She’s lying on the dry meadow grass, cloud-watching. Spiky stalks scratch her back as she thinks. Her shoulders crush the wild mint in the grass and release a sharp tang. Cumulus cathedrals tower above her. Cathedrals with new towers bursting out, like pillow lavas under the ocean.She sucks her mint and thinks. She feels a huge sense of foreboding, a heavy lava stone deep in her abdomen. It’s a big decision. She looks at the azure sky between the clouds and thinks. Blue and moody. What should she do?
She imagines staying in the flat and notices a slow band of grey clouds moving in a different airstream. The grey is being overtaken in a race across the sky. Overtaken by an armada of galleons in full sail that glides so fast she feels like she is steaming across the ocean. She reaches out to check the ground. Is she moving or are they? The dry sharp stalks tell her that her ship is stationary. She smells the mint and thinks.
She turns her head to see high wispy clouds escaping like steam from a bubbling cauldron. The vapours flow and merge making images against the sky. A horse silently mutates into a lizard and then is gone. A map, islands moving and colliding in a frenzied continental drift. Two lands meet and close together leaving a lake of sky between. A round lake that’s being squashed and pulled. For an instant it’s a perfect heart and she takes a mental photo of this moment.
The shutter clicks something in her mind. Now she knows what they’re going to do. The lava stone is lifted, the wild mint smells good and she notices that the clouds have translucent edges that let through a magical platinum brightness.
