The moon was fat and yellow in the sky tonight, fuzzy behind a curtain of thin white cloud.

~

I went on a date with Dave the Security Guard.

It was nice. We talk easily.

But he made too much fun of my...eccentricities. I do not mind a man who dresses normally, but I will not put up with a man who wants me to dress normal.

I yam what I yam.

~

When ever I ride the train over the bridge, I look out across the water.

The river runs over a rolling ribbon of rocks, thin in some places, impossibly deep in others.

Pale amber stones, smooth and round like so many little moons, glow beneath the shifting sheets of translucent green water.

And just for a moment, as we're rattling and shaking across the white concrete bridge, I am suspended in the story of the Abhorsen.

And I do not see the ribbon of water, not as it is. I see the Abhorsen house spearing up from the center of the swiftly moving water.

Maybe not as the book describes it, but as my brain saw it.

White water stained walls surrounding an impossible oval of garden. A well of red bricks, inexplicably dry, at one end. Bushes and herbs crowding around the edges of the walls, softening the abrupt change from water to stone.

And the house, oh the house.

A white towering thing, vaguely Edwardian in feel, like someone took rooms and towers and piled them all on top of each other.

Glass windows made up of tiny diamond shaped panes, sometimes coloured, but mostly not.

Dark brown roof. Dark brown shutters. Dark brown framework.

And on either side of the river, the shambling dead, eager to get to the Abhorsen, but forever stalled but swiftly running water.

And then, then the train rattles me out of my daydream and we are over the bridge, pulling into the concrete forest of downtown, or the sweet, shabby neighbourhood on the other side.

~

It is a weird night tonight.

My father comes into town tomorrow.

.

Rosie.

Before&After