"This Land", Part 2

[aesmael]

Whenever she visited the place she had made she did her best to add detail and impart a sense of life to it. Here, a depression; there, a hillock; now a meandering groove which might have been meant as a dried riverbed. The solid was made brown and just earthlike enough to be clear it was not. Much of it she turned green, so that now it did not look like grass rather than not like dirt. This was variety.

There still was no sky or any thing beyond her island. To look anywhere beyond this patch of solid was to be confronted by the raw absence of anything. This bothered her, more and more as time passed until finally it was like daggers stabbing into her brain and she could not bear to look up. So she fenced herself in with blue and dotted it with cotton-puff clouds, above and below.

Clouds below, they fascinated her enough that she wished to spend hours watching them, if only they were not so crude. She did her best to make them fluffy, to make them change and drift like clouds should. They came not a bit perfect, but far better than before, so she fixed up the clouds above too.

She lay on the brown solid, head down over the edge to admire her handiwork and found her perception abruptly shifted. All at once it was not the clouds moving but her island, carrying her along with it to unknown destinations. The unexpected sense of motion made her feel suddenly nauseous and afraid to fall. She had to scramble quickly inland and focus on something still to keep her lunch – though she had none to lose.

After a short while she recovered and began to felt quite proud of her work, and a little silly. “You have had this canvas with which you might have made anything,” she said to herself (for she was very much the sort of person who spoke to herself), “and all you have done is build for yourself your own little corner of mundanity. What a small mind you have! At least this bit of whimsy will go some way to make up for it.”

So for hours after she watched her island plow through the clouds and made herself a captain's hat to wear, which fluttered in the breeze when she remembered that it ought to.

Comments

[lost-angelwings.livejournal.com]

:)

I liked this :D

[mantic-angel.livejournal.com]

Mmmmm, oh, the instant I saw the link, I did not even need to click it, I realised this was a sequel to one of my favourite bits of your writing, and was delighted.

Reading the actual post merely confirmed and reinforced the delight of already knowing what it would be :)