“I want you to close your eyes and concentrate.”
Sharee did as she was told, sort of. She closed her eyes. “What am I supposed to be concentrating on?”
“Anything. Your breath, the feel of the air on your face, the beat of your heart, the feel of your leggings against the skin of your fingertips.”
It would have been easier if he’d stopped after the first option, now her brain was skittering between all of them.
She felt herself scowl, then tried to smooth out the frustration in her brows and hone in on her breathing. In through the nose, out through the mouth.
Siimon maintained his smooth, calm, flowing way of speaking, the irritated undertone was just her imagination. “Good, sink into your focus, let the world float away…”
How could the world float away? She was sitting on the damn thing. It was all around her, solid, stable, reassuring. The last thing she needed was the earth to be as wispy and insubstantial as her composure.
But this was supposed to be good for her, and Siimon had been highly recommended by the school mums she’d chatted with when picking up Ebony.
She really should have come up with a more suitable name for her daughter. Ebony was not ebony in any way, shape, or form. Her skin was a golden coppery colour that should have a name of its own, simply for being so beautiful. Her eyes were a startling green, and her hair a rippling mane of gold-streaked latte.
It was just as well she was a teensy bit overweight, otherwise she’d be drawing all sorts of unwanted attention from those nasty perverts the newspapers were always talking about.
And she was so clever. The school was constantly sending carefully worded emails about Ebony’s independent nature, and tendency to rebel against unreasonable authority. She ignored them. A girl in this world needed to be able to assert herself, and if it meant asserting herself over some of the pallid little jellyfish girls in her class, well, it was good practice for the workplace, wasn’t it.
The DNA of Stories 