I'm living in a Mark Twain book--a mutant version of "Tom Sawyer" or "Huckleberry Finn" that includes a Mysterious Stranger. He offers magic: each kid gets one wish. It's free and revocable. The stranger says frankly "It's an experiment. Will you regret your wish once you have it?"

Tom Sawyer wishes first, while Huck and Becky Thatcher and Jim watch, skeptical. Tom wants to fly. The mysterious stranger points at him... and Tom hops atop the fence, light as a sparrow. He floats up into the tree, then dives around the church steeple like a swallow and lands grinning. It works!

Huck wants a protective spell, so nothing can hurt him. The stranger hems and haws a bit. "Well... that's tricky. I can't protect your feelings."

"Oh, sure," says Huck. "I just meant no one can beat me up or kill me."

"Well, that I can do." So Huck gets his wish--a wise one perhaps, what with his dad beating him and all.

I don't know what Becky Thatcher wishes--she keeps it private, between Mister Mysterious and herself.

Everyone knows what Jim the slave wishes. Ex-slave, I mean.

Huck and Tom to out in a field to test their gifts. Tom flies swoops and soars, but decides he wants to land and walk with Huck. Says absently "let me get down here" as he comes round to land...

But the Mysterious Stranger treats his "let me down here" as revoking his power of flight for good! The gift flicks off like a light, and Tom falls like a shot crow. He's high up. Huck, below, watches in horror, helpless, as Tom Sawyer slams into the rocky earth ten feet away, a broken, silent bloody heap.

One dead in the first few minutes. That was no mistake. This stranger is treacherous, murderous!

I suggest--as a reader, with more time than either of them, able to look outside the text--a way for them to edit the scene. I take Huck's role--and jump under Tom so he lands on ME. I can't be hurt--the spell HAS to let me cushion Tom's fall, even if the Stranger doesn't want it to.

Later, in a bookstore, I run across a revised edition of "Huck and the Mysterious Stranger." I flip it open, and find a new scene: a banquet for Huck, the hero who saved Tom Sawyer.

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• Wishes = my housemate's reading Elizabeth Scarborough's THE GODMOTHER: a burnt-out social worker gets a wish and tries to save not herself or even her clients, but her whole city.
• Stranger = no fairy godmother, but the Devil himself, from Twain's THE MYSTERIOUS STRANGER.
• Huck Finn = Independence, refusing to be "sivilized". Battered by his dad. My own practical survival part? Seeks physical safety but is stoic about emotional pain.
• Tom Sawyer = my romantic bookish mind. Gets into trouble here--but is he to blame?
• Flying = shamanic dreaming? Fantasy life?
• Tom wants to land by Huck = I've been avoiding art, writing, dreaming for several days. Want to ground myself...
• Tom didn't want to give up flight = I'm only grounding myself temporarily.
• Stranger maliciously misinterprets Tom, revokes wish = I feel dead when my creativity and dreamlife cut off--crashing down into this hard, narrow, physical world.
• DIAGNOSIS: My current illness, creative slump, and poor dream-recall is not an error or slip but the active malice of an experimenting side of me--using "experimenting" in the broad sense. The sense that includes psycho boys who set fire to cats. I'd better be careful. I have one of those inside, and his favorite experimental subject is, apparently, me.

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