

Oh goddess. It. Is. Beautiful.

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