We’re just going to have to chalk today up to a light day of writing.
Day 335
Enter Ned the Goth
One of the things I love about this daily writing work of mine is that when I write myself into a corner as I did yesterday I’m free to just pretend it didn’t happen. I’m free to do something new today. Believe me I want to do something new today.
I’ve got no idea why Jasper is hanging out on the fire escape of my real grade school. I’ve got no idea what spell he is writing, why it’s his last, or why being fifth matters. At least why it matters enough to mention.
You may recall we first met Jasper in a field conjuring a flock of geometric shapes to aid him in his flight and escape (or transport or casual flying stroll). I’d written into a corner on that one too. Jasper escapes; I’m left holding the bag.
Jasper preferred the rune-script for his spells over the verbose Enchanters’ Latin he’d first learned. The iconic shorthand of vertical strokes and compact loops in singlets, couplets, triplets, or staggered bunches reminded him of musical notes. He could feel the pattern of the spell in his fingers as he wrote. It felt much more like he built magic from a scaffold than he merely described it in a book report. That concrete sensation steadied his hand and informed his artistry.
The the handwritten spell shuddered on the printed gridlines. He looked to the five in the corner of the page. The lines snaked out of place in a swirl and then spacked into a spilled-ink shape. The loops of his rune-script came unwound too. The verticals withered like new shoots unprotected from the sun.
Without ever looking up, Jasper swiftly closed and bound his Moleskine. He slipped it under his hoodie into the waist of his jeans at the small of his back. The pencil he positioned in his fingers so that as he slammed his hand down hard on the metal railing his middle finger cracked the pencil in half across the backs of his other fingers.
“That had to hurt Jasper. Did it? Did it? Did it?” Ned taunted musically from the asphalt playground below. Black clouds of soot belched occasionally from below his Demonia boots. “So sorry to interrupt. Were you sketching birds again?”
Day 334
Jasper’s Fifth and Final Spell
For the sticklers, I did write yesterday. And edit. I just can’t post the content publicly for now. Settle down. It’s not salacious, just temporarily private. Plus, the content is not interesting to most of you anyway.
Jasper pointed his #2 pencil finely but the angle of it annoyed him. The woman running the cash register at Tilton’s down the road cooed at his choice of color and said, “It’s a lovely sharpener.” She obviously thought shavers and sharpeners were the same in the way she thought five-year olds and eleven years olds were the same. This pink plastic and razor blade jobie compared poorly to the seven sharpeners with dual rotary cutters locked in the eight rooms of the school at his back. It was not at all like the kind the nuns mounted to the door jams at Sacred Heart Parish School in Topeka.
He gently dulled the needle pointed lead with a few careful circles on the back page of his notebook. Jasper thumbed back to the front to the first pair of blank pages. He then numbered the page at the top with an encircled five. He thought for a moment–maybe he prayed for success–then began constructing the vine-like vertical rune-script of his fifth and final spell.
Day 333