Glowy

"Just ONE more level," said Glowy.

It was, by a conservative count, the fourth one more level.

Glowy is properly good at games. Glowy knows every one of them, has beaten things nobody else has beaten, and has helped half of Candyfloss Land past the bit with the spiders. This is a real skill and Glowy is right to be proud of it.

The trouble is the clock, which has a way of going missing.

Mossy had asked Glowy to come out at two o'clock. It was now nearly five. The light had changed and Glowy had not noticed the light change, because when the level is on there is only the level.

When Glowy finally looked up, the afternoon had gone somewhere, and something dull and gritty was sitting behind Glowy's eyes.

"Was it fun?" said Mossy from the doorway.

Glowy considered this honestly, which Glowy is good at.

"The first bit was," said Glowy. "The last hour wasn't, really. I just couldn't find a place to stop."

That is the true thing, and almost nobody admits it. It was not that the game was too good to leave. It was that there was never a natural edge to it, and Glowy kept going long past the fun bit looking for one.

So now there is a timer, which Glowy set personally and can change personally, and that matters enormously. When it beeps, Glowy does two things: stands up and stretches, and looks at something far away out of the window.

That is it. The whole trick.

The far-away looking is the part that does it. Eyes that have been on a screen all afternoon go strange and tight, and looking at the end of the garden lets them open out again, and the world sort of arrives back.

Glowy still plays, plenty, and is still the one you ask about the spiders.

But Glowy went out with Mossy on Saturday and found a beetle, and came in afterwards and said, with some surprise, that the real world glows as well.