the artist, after the accident.

 [x]

She thought that if she could not use her hands like this she would die.

Quietly, but she would.

She finds new strength in this new body, hers, because she has everything to learn. Again. Like a schoolgirl. Like a little girl making pigeons out of clay. This is a new chance: she thought she knew everything. This material, unfamiliar, hard, damp, alive. Musk of deep-red dirt. Her hands - the connections between muscles still asleep, the nerve endings in her fingertips still numb - carve out primeval shapes in the earth. Like the world after the rain, it is malleable. Crippled. It will learn to fly.