♫♬♪

She broke into a loping run across the grass and thought she could go on all night, knifing through the silky air, sprung forwards by the steely coil of the hard ground under her feet, and by the way darkness doubled the impression of speed. She had dreams in which she ran like this, then tilted forward, spread her arms and, yielding to faith - the only difficult part, but easy enough in sleep - left the ground by simply stepping off it, and swooped low over hedges and gates and roofs, then hurtled upwards and hovered exultantly below the cloud base, above the fields, before diving down again. She sensed now how this might be achieved, through desire alone; the world she ran through loved her and would give her what she wanted and would let it happen. And then, when it did, she would describe it. Wasn’t writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?