I want . . .

I'm tired.

My exams are done, a big   gap   in the school year waits for me
To fall in . . .

In winter I probably need the time off. I always hate the little fist my mind has tightened into by this part of the year. I'm work-minded. Winter's bad to me in other ways too: my hands freeze and dry up until little lines of blood appear on my knuckles and the ball of my wrist, making it hurt to type, or play piano, or do dishes. My lips crack. In fact every night I wake up with dust in my mouth and have to climb out of bed to get a drink of water.

And some spirit has carpeted my room in the finest grains of sand, that pack and screech minutely against each other when trod on.

The house seems a lot bigger, there is a taste of salinity in the air. Expansiveness too, as if the walls are backing away from something. A stalking hydrophage.

Outside my window a sucking wind howls through dessicated twigs of trees and soon will blast through huddling dunes of needles of snow, transforming them into hurricanes.

And the edge of my left eye thinks I see a flash of someone watching me from behind a curtain. And at the edge of my right ear, at the threshold of hearing, someone whispers:

"Did you see . . . ?"