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Novella: The Spring, by Charlotte Squire – Ch 1
Submitted by Charlotte on March 30, 2016 – 2:00 pm One Comment
Here’s a wee project I’m working on, it’s a ‘novella’. I’ll post up a chapter a day for a few days and see if people want to read more. Charlotte x
Short story: Our Spring
By Charlotte Squire
Trouble’s brewing for a small rural community who live near the most pure waters on earth Te Waikoropupu Springs, in Golden Bay, New Zealand. A foreign company plans to buy the sacred waters and cut off all access to the sacred waters, not to mention their plans for the water. Cue an unlikely group of people, with one thing in common, inherited psychic powers. They’re drawn together to create a powerful, positive force to fight for the springs.
Chapter One
She saw the bowl before she made it, and it was a beautiful piece. It would be fat and perfectly round, with just a hint of rim, perfect for those who loved a good helping of porridge on a cold winter’s morning. She could picture her favorite cobalt blue glaze, with a smattering of stone white. There, in the little studio that she’d once converted from a dusty garage, her strawberry blonde plait and runaway curls caught the late morning sun as she selected a new lump of clay and switched on her wheel.
Bella leaned into the clay with an ease that came from ten years of apprenticing to some of the region’s most sought after master potters. The clay began to change beneath her hands and the conversation began. It wasn’t that she forced the clay into shape, more that she knew where it was most likely to yield, and she coaxed it, as an insistent mother would a hungry child. Finishing with her hands, she sat back and held her gaze upon the near perfect bowl. The sunlit dust of the studio seemed to pause and spark for a moment. The wheel continued to turn, while she sat, watching the bowl slowly find its final shape.
“There, you’re done,” she said, sitting back with a satisfied smile.
She’d always been able to do it, sense the weak point in any solid form, and nudge it, gently, but firmly, into the shape she imagined. While clay was her medium, it wasn’t the only one she worked with. From a young age she’d been able to change things – branches would shift into new shapes, furniture could be moved just enough for her little hand to retrieve a hair tie, and later cars could be rolled apart to create the perfect parking space during her nervous early years as a driver.
It had been a useful talent, and thank goodness her Grandmother had seen it in her and guided her with it from the age of four. But it wasn’t exactly one she brought up at dinner parties. In fact, since her Grandmother had passed, no one knew, and that was the way she liked to keep it.
She ran a wire beneath her tenth domestic piece that morning and wondered what she’d make next. She had rent to pay, chickens to feed, Dangerous Kitchen pizza to eat. She turned up the music and looked to the next lump of clay. It would be a curvy wine goblet. She could just see it …
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Tags: fiction
go Charlotte! Love it x
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