‘Edith was finding her pencil a less critical implement than her pen’ (POND LIFE).

Sometimes a scene comes from drawing. Sketch it out. Writers are draughtsmen and women too. We need to find the lines, the shapes, and if our pencil allows it, the smudges too. The black spots between your fingers — don’t wash your hands of it yet. There is always something left behind — there — on your cheek. That is writing too. Don’t clean it.

Edith Cull was finding the pencil a less critical an implement than her pen. For one thing she could rub things out or smudge them if they began glaring back at her: those letters, her characters, those words.

She had found a set of pencils in the kiosk and had asked the lady who ran the shop – her name was Sophie or SOF-FEE (Edith was practising her French) -- whether she might order in some more. Her supply of pencils was going down fast, rapidly disappearing, because Edith had a bad habit of chewing upon her pencil top. As she summoned the next image, the next moment; Leviathan with a devil on his back in the shape of a claw.  

‘Canst thou put an hook into his nose? Or bore his jaw through with a horn?’ 

Edith didn’t want a horn, but a claw, perhaps a paw. Where had she seen that before? She was grasping at something, but her mind felt murky, and the light in the tent was poor, so she picked up her camping stool and went outside.  

Twilight, and gnats were spinning through the air. Edith liked this time of day for writing, it had electricity. Things were born, and things died, things made love. At least that’s what she thought all the humming and whirring was: gnats murdering one another, horse-flies leaving tiny trails of blood, nasty invisible nature.  

Edith had never liked insects; she suspected them of doing things they ought not. Leaving dirty secretions, silvery codes of malevolent purpose, coils of sticky wrap around her toes. Edith hated sticky, clingy things, and now that her toes were covered in red spots -- midge bites she noted, she’d like to circle everyone and squash them between her fingers -- she was furious. Things were shifting. Peter was no longer a handsome man. She made a list:

protuberances in all the wrong places,

an overextended chin,

nose too long,

legs too gangly,

legs too thin.

She had never thought of his legs, but Peter, she had to admit, was not well built. She had been misled. He was a squat, weedy sort of man, a pair of garden clippers slipping in the middle. Rusty, left out overnight, the blades blunted, hinges collapsed in the middle. Edith grimaced.

The summer air was warm, but she could feel a hint of a chill. In the distance, behind the trees, she could make out the lumpy figure of Peter Jarvis hunched over his stool. She turned away, there was a strange taste in her mouth. I shall read aloud, thought Edith, I shall read my Bible like we used to in Sunday school. I shall seek my inspiration. But Edith’s material was not very comforting, and the light was dimming through the trees.

  ‘Canst thou put an hook into his nose? Or bore his jaw through with a thorn?’  

Edith circled ‘thorn’ and ‘hook’ and began to doodle: a long spiky spear with a crescent-shaped hook. She thought of the butcher’s hooks hanging in the precinct, rusty and brown from drying in the sun. Mr. Dewhurst was very fond of his hooks; he cleaned and polished them, and they gleamed back their malice. And when Mr. Dewhurst came out to Edith, who was considering a cut of bacon, the hooks said, come, come! And Mr. Dewhurst grinned and beckoned her in.

 Her hook would need to be long, to dangle down and curve towards  --- and Edith drew what looked like a large nose --- but because she had no crayons, she could not turn it into flesh. So she left it dangling there, pink and greasy.   

(FROM POND LIFE, A WORK IN PROGRESS).