Whit

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I was in my room, reading a book.

I turned a page.  The curved shadow of one candle-lit white surface fell over another and the action made a small sharp rustling noise in the silence.  Suddenly, a dizziness struck me, and I was acutely aware of the paper's thin dryness, rough against the skin of my fingers and seemingly conducting some powerful, disorienting energy from it to me.  I sat as if stunned for a moment, while the unbidden memory of my first Healing coursed through me, suffused with the light of a distant season.

It was a hot summer's day; one of those close, still afternoons when distant haze over the hills or across the plain might become thunder before the evening, and stone walls and outcrops of naked rock will give off small bursts of sweet, heated air when you walk close by.  My brother Allan and I had been playing daringly far away from our home at the farm, and daringly close to a main road.  We had been stalking rabbits in the fields and looking for birds' nests in the hedgerows, all without success.  I was five, he a couple of years older.

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