There are things you dream before you’re born to dream them. And things you meet twice before you understand you’ve only ever met them once.

The bird that shouldn’t be here

I’ve written this heron before I knew it existed. Indra dreams it — grey-black, patient, watching from some threshold she can’t name — and I gave her that dream the way I give my characters most things: certain it was mine to invent.

Then it landed at Overton. Real weight on real snow, between the caravans and the fire, while Drina sang something old enough that the words arrived after the tune did. Nobody else looked up. Wolfgang didn’t look up. He was watching me.

He has amber eyes. I’ve only ever met one man with amber eyes in my whole life, and I wrote him first.

Girl, don’t

I tell myself not to make the connection. Girl, don’t. You are fifty-something and past the age where the world hands you signs, you’re the one handing signs to a page, that’s the job, that’s always been the job.

But the bird was there. And Wolfgang’s eyes hold the exact gold I gave someone else, years ago, in a book I thought I’d made up out of nothing — and I felt it in my sternum before I felt it in my head, the specific cold of a thing crossing over from invented to inherited.

I don’t know yet what it costs to notice. I suspect I’m about to find out.

A note on the bird:

The black heron (Egretta ardesiaca) doesn’t belong in an English winter. It’s a canopy hunter of sub-Saharan wetlands — famous for the umbrella trick, wings thrown forward over the water to trap fish in false shade. It has no business standing in a Hampshire lake in December.

I know. I checked. Twice.

Keeps it factually precise (real species, real behavior — the umbrella-feeding trick is genuinely what black herons do, which doubles nicely as an unstated metaphor for the whole scene) and refuses to explain why it’s there. The “I checked. Twice.” carries the unease without spelling out the magic — consistent with costs implied rather than mechanics stated. I.Ph.

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© I.Ph. de Lange / CYcrds OÜ