- The voice
- Rare, and pleased about it
- Home
- The Starlit ShoreStars in the water. The threshold between the lake and the sea
- Part of
- The skyTardy as sun, moon, cloud and moon bow.
- How home goes to sleep
- It goes to sleep when the stars in the water go out before the stars above.
The story of Tardy Bow
Rainbows in this world do not simply appear. Somebody makes them, while you watch — and the somebody is the Tardy Bow, a soft cream-white star with blunt rounded points and the family snout on his face, who flies, and whose trail is the rainbow itself, streaming out behind him in a wide sweeping arc as he goes. He draws the day’s rainbow in full colour after rain. At golden hour he draws it again all in ambers and golds — and that one is a signal, if you know it: the gold bow means the sleepy part of the day has begun. And on rare clear nights he draws the rarest one of all, the moon bow, in dusty rose and terracotta and deep violet and sage — which is a real thing, moonlight through raindrops, and almost nobody has ever seen one. When the arc is finished he flies on, and the finished bow stands on its own in the sky, plain and complete, with no face in it at all. The bright thing you loved today does not leave at bedtime. It goes quiet, and stays.
Straight from the sheet
Every character is drawn once, properly, on a sheet — the same way the books were made. This is Tardy Bow’s.
