Winter in a cabin. Writing and not writing. Rain, misting in from the west, hissing diagonal. And now the wind rises, shaking everything slightly, mussing the trees and rifling the hedges. I feel the rain redouble to drum salvos on my old tin roof.

Last night I slept, warm beneath quilts on a horsehair mattress. At 2 a.m. a storm set in. Wet white noise. A radio set between stations; the rain playing train songs. I drifted off… swaddled in a bunk in the belly of a ship far out at sea.

I dreamt of a writer on a rock isle smooth and dark like the back of a great black whale… where was I bound, I wondered, lost in the whirl of the small-hour squall; my little boat beset, my hoped-for book unwritten, thrashing woods now white horses, illegible notebooks circling my head like so many ghostly birds.

Dan Richards