An early edit of the beginning of the second chapter of Tell Me A Story. Hopefully, it won't look much like this when I'm through with it.

"Once upon a time," he began (he always began with 'once upon a time,' not for lack of a better beginning, but as an incantation, a 'speak to me, muse,' a four-word portal to the world of stories. A wardrobe, a painting of a dragon-prowed ship, a pool in the forest.)

"Once upon a time, two boys lived in a strange and beautiful city far away from rain. One boy was warm, with a body full of angles and a soul of soft light, and the other cool, with a face that didn't make sense and a knack for extremes. They didn't have names—no one had a name in that city. No one needed one. Everyone spoke softly and in pairs, catching each other's attention with coy glances and subtle movements. In the perpetual hazy-dawn light, the city sounded always like a breathy-voiced woman murmuring sleepy nonsense as she awakes. People slept like cats in corners and on balconies, for fifteen minutes or an hour, then got up and went back to work without a movement of the sun or a shift in the blurred splashes of shadow. It was a city of shattered-glass butterfly wings with Faberge eggshells strewn in the streets. It was a city so delicate that it could flutter apart at any moment, that if the blinking-eyed barefoot people meandering aimlessly through its archways dared to reach his tapered fingers out, he could send a rainbow of scales down to nest in his hair....."