Sunday Showcase: January 2013

Another month, another snippet from the strange recesses of my mind … This one's the beginning of a young adult fantasy I'm currently reworking. It's called Arcana and there's no information about it currently on this site (ooh, sneak preview!). I'd love to know what you think.

I stand on the edge of the cliff, looking down at the ocean. The wind whips my hair around my face, making my eyes water; salt and seaweed fill my lungs with their tang. I should be afraid. I know I should. But the wildness of water and sky draw me onward.
    Decide, the wind whispers to me. Decide …
    I shuffle forward, right to the very edge, toes icy in their summer sandals. I'm shaking, but it's not with the cold. My left foot hovers in the air. This is it, now. The final boundary. Either I go back and find a safer route, or I take the last step and plunge into the unknown.
    “Well, Paulina?” a voice says, low and mocking, in my ear. “Do you dare?”
    Paulina? Startled, I turn, and my right foot slips on the crumbling soil. I teeter on the edge, trapped in perfect balance, caught in a moment that might go either way: back onto solid ground, or headlong into nothing –
    Then the cliff gives way beneath me and I'm falling, falling, falling towards the churning grey water below.


I had been dreaming. I was aware of that. But even as I tried to cling to the memory, it dissolved like a sandcastle before the rising tide. And in its place –
    "Polly! Will you please turn that thing off!"
    I opened one bleary eye to see my phone jumping and vibrating like a small mad robot, carefully positioned on the other side of the room where I'd have to haul myself out of bed to reach it. A stream of tinny sound made its belated way into my ears, and I winced. I'd set the alarm to the most irritating ringtone I could find, in the hope that it would actually do the job of waking me up. But apparently my legendary dead-to-the-worldness was even proof against the electronic equivalent of a wolf's howl.
    I dragged myself out of bed and stumbled in true zombified fashion to my desk, where I silenced the phone with a stab of my thumb. Eight thirty. I'd programmed the alarm to go off at eight. No wonder E.S. sounded annoyed, if she'd been forced to listen to half an hour of Frenetic Hamster.
    "Sorry!" I called.
    "My eardrums are bleeding," my stepmother said through the door, but now there was a hint of a smile in her voice. "Have you packed yet?"
    Packed? I looked wildly around, and my gaze settled on the empty suitcase by the wardrobe. The suitcase I was meant to be taking for a week's stay with my sister Amber in Glastonbury. The suitcase I'd decided last night I'd have plenty of time to fill in the morning, since I was going to get up in such good time …
    "Just finishing off now," I lied, stuffing an armful of random clothes into it, followed by half the contents of my underwear drawer.
    "Good. Remember, if we don't leave by ten you'll miss the train."
    Her footsteps moved away, and I returned to the frantic bundling together of my belongings. They'd be pretty crumpled by the time I got to the other end, but I figured that was practically de rigeur in Glastonbury. Amber never looked like she had even a passing acquaintance with an iron; it was one of the things I admired about her, used as we all were to E.S.'s sharp-suits-and-immaculate-shirts way of life. And if I wanted to meet some artsy eyeliner-wearing college student while I was there, I had to look the part. Not that I ever had met anyone the least bit promising before, but maybe this year …
    Do you dare, Paulina? The words popped into my mind, but I had no idea where they'd come from. People never called me by my full name, just as they never called Amber by hers – or my brother Jake, for that matter. We hadn't been Annabel, Jacob or Paulina since we were babies.
    "Sure I dare," I said to the empty room. My friend Cecy was spending the summer abroad – I'd already had a postcard from her with the Eiffel Tower on the front and an atrocious faux-French scrawl on the back – and I knew she'd be full of herself when we returned to school. For once in my life, I wanted to be the one who'd met some cute boys and had a little excitement.
    Yet somehow, I didn't think that was what the words had meant.