Teaser 74(ii), hot wet horizon shimmer – for Rohan Quine’s “The Imagination Thief”

Weightless and barely moving, my attention floats for another hour or two in their company, while they say hardly a word more.

At last I watch them rise, gather up their things and stand looking out across this sea beside which Shigem has lived throughout his life. Then they turn and meander up the beach. When they reach Ocean Avenue and turn left, walking down the middle of it, Kim says, “It’s funny, but it feels like a story’s being played out here—as if some tale were being spun, involving me. As if all this Asbury Park backdrop (except for you, my love) were some movie being projected onto the air around me, while I walk through it. But who’s projecting it for me? Who’s bringing me into it, and why?”

As he speaks, Ocean Avenue seems for a moment to be much longer than they’ve known it. It is heavy with a furnace heat, wide and deserted. Façades recede in both directions, matte brown and grey, flat as scenery or movie screens. A breath of wind in the dust stirs a cellophane wrapper on the road. Tiny in the distance, the street vista vanishes in glare: where it wets the horizon a shimmer hides the buildings, so the roadway punctures the smudgy blue sky. Shreds of air undulate thickly in the heat…

And there I shall leave them for this afternoon: ambling down the road’s yellow centre-line, each with a bag in his hand and an arm around the other’s shoulders, bodies touching all the way down to the hip, both leisurely and in-step, into the distance.

For more about "The Imagination Thief" by Rohan Quine, see

https://www.rohanquine.com/the-imagination-thief/

For some great reviews of it, see

https://www.rohanquine.com/press-media/the-imagination-thief-reviews-media/

To watch any of the 120 complete mini-chapters of the novel’s video-book format (for which this little video snippet here is just a teaser), see

https://www.rohanquine.com/t-i-t-video-book/the-imagination-thief-part-vi-video-book/

For links to all of these short teasers, see

https://www.rohanquine.com/t-i-t-video-book/short-teasers-for-the-imagination-thief-video-book/

And to pick it up from whichever retailer you may prefer, the retailers’ links for the audiobook are at

https://www.rohanquine.com/buy/the-imagination-thief-novel-audiobook/

and for the paperback are at

https://www.rohanquine.com/buy/the-imagination-thief-novel-paperback/

and for the ebook at

https://www.rohanquine.com/buy/the-imagination-thief-novel-ebook/