Once there was a young girl who lived in the forest. She almost lived all by herself but there were too many trees to talk to.

One day she was sitting under a tree thinking about calculus and recursive programming when she heard a voice. It said

So she got up and went back to her little house. Inside she lit a candle and read the newspaper. This was the kind of paper where the words didn't quite stay on the page right, but kept jumping around and making pictures. Someone was giggling in the paper. She turned the pages back and forth until she found the laughing words, then carefully tore them out.

It was nighttime then, so she went out and looked at the stars. Then she started to dream.

In the dream she was lying on her bed with a tall candle at each corner. They made strange forms of light over where she slept. She left the bed somehow and went into the sky. There she could hear lilting music, flute and bell and reed all in one. The stars were singing harmonies and she listened for hours, floating there on her back with her eyes closed. She could feel the cool wind moving around her, carrying the scent of cut wheat from far over the hills.

The moon rose, and the light became brighter so that the air was almost visible. With the wind she drifted down to a river, wide and dark. The wind let her down gently onto the water's surface, and she calmly floated away. Eyes still closed, she could hear the river talking. It had also been hearing voices. The river was long and deep. To it little voices meant nothing. But it could remember what this one said to it, and it told her over and over again as she slept, murmuring softly inside her.

The river gradually enfolded her as she fell deeper and deeper into the depths of sleep, wrapping warm arms around her that felt like candlelight. The candles around her bed reached out to her, letting the light flow around and over and underneath. She smiled. Then there was an extra glow somehow. A letter appeared from somewhere below the ceiling and floated down onto her chest. It looked like it was laughing.

When she woke up next morning there was a letter sitting next to her bed. She took it outside into the early sunlight and read it. It was a good letter, from the author of the laughing words. He said he was coming to visit. So she ran around and tidied up, picking up stray bits of dreams and putting them back in their place, moving all the homework into a neat stack somewhere so that there was room to sit down, sweeping the last little bits of art paper under the bed. Then there was a knock on her door.

She opened it.
and there wasn't anybody there.

So she picked up her bag and went to maths class. There there were lots of people. She looked all around and didn't see who she was looking for, so she sat down and waited. As she waited she watched a flower unfolding, very slowly from bud to bloom. It was almost half open when a man came in and sat down not far away. He glanced at her, and there was a flash of laughter in his dark eyes. Then he turned away and began working on vector calculus.

Afterwards he came and talked to her, and they went to where she lived to keep talking. She got up to turn off the kettle, and when she came back she saw in his hands a piece of the dream from last night, that she'd missed when cleaning. He seemed to know what it was, so she didn't mind him seeing it. They talked and talked until the day ran out, talking with their fingers.

and the rest was never written.