I am writing. Ok.
     Sallow creeps across a misted moon
I almost tear it off and crunch it up, feed it to the trash-beast next my desk, it sounded so bad, so *purple*. The trash-beast crunches, merrily. I try again.
     Forest trees hang silent show
     Ripe fruits swing the branches below
     And bursting out from night’s cocoon,
     Yon Twirrel sidles its rigadoon-
     Awful. Horrible. Now they’re just words on a page. Mumbo. I tear it. Even the parts trapped in the spiral-bind. All of it goes into the trash-beast. It tries to eat, but is full. It vomits a little onto the floor. I have to bring it out later, let it walk, have it dump, before feeding it again.
     I pinched out the wick in the Al-Djinn lamp and waited. After a while, it comes in.
     Hello, magician.
     Twirrel.
     Tis Twirrel.
     “I know.”
     You’ve failed again.
     “I have not. I’ve-I’ve-”
     Stuttering. Bad.
     “I do not stutter.”
     Magician scared. Magician afraid. Like little piggy with house blown in.
     Who’s afraid of the big-blank-page, the big-blank-page, the big-blank-page?
     It sneaks, and is under the desk, staring with shining eyes from the crotch of my wizard’s pajamas.
     Afraid.
     I close my knees and kick in instinct, making the desk jump. Twirrel melts into its trademark swirls, the black and purple fairy stuff of its substance, without laughing -never really laughs- and is now at my shoulder, one foot on each side, long hand holding my hand, holding my pen in a fist, mocking me to write.
     Magician must magic now, it said, as though chiding a child, else sunrise wins Twirrel’s anger and Twirrel’s bet.
     “I am not afraid.”
     Then you are a fool. Better afraid and brave than a fool.
     “Go away Twirrel.”
     Why?
     “You scare me. I don’t write scary things.”
     Twirrel knows. It took a munch of my hair off the top of my head, where the hairline swirl was, just enough to hurt, just enough to make a bald spot, and disappears again.
     Twirrel goes.
     Magic, magician.
     Else.

*

     I first met Twirrel in another person’s book, one day in a London park. He was an ink drawing then, made with marker pen, and looked like a figure wrapped in grease paper, swatted with oil and tar. She, the owner, would not tell me what it was, but continued drawing, slow, but I saw almost in a frenzy. I could see the shadow of the previous page through this one, she inked it so thick. There was one more on the cover, and when the wind flapped the pages I saw that the book was full of the figures.
     I tried asking her again.
     “Hello?”
     She stopped drawing and answered me in a quiet voice of divided concentration. Her hand stayed poised over the page, like a gramophone needle. She stared at the page, not looking up. Her hair hid her like a scarlet curtain.
     “Stop. I have to draw. I have to finish. I have to capture him, otherwise he escapes.”
     “Him?”
     “Twirrel,” she said, and I knew it was the thing dancing in the book, with its fingers of ephemere, its bloody prizes, and grasps of dead twig branches held to its head like antlers.
     “What is he?”
     “A fairy.”
     “Really.”
     “Yes.”
     “Where does he live, then? What flower? Or does he live on shrooms?”
     “Go away. He is trying to escape.”
     “Why?” She heeled the page with her hand, without looking up. I jerked; the action had come without warning. Her face did not even change.
     “Fuck you,” she said. Her rudeness silenced me. When half a minute passed, she began to draw again. Something about her, something about that, left a scar of anger in me, like a papercut with a halo of dumb red pain.
     I bent down a little to look at her face through the scarlet curtain; she bent lower, hiding. I snatched at the book. She managed to lift her graphite pen, to spare the picture, and lost her sole grip on it. I ran away, winning, laughing. She chased, breathing, one hand to her chest. I thought not to run fast or far, just far enough. I tore the front page off and flung the rest in the grass. She stopped, stooped to pick up the book. She had already forgotten me. She looked up when she discovered what I had stolen.
     “That’ll teach you, you sorry bitch!” Her face was pale, paling and losing color, but she was smiling. It was not an evil, or any way cruel smile. She really had forgotten me; her smile was for herself.

*

     I wanted the light again; I shake the lamp, worrying the Al-Djinn inside with my finger, and the flame belches from the sprout. The wick lights.
     I begin to write again.
     The thief knows not the nature of his prize,
     How wonderful th’ nature its form belies,
     Or else Hell in box of innocent size.
     I wrote:

     A naiad once there was, in the age after Eden, called Sal’m. Her name, meaning Salt, Salem or Psalm, was a soft name, but her heart was hard set on seeing the great Above; she wondered, since she was a little ripple, what it would be like to touch the sky. Grandfather touched the sky once, he said, when the world was younger. He had kissed the great blue yonder when the flood swallowed the world and swallowed Eden, he used to boast, and compared himself as to the waters above and those who had not kissed it as to the waters below.
     "The sky is blue, and of every color. The sky has stars. The sky has a sun that rises. I tell you, the greatest of wonders is to touch the sky; else can you tell me who in the water-world has seen what I have?"
     The naiad wished, all her might, to touch and see the sky that grandfather saw, before the Flood subsided. And she called out to the aqueous Numinous, the Leviathan, from the cave of its immortal slumber.
     "Let me touch the sky, lord of the sea. I call you by your names, Poseidon, Daeva Jinn, Krak'n and Leviathan, grant me my wish; I would give my soul to touch it."
     In reply said the Slumberer, "what morsel would your soul be to me? Yet as you desire, so shall it be. Above the sea is not my dominion, but another's. He will take your soul, and I forewarn you, he will trick you of it. Are you still eager to go? Answer carefully, for there is no room for regret."
      She was, without regret.

     And the lord of the sea, merciless beyond compassion, heard her and answered, and sent her up to the care of a winged serpent who lost its wings, and having sent her, retreated to his cave to sleep.
     That serpent opened a portal, though which the naiad passed, into the threshold of the world of land and legs she came. The portal was porcelain, and very smooth, with still, warm, unsalted water touching its brim.
     It had a whirlpool at one end, and it was through this that she came. Once she did, she felt the portal close, sealed with a seal of rubber.
     She turned in the ivory coffin to face up, and saw a light that was not the sun. She saw the Tempter above the water, and he smiled mildly. Into the water he let fall a certain fruit, of which shape and hue was unknown but which Sal’m saw was fruitful and good for food.
     “Eat, and I will have your soul, but then rise, and walk after the sky. That is your ambition.”
     So for the passage paid her soul and ate the proffered fruit, and thus, she could breathe and walk on land.

     Her new feet touched; the floor was cold. The air was cold. She stretched out to the Serpent for balance, but he moved away. She crawled, and found a length of downy cloth that hung from the wall, and took it to cover herself, for the cold was dry.
     "What is this place?" she asked the serpent.
     Said he to her: "this is where you wished to be."
     "I wished to touch the sky," she said, dripping, shaking her head.
     "This is the sky. The sky begins where the sea ends," he said, gesturing to the prison, with its mirrored fountain shrine, throne and coffin all in porcelain, the bath room of a rented holy day house.
     "But this is not the sky my grandfather saw."
     Satan opened a window, "but it is." He showed her.
     The sea, below the sky, was of the same color as the sky. The stars that hung in the sky calmly twinkled at themselves from the sea. The sun was reflected and the moon was reflected, and here the sea won: for in it more things lived than in the sky, more than equal in color and form, and in its far reaches down below there were more things that made their own light than those above the sea.
     More yet, in the sea was family, and all she ever knew.
    Said she to the Devil,
    "I have traded innocence for knowledge. Now I'd sell my soul to send me back. My lord, I am deceived; I want not this that I have received."
    And said the serpent, his old eye agleam,
    "Do not dream, child, to return to before the lust to wander did conceive. Know you not? Each one mortal has but one soul to give."

     Twirrel came the moment I stopped writing. It tore the page out and guzzled it, looking at me all the time. I felt myself forgetting what I wrote, every word. When it finished, it grew haunches, hoof and horn, and the oil of its skin was the blood on a murderer’s grave. In its clawing hands were handfuls, torn bouquets of delicate rainbows, scales sea-green tourmaline. I knew that something precious had died, but I could not remember what.
     “You’ve had your fill, Twee. Now go away.”
     No.
     “I kept my promise, Twirrel. You keep yours.”
     This night I not eat your soul; I have eat the soul of your soul-child. That is the promise.
     “Go away!”
     Why?
     “I don’t want you! You make me write horrible things! Sad things! If you’d just go away I’d write everything beautiful. I could show you Heaven, or Earth, the Gilded Past or Silvered Future. Just let me go! Stop watching me! Let me go!”
     No. I showed you me. I am your Muse now. All the Music you must write must be a little about me. I want to see of Heaven, and earth, and of all your things you speak of.
      “I can’t show them to you unless you go away. Unless you stop watching me. You make me blind.”
      You must try. I want to see.
      “I can’t do it if you keep watching! Your... presence obstructs me! I can’t do it!”
      You will if you want. Or else never write again.
      Then it left me, for the new day had come, and like the black fairy gold it was it vanished into the air with a taste of iron.
      And I knew. Another night. Another bet. Trying to break the barrier. Trying to give birth. Trying to dream of things other than that nocturnal abortion.
      Failing, but trying.
      And every night I grow a little paler.