Manufacturing Inspiration

Start with a knife, a tree, a candle, a corpse. Start with a dead bird and its dead feathers spread out about it, mites crawling across it.

Start with the spark of a match being struck; the brown honeycomb scraping, smudging phosphorous and chlorate together.

Start with a bloody white dress, lace and linen. Children dead at the beach. Crawling through caves. The rough brush of rock against skin. The sharp sting of rock against skin. Shifting sands and makeshift tombs. The stink of something strange, something acrid.

Start with dark, damp hair barely stirring in the wind and the way she wouldn't look at you as the waves clawed at the shore.

Start with a shell smashed to powder, a smell you can't place, a taste on your tongue like a thousand 'goodbyes'.

Start with the thin red thread around her thin right wrist.

When did you see her last? Somewhere that wasn't in your dreams? Somewhere by the sea? A shadow or a ghost.

Start with the way her ribs felt as you held her.

Start anywhere. Just start.