Ree-Imagined Worlds

In the village square, the piano accordion music twirled and swirled. It sang as it wound its way around the fast drums and joyfully dancing bodies.

It rose, higher and higher, into the night. Past the golden lanterns, past the rooftops, and past the tops of the trees. Until it felt to the girl as if the music was calling to the very stars to come to earth and dance.

And yet, even though the music thrilled and thrummed across her skin, beckoning and joy-filling, the girl hesitated at the edges. Too shy to venture onto the cobblestones. Too self-conscious to join the dancing villagers.

Instead, she retreated onto the quieter path, the one beside the square, the one behind the tall hedge with its shimmering explosions of yellow star flowers.

Here, she couldn’t be seen. Here, she could only see the flowers, the sky of ocean-nights, the stars. Here, the music and its rhythms came flowing over to her.

She held out her arms – carefully at first. As though she needed to catch the music as it fell from the sky.

Then she started twirling. Slowly at first. Then faster and faster. She twirled around and around with the music as her lavender skirt flared. And she laughed.

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This lil microfic was born out of two long-ago Twitter microfics that I’d captured next to each other in my handwritten notebook. Reading them side-by-side, I was struck by how they flowed into each other as a longer version of the same scene. And now, here they are.

The words were already there. The image, my friends, is something else altogether. I didn’t know how to create an image to suit this story. I swear, it is SO much easier to write a story to an image than the other way around. In the end, I did this image with pen and paper, then I took a photo and painstakingly played with it in my photoshop express app. (The app has been frustratingly glitchy of late, but I’ve also realised has a ton of extra tools on it now.) I’m pretty proud of the end result – stick figures and all!

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