She curses to herself and checks the weather forecast. Last night the snow was a bad sign. Now she wishes it was back. The temperature should drop again tonight. And stay low. With clouds. Tomorrow morning there should be snow ready to be blown off trees. Not much, but she doesn't need much. Her phone bleeps. Kevin.
«Where are my breezes?»
She sighs.
«Very funny.»
She hesitates. She shouldn't be taking her weather-induced bad mood out on him. She adds,
«Tonight and tomorrow morning should be cold enough. Should. But who knows. I didn't think I'd be wishing for snow now.»
The phone bleeps again. She picks it up, expecting a reply from Kevin. It's not Kevin.
«Hey»
She feels a small kaleidoscope of butterflies released in her stomach.
«Any chance you would be free for coffee later today?»
She catches herself before smiling at the phone like an idiot. She can't do this right now. She takes a breath, types an answer.
«Sorry.»
Then something occurs to her and she quickly types up another text.
«It's just that I have something big going on right now taking up all my time. Can't talk about it right now. But I hope I'll have time again soon.»
She closes her eyes for a moment, gets up and along with her day.
~x~
The morning is still. Unnaturally still. The serenity is eerie. It's making her uncomfortable. She can't feel the air moving at all. The Sun is still behind the horizon, but it's about to come out any minute now.
She assumes that's what Kevin's "first morning breeze" means. This time of the year morning isn't entirely clear. Is it the time most people get up and start the day? Or is it the time the Sun rises, an hour or two or three later than people wake up, depending on the people. She decided it must mean the first breeze after the Sun has first peeked over the horizon. "The time people get up" is way too varied. And besides, it seems the magic would care more about the Sun than the people.
So she is now sitting outside, in a small forest (if a forest can be understood to mean a few dozen trees close to each other in the back yard), patiently waiting for the Sun to rise, and the wind -- sorry, breeze -- to blow some snow off the branches.
Her thoughts are going in a circle. She didn't know how accurate the magic needed the ingredients to be. She didn't know how accurate the "first" there was. The first breeze blowing snow off of any tree she happened to be standing next to? Or the first breeze she saw blowing snow off of a tree, which might be 20 meters away, and she would have no way to catch except luck. Or the first breeze in the area? How big an area? What if some snow fell off a tree on the other side of town before here?
No. She'd spent all of yesterday paranoid in these thoughts. There was no way to know, but there was also no way to catch a breeze that was on the other side of town, or even on the other side of her tiny woods. She would have to catch the first breeze after sunrise, blowing snow off a tree, that she was close enough to catch. And just hope it works.
She glimpses the Sun. She chose a high place for this so that she would see when the Sun rises, instead of whenever it gets high enough to be seen over the buildings in the city.
She tenses up. Now is the moment. She has to get the first breeze that was enough to blow any of the snow off of the branches in the tree next to her. She's practically holding her breath.
Nothing happenes.
Nothing continues to happen.
A light puff of snow falls from the tree beside her, dislodged from the branch by a breeze so slight she barely feels it. She has been waiting for it so intensely it startles her and she drops the bottle in her hand. She curses, picks it up, pulls the cork off, and summons the breeze.
Getting a breeze into a bottle is really quite easy, as long as you have the right bottle. This one practically sucks the slight change in the air in, and she jams the cork back on. She looks at the bottle. It's glowing faintly, she knows. Too faintly too see unless it's completely dark.
She has her breeze. It seems to her the serenity of the air should be settling into her, just for having one thing less to do, but she doesn't know if that's true. She doesn't know how specific the magic is. And she doesn't know if dropping the bottle spent the precious few seconds that she had to catch the correct breeze.
While she's at it, she catches a few more for Kevin. They're not going to be any good for what she's doing, but early morning breezes tend to be good for a bunch of things. She's sure Kevin finds some use for them.
_____________________________________________________
Okay, so we're both quite busy, you with work and studies and stuff I guess, and me with Panama and Costa Rica and Nicaragua. So we'll just write short parts. That's fine. That's doable.
(As you can see from this not-short part I just wrote.)
The topic for tomorrow is Interest.
~matleena
I am intrigued by the notion of sentient magic now. Perhaps magic does care a great deal about things.
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