Draft: opening

We play at Paste –

Till qualified, for Pearl –

Then, drop the Paste –

And deem Ourself a fool –

The Shapes, tho’, were similar,

And our new Hands

Learned Gem Tactics

Practicing Sands

                                                  Emily Dickinson

☾⋆

‘Shrink Plastic’, it was called. Louise didn’t like the name. ShrinkING Plastic would be better, she felt. The lack of ‘-ing’ was somehow unglamorous. It stripped the whole concept of its magic. The stuff inside the box starts off big, and then you do things to it - apply heat or something - and it ends up small. It’s fucking plastic… that shrinks! ShrinkING plastic. Take the ‘-ing’ away, and it sounds like it’s already shrunk. It sounds ominously practical. It sounds… kitchen-utility-ish.

The box was pretty though, in a block-colour-clear-plastic-Tamagotchi-packet sort of way. She didn’t feel depressed when she looked at that box. She felt… wide-eyed 90s café girl. Making coffee in a big bright room. Morning radio. Flirting with Jack Davenport. Better, anyway.

It was getting dark outside her studio. Louise could tell because she’d left the shutters open. She could see two boys scooting around on their bikes, edging carelessly into privet hedges and dragging their feet on the pavement. She could see the rosy glow from the restaurant across the road, spilling out when the doors were opened by couples and families from the nearby houses, ready for their Friday night treats.

Louise liked her view. She liked the people in the restaurant window, and her amusing boyish bikers. Two weeks of filing precious metals with the shutters closed had knitted her muscles together. It was time to cut her shrinking plastic into moons and ice creams and sarcastic kittens, and bake them alive in the oven.