…The creature forced its one huge eye into my face. All I could see was the nauseating, purple gleam of it. My fingers and toes tingled and fell limp.

‘Why does it struggle so? Will it look into Balor’s eye? Will it stop...’

Balor swallowed the words as its head jolted to the left. It hissed and screamed, detaching from my chest. I scrambled away.

Jack had come.

The creature recovered into a low frog-like crouch. ‘The nasty Avery boy, is it? What shall I do with it? Spoils all Balor’s plans, does it? Shall I kill it?’ Balor growled low, sizing Jack up. My head throbbed where the claws had dug into my skin, but I struggled to my feet. Like he always did, my brother stepped between me and danger.

Balor leaped at Jack...

#

The front door flew open, and Elizabeth swept in. A disgusted sigh of frustration filtered into the office where I was busily typing Jack’s story.

Poor Jack, I thought, he’s doomed to be suspended in battle with this loathsome beast for another day or two. No, that’s optimistic—probably until next week.

“I hate chemistry!” Elizabeth groaned. “Everyone is getting Ds and Fs, and we all have to do these monstrous extra credit papers that take hours and count as quiz grades!”

“Doesn’t the teacher realize that if all the students are failing, something is wrong?” I asked.

“She doesn’t care! I have straight As and one C—in chemistry. She’s the worst teacher ever!”

Obviously, the horrid chemistry teacher conflict trumped the urgency of Jack’s forest skirmish. Jack’s tough, I thought, he can handle himself for a while.

I clicked the “save” button but optimistically left the computer on as I walked upstairs, rummaging through my brain for files on the principles of bonding—chemical and parental—and collecting a variety of abandoned socks, toys, and towels as I climbed.

By 3:30, the chemistry storm had subsided. I left Elizabeth to battle the elements alone just in time for the door to blow open again. My two little ones slumped into the entry, plopping backpacks and shoes onto the floor. The whole snack, notes from school, and homework routine was well underway when the phone rang at 3:45.

It was Natalie. “Can you pick me up from school? I can’t ride the bus because I cut my toe.” How could any child possibly be expected to ride a bus with a cut toe? It’s just not done. I found my keys and set off to rescue my injured daughter. On the way to her friend’s house, Natalie detailed the afternoon’s social calendar for me.

“Could you pick me up from Nina’s at 5:00 and drop me off on the other side of the planet at 5:15?” I looked doubtful until Natalie explained how, with some deft manipulation of time zones and the space-time continuum, I could be home in time to make dinner. Maybe it’s because I write fantasy fiction, but the whole scenario sounded feasible to me.

I found myself picking up a pizza on my way home from the other side of the planet at 6:00 when I answered my cell and Elizabeth informed me that the world was on the verge of collapse because we were going to be late to her gymnastics class.

It was 10:00 p.m. before the upstairs went dark and silent. I tiptoed to the office, stifled a yawn, and woke my computer in a last guilty attempt to rescue Jack from the onslaught of the beast. The light of the monitor glowed into the dark study, illuminating a fluffle of dust bunnies hiding beside my computer. I glared at them, sighed, trudged to the pantry, and pulled out the Pledge. Having eradicated the pests, I opened my manuscript and began typing:

#

“Be careful, Jack,” I gasped. “The eye is its weapon. It’ll paralyze you.”

I wasn’t sure he’d heard me. Jack’s face was set ferociously. Brandishing the tree branch, he charged our slimy foe and struck at its floundering head. With a nimble, reflexive spring the creature caught the limb and pulled. Jack lurched forward. They wrestled for possession of the weapon.

Swallowing my aversion to coming into contact with slime, I grabbed one arm…

#

A deep voice from the desk behind me interrupted the flow of words. “Do you think we choose our beliefs, Rose?” my husband Caleb asked, reading me a line from his new favorite philosopher. The conversation was enlightening but left Jack hanging in the dark—again.

Days passed in a blur of the mom thing. Dust bunnies taunted me, giggling. The toilet in the hall bath babbled, stuck in the flush position, the ring around the bowl now ripe and possibly growing teeth. I fretted and stewed that I’d never get back to Jack’s struggle. Adolescent trauma, an unsightly smudge, an elementary emergency—something always stole my attention. Perhaps Jack was doomed to die strangled in the grasp of the creature.

On the way to Natalie’s orthodontist appointment, she recited to me the highlights of her most recent exploits at the Saturday night dance.

“I told him I liked his necklace,” she paused for effect, “and he took it off and gave it to me!”  Her eyes gleamed with glee and girlish modesty until she grimaced, guilty—but not. “I think I like his friend better, though.”

In that moment, the journey became the destination.

The pilot light of my imagination sparked. My subconscious churned. The necklace and the Saturday night dance wove their way into Jack’s character arc and plot line. The story bubbled to the boiling point while my daughter and I chatted. Little sparks fired along the neural paths of my memories and wove the conversation with my husband into some sage advice from Jane’s grandmother. Living interrupted the writing so that what I had originally intended as the unfolding of the plot became entangled with tributaries and twisted in ways I hadn’t imagined, carving out a story as unpredictable as real life.

The flow of our lives lent the spark of reality to my characters, even in the realm of fantasy. To stop the runaway stream of the daily grind and retire into the stagnant pool of quiet, undisturbed contemplation would have robbed the story of its very source of vitality.

Writing demanded my time, pondering space, imagination, and problem-solving, but life consumed those. The trick was to seize the moment when my interactions with people had left such a huge impression that characters and stories had been born of it. Only the people mattered. The story thrived because of the people.

With two hours before Elizabeth would come home, I abandoned the war with the dust bunnies, left the bathroom to stew for another week and the Pledge to idle on the bookshelf, its judgmental eye covered with the dusting cloth. Words that had accumulated in my imagination rushed out my fingers onto the keys.

#

…The creature belted me across the cheek. I toppled into the tall grass.  Jack seized the moment to wrest the branch from its claw and strike a mighty blow to its chest. The creature fell. Jack leaped to finish it off. Clutching the descending tree limb between them, it forced Jack to the ground and vaulted onto his chest. Balor seized Jack’s head, forcing his gaze into the purple glow of its malignant eye.

“Will it look, so I can kill it?”

“Don’t look, Jack. Close your eyes!” I scrambled up and lunged at the creature, aiming to cover its eye with my hand. To my great astonishment, when my hand touched Balor’s eye, it shrieked and rolled off of Jack, writhing in pain and cradling the eye.

“Larmes d’Ounatha, it has? How shall I take it now? Must I run? Must I find the dark? Why does it hurt so?” Balor squealed and ran off into the darkness.

Jack looked at me. I looked at my palm. My crescent scar usually shimmered vaguely in the moonlight. Now it glowed a soft fluorescent green.

“What does that mean?” Jack asked. “Larmes d’Ounatha?”

“It means Tears of Ounatha. One of Grandmother’s tears fell on my scar when I showed it to her. Human connections are powerful magic to the Tuathan. Maybe the tear gave me some of her protective power.”

Jack sighed shaking his head. “Whatever. C’mon, it’s dark. I have to get you out of the forest before anything else comes after you.”