Page 7 of Trip Me Up
She slid forward and picked up one of my favorite pens from the coffee table, the kind with the fast-drying ink that didn’t smear as I dragged my hand over the words. “Here.” Then she wavered for a second, like she didn’t want to break the bubble of magic around me. “Want me to go somewhere else?”
“No, I—” I hadn’t thought about where I’d take the notebook. But a whiff of eucalyptus, real or imagined, resolved me. “I’m going to the park.”
She glanced out the window. “Just a few hours of daylight left.”
“It’ll be enough.” I wouldn’t presume that my muse would stick with me for more than a few seconds, certainly not hours.
“Still, better take a flashlight.” She hopped up, went into her bedroom, and came out with a pocket-sized flashlight. She held it out to me. “Just in case.”
I nodded like she’d given me the detonator for the bomb that was going to blow up the evil mastermind’s lair. Although we’d blamed it on the TV deal and the consulting I’d done on the scripts, we both knew how serious my writer’s block had been. Already a month late with my pages, I’d asked her to negotiate an extension with my book editor. Unfortunately, that meant a delay in our advance. Mom and Grandpa needed that money to buy organic fertilizer. Gabi would need her cut for rent and groceries when we finally got off this tour. And she wouldn’t say it, not now when I’d reached for my notebook for the first time in a month, but the TV people were getting nervous. Without a second book, they couldn’t make plans for a second season of the show. And we both knew what Heidi would say if we asked for another extension.
I tucked the flashlight into my jeans pocket and slid the pen inside the spiral binding. Picking up the key card from the counter, I slipped out, creeping down the hall and out the door as if any sounds would startle my muse.
Outside, the sun perched a couple handwidths from the tops of the trees in the park across the street. I caught another whiff of eucalyptus. The trees called me.
Dodging cars, I crossed the street. I didn’t bother with finding an entrance; instead, I climbed the berm directly into the forest. The trees welcomed me with caresses from their leafy branches. Less than a minute’s walk into the park, the sounds of the city muted.
Sparrows called to each other. Squirrels chittered. I meandered among prickly live oak and fragrant eucalyptus, picking my way through ferns, filling my nostrils with the sharp scent of pine and humus.
A butterfly glided by my shoulder and I could almost imagine it was a sprite coming to whisper in my ear. It swooped away into the dimness, leaving me alone.
The deeply fissured trunk of a Monterey pine, not so different from the white pines at home, begged to be stroked. My hands had softened, the farming calluses still there but smoother after months without farm chores. Only the callus on the side of my left middle finger remained, and even it had shrunk.
I leaned back against the trunk and slid down to sit at its base. I pressed my back into the ridges of bark. Damp earth seeped into my jeans, and if I ignored the eucalyptus, it smelled just like summer in the woods on the farm. When I was a kid, every chance I got, I’d race off into the woods to lie on the forest floor and dream of wood elves and sprites and trolls.
If only one of those wood elves would pop out and tell me how to finish the story.
Tilting my head, I peered up into the canopy. A city person like Gabi might’ve taken the dappled patch for sunlight coming through the trees, but that was a spotted owl. She sat perfectly still on the branch.
So far, I hadn’t written any owls into the story. One of them could fly in to rescue Nieven, who, in the last scene I’d written, had fallen with his horse, Winter, through a hole into a giant spider’s lair. Ugh, no. I could hear the critics’ words: uninspired, predictable, derivative. Lazy. Plus, there was the horse. Suspension of disbelief was one thing, but no way would readers buy an owl pulling a horse out of a hole.
The owl’s spots, white on brown, stirred something in my brain. Not white on brown, but brown on white. Freckles. A constellation of them, no makeup to conceal them, across Samantha’s nose. That nose she’d wrinkled at me when I’d compared her dog to Toto.
And her eyes.
No one who’d met Samantha could forget her eyes. Dark blue. No, dammit, I was a writer, a wordsmith. I didn’t need a freaking membership card or certification. Indigo. Violet. The distant mountains. Night sky above the farm. Lobelia spilling from the pots Mom planted every spring.
Lobelia. A proper name for an elf. No, a fairy. Samantha could’ve been one, with her spare frame and delicate features. The black suit she wore like armor. A little more leather, and perhaps a cloak, and she’d have fit right into one of my stories. A faerie? A pixie? Warmer.
A sprite. A wood sprite. That was it. And if I gave the wood sprite wings, she could fly down into the spider’s lair.
What would Lobelia say to Nieven? Samantha and I had talked about cheese. Her dog. And, briefly,Ladyhawke.Only the greatest fantasy movie ever. Maybe, if Gabi hadn’t found me so soon, we could’ve talked about books. Or why she was at the fundraiser, seemingly unwillingly. Our hopes and dreams. Something real. If the photographer hadn’t chased her away, I could’ve gotten her number.
But that horse had left the barn, and, shit, I’d forgotten—again—about Winter. How would a tiny wood sprite get a full-grown elf and his steed out of the trap?
I stared at the owl gripping the branch with her talons. A wood sprite would have some sort of tree magic, perhaps. Sprites helped the trees bud in the spring and turned the leaves colors in the fall. She could cause a tree root to grow down inside the hole and create a ladder—no, a staircase—for Nieven and Winter to use to escape. Add the big, hairy spider right on their heels, and—
I opened my notebook, flipped it over so the metal spiral wouldn’t dig into my writing hand, and set the pen to the top of the page.Chapter 17,I wrote,The Escape.But not even my ritual could get me to focus on Nieven and his predicament, could dispel the image of her blue eyes laughing up at me. So I began to write about them. About her.
My hands tingling, the words flowed.
Like the burbling stream on the farm, like the salty wind off the Pacific Ocean that curled between the trees in the park, the words poured out of my pen into the notebook. Maybe Lobelia was there in the forest, whispering them into my ear. Right then, I didn’t give a flying fuck whose words they were.
They were words.
When I scratched a word into a page that resisted my pen, I squinted to focus my burning, bleary eyes on the notebook. I’d hit the stiff cover. The end of the thick notebook. I flipped back through pages of scrawled words I couldn’t read. The sky had gone purple in the gaps of the leafy canopy overhead, and thick shadows concealed the forest floor. The spotted owl was gone.
When I stood, cool air hit my jeans, damp from the dirt. The chill had penetrated my muscles, and I stretched to uncramp them, shaking out my left hand. But the cold, the aches, the subsiding tingle in my fingers were all the best kind of discomfort. The well-earned kind.
But I wasn’t done. I needed more pages. As I jogged back toward the hotel, my brain remained in the mythical forest with Nieven, who now owed Lobelia his life and was about to lose his heart to her, too.
