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demiurgentA brief passage from a current work in progress. (Not the one I worked on yesterday, but heck.)
As midnight struck the Yucatan Peninsula, the clocks struck six in the morning in Ealing, London. Virginia Casman was spreading jam on one half of a muffin and listening to the Radio Service. The weather was coming up – she wanted to know what to throw on before heading on her Saturday crawl. And as she spread jam, she idly thought about the Occult.
It was a subject of some fascination for Gin. She was a writer and correspondent to many, and such things ran in her circles. Mythology, magic and Jungian psychology bumped up against quantum physics, poetry and a love of horror fiction in her mind, especially at this hour.
And spot on at six in the morning, one piece rubbed against another in her mind and connected to each other. Almost without realizing it, she made connections that seemingly had always been there to be made, but had never occurred to her. By the time she realized how clear it all seemed, she had eaten half her muffin and missed the weather report.
“But surely that can’t be it,” she murmured. “Someone would have pieced it together by now if it were.” And yet, it all seemed to make sense to her.
Feeling almost like she were in a dream, Gin pushed into her sewing room, which also served as her study and had a desk for her laptop computer. The room was a perennial mess of yarn and books stacked on books. Books on bookshelves and books on tables and books stacked up next to her overstuffed chair. Digging through one of the piles, Gin scooped up one of her current favorites – a book of incantations and spells, published in London in the late eighteen eighties. Silly twaddle, really – half old wives tales and faerie stories and half balderdash for making people fall in love or calling good fortune. She paged through it, looking. . . applying her new insight, adding to her theory. . . .
There. A spell for calling wealth to one’s self. She looked at it, considered, made a few mental substitutions. She would need a few kitchen things, an egg. . . .
Ridiculous. She had come up with a new approach for writing about magic in a story, that’s all. Verisimilitude. And yet, she found herself gathering things. The copper bowl she had from a druid kick she’d been on in College. The silver spoon was from her grandmother. Absinthe was one of her mainstays. And the egg hadn’t quite gone by.
“Wealth and prosperity, indeed,” she muttered, and worked the ritual.
The handbag smashed through her window like a brick. Gin screamed, jumping back out of her chair as the purse skidded across the tile floor in a halo of glass. She stared at it like she might a snake.
After a moment, she leaned down, picking it up. Her hands shook as she looked out the broken window. The yard looked empty, and Uxbridge Road traffic was normal. She looked back at the bag in her hands, and worked the clasp.
It was stuffed, almost to overflowing, with hundred pound notes.
Gin stared at the purse, then back out the window. “I’ll be damned,” she muttered, then wondered if it were true.
As midnight struck the Yucatan Peninsula, the clocks struck six in the morning in Ealing, London. Virginia Casman was spreading jam on one half of a muffin and listening to the Radio Service. The weather was coming up – she wanted to know what to throw on before heading on her Saturday crawl. And as she spread jam, she idly thought about the Occult.
It was a subject of some fascination for Gin. She was a writer and correspondent to many, and such things ran in her circles. Mythology, magic and Jungian psychology bumped up against quantum physics, poetry and a love of horror fiction in her mind, especially at this hour.
And spot on at six in the morning, one piece rubbed against another in her mind and connected to each other. Almost without realizing it, she made connections that seemingly had always been there to be made, but had never occurred to her. By the time she realized how clear it all seemed, she had eaten half her muffin and missed the weather report.
“But surely that can’t be it,” she murmured. “Someone would have pieced it together by now if it were.” And yet, it all seemed to make sense to her.
Feeling almost like she were in a dream, Gin pushed into her sewing room, which also served as her study and had a desk for her laptop computer. The room was a perennial mess of yarn and books stacked on books. Books on bookshelves and books on tables and books stacked up next to her overstuffed chair. Digging through one of the piles, Gin scooped up one of her current favorites – a book of incantations and spells, published in London in the late eighteen eighties. Silly twaddle, really – half old wives tales and faerie stories and half balderdash for making people fall in love or calling good fortune. She paged through it, looking. . . applying her new insight, adding to her theory. . . .
There. A spell for calling wealth to one’s self. She looked at it, considered, made a few mental substitutions. She would need a few kitchen things, an egg. . . .
Ridiculous. She had come up with a new approach for writing about magic in a story, that’s all. Verisimilitude. And yet, she found herself gathering things. The copper bowl she had from a druid kick she’d been on in College. The silver spoon was from her grandmother. Absinthe was one of her mainstays. And the egg hadn’t quite gone by.
“Wealth and prosperity, indeed,” she muttered, and worked the ritual.
The handbag smashed through her window like a brick. Gin screamed, jumping back out of her chair as the purse skidded across the tile floor in a halo of glass. She stared at it like she might a snake.
After a moment, she leaned down, picking it up. Her hands shook as she looked out the broken window. The yard looked empty, and Uxbridge Road traffic was normal. She looked back at the bag in her hands, and worked the clasp.
It was stuffed, almost to overflowing, with hundred pound notes.
Gin stared at the purse, then back out the window. “I’ll be damned,” she muttered, then wondered if it were true.
