In November of 2004, I didn’t write a novel. This is a series of excerpts from all the novels I didn’t write that month.
He was methodically pulling wings off various insects he had trapped in jars when she walked through the garden. She paused to squish one of his poor wingless victims on the path.
“How many more?” she asked.
“Well, I have thirty-three sets right now. I figure I’ll need more than eighty to get the proper size. How is the glue coming?”
She took off her shoe and inspected the bottom. “I’ll need a few more of these. And I still haven’t heard back from Lucy on the spirit gum.”
He nodded, then turned back to the dragonfly he had carefully pinned to tree stump. Delicately, he twisted the first of the four wings from its body. “You understand this is just a prototype. The real wings will be extracted from birds.”
She shifted her weight from her shoe to her bare foot, wincing a little at the pebble that dug in. Her mind went deaf under the shudder of stepping on bloody wingless birds to make the glue that would hold the feathers together.
“I think I’ll need a hammer to kill the birds,” she said. “I don’t think I’m big enough to squash them.”
“Whatever works,” he replied and snapped the last clear wing from the dragonfly. He smiled, holding it up to the sun. “These will be beautiful.”
I like this idea. Every scene of a novel should contain the whole thing, fractal-like, so this little scene you have given us is a whole novel for our imaginations. Very cool.