FicWad

Down the sloping long lawns of the manor there were still pockets of brilliant green where they could walk and pretend it was still summer with the swallows going at high speed round and round and in and out of the hollow tops of the bell-towers making them dizzy when they tried to watch the birds from where they had toppled down and lay stretched full out on a long rolling knoll speckled fuzzy with silken parachutes of milkweed and thistledown.

(If there was just one thing you needed right now to never need anything ever again, what would it be?)

They stood together at the window and stars streamed past, the only sign they were moving at all. When they had been younger it would have seemed wrong after a full summer traversing up and down the river that ran through the woods, behind the long sawmills at the edge of town, where bubbles and leaves trailed behind the punt in elaborate long tails and fins and they felt they were riding a monster called up from the soul of the river, but once they both stopped punting the monster disappeared and they could not call it back again to look at it, it was only there when one of them couldn't drop everything he was doing and peer over the edge of the boat to see what it was like.

(If you could have anything in the world that you wanted, right now, what would it be?)

He used to have this nightmare, and then it came true.