By Abigail Ottley
There you are, my lady in white, drifting ghost-like through my lamp-lit bedroom. Your hair hangs loose, the colour of foxes in winter or last leaves on the point of falling. Your brown eyes are slow, sticky as fresh toffee, your face, as pale as any daisy. Now you lift one spectral finger and lay it to your lips to discourage me from too hasty speech. I think it is my grief that conjures you here, half hallucination, half remedy. My fondness for spiders, mountains, the abyss fosters in me the illusion that you care. I am cloistered in my attic as you once were but these Alps continue everlasting cool and no purple Himalayas grow slowly. My mountains are molehills, more humble than mighty, but my bedrock is basalt and obsidian. How long it has been since my blood erupted but in dreams how brightly I have burned.