Carpe Noctem

A train of thunderstorms passed through the area  last night. Brief, violent and not wet enough. The power flicked off while I was wrapping up a long report for a customer. Whoopee! No power means I'm offline until it's restored. Of course, it also means I don't get paid for the missing time.  But, oh well, act o' god and all that.

It was too early to sleep and I caught the bones of a good story while paddling around in the pool earlier in the day. I took a few notes at the time, but couldn't read them in the dim light so I just started from scratch scribbling away by candlelight. Five minutes into it,  I heard a huge splash from the pool and went out on the deck to investigate.

A large limb fell from one of the overhangs and circled lazily with all the other tree trash that happens every night. The drizzle stopped, the clouds parted and a brilliant moon turned everything blue-white. I shut off the flashlight, took my tarot deck and went down onto the pool deck for the blessing. Starkers.

Moontan and sanity restored, I came back upstairs and put down the first eight longhand pages  of what I had started in the water. Now to key it all into the magic writing machine.

 I wish, though, that I had gone into the water, but that limb and all the rest of the detritus moved around in a way that made me think of the scene in Star Wars where they are trapped in the garbage chute on the Deathstar. You know, before the walls started closing in, something swimming by in the soup, brushing Luke's leg. The thought of creatures in the water put me in the proper frame of mind to paint this story with dark colors.

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