Go back—go back, there. Just there. Late June, the end of a
sunset, the shadows of houses rising on the faces of houses behind them, and
the tone of the light is an earthly amber, as surreal as you have ever
experienced. The trees are dream-still, hanging in space, defining depth as
surely as jutting stones. Hanging thin limbs motionless as chandeliers in
locked-up halls. And you are out there, in that air, maybe your bicycle has
come to a stop or you’ve just ceased the rhythm of walking home, to gaze in
wonder at that hot, frozen summer slipping over the rim of night. You believed
in magic then, damn right you did. It was a purposeless magic, it couldn’t be conjured
or controlled, but it spoke to something in your imagination. And your mind
made a mirror of that dusk, and populated it with shadows of everyone you saw
and knew and did not understand that summer, or all your life. They were
doppelgangers of you, they were simulacrums and clones, and they separated like
cards flicked off the top of a deck, landing in that statically beautiful evening
world, donning hoods and robes and blades and tomes. There were dragons curled
into the forest and griffins perched at the peak of the roofs, their powerful
beaks lifted toward the stars, their catlike haunches unmoving, like the petrified
tree limbs, like the silhouettes of houses black and gold against the last
vestiges of the sun. Go back there, young writer, and write about it all again
and again.
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