theurgy her transformation. Rapture caressed the edges of her sourness, stealing away the creases of age and bitter waste. Lighting her up so that she bloomed and glittered. “Oh, thank you, thank you! So exquisite…” Her fist was pawing the air, writing blind words with invisible ink. “Paper! I need pen and paper!” She lurched for her desk, for the means to capture her borrowed radiance before it shrivelled inside her. The thing curled up once more on the dirty floor and mewed out a faint, dark cloud of pain and loss, which lingered above its head for a moment as if reluctant or divided, and then floated up to bump and jostle the other clouds collected thickly at the apex of the cage. The creature lay and listened for a while to the sounds offered by the wider world; the faint hum of the earth shifting, the crackle of the wind stirring leaves and grass, the scrape and sigh of spiders spinning their webs. And then it tried to sleep, and in dreams return to that world. When she came home she was grumpy and sore, hollowed out by her psychic hangover. The thing was unconscious and didn’t stir when she slammed the door behind her, heaved her bag onto the table, and threw herself into a chair. It didn’t stir when she flung herself out of the room to make coffee and find painkillers and then shambled back in again. She gave the cage a spiteful shove on her way past and then sat and sorted through the papers on her desk, muttering and mumbling, occasionally exclaiming as a line caught her attention. The painkillers and her achievement combined to lift her mood, and she eventually raised herself to peep into the cage and prod at the thing. “Come on, you lazy little imp or fairy or whatever you are. While you’ve been slumbering away I’ve been hard at work. Want to hear about it?” She prodded again. “Wake up, do you hear me?” She unfastened the door of the cage and lifted the thing up between forefinger and thumb. Her nails snagged and tore the brittle skin of those once glorious wings, now too dull to even decorate, too forever-damaged to fly. Impotent appendages that mocked even as they clung determinedly to its back, fused there by bone and nerve. “Are you okay? Wake up! I need you!” She dropped it in panic, picked it up again and shook it. It opened its eyes and stared past her with blurred, still half dreaming hope, soaring with its mind up to the ceiling, around the room, out of the window. And then it awoke fully and focused, and the vision fled. It opened its mouth and let out a cracked, thin thread of a cry. “Jesus, you had me worried there! I thought you’d gone and died on me. Do you want some more water?”
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