Michael looks up, frowns, then looks back down at the paper and twiddles the weird-looking pen (made out of a pipe cleaner, feathers, and some kind of pointy bead) between his fingers. He’s making lists of words: nouns in one column and different sorts of adjectives and descriptions in two others. Nothing is labeled, but it’s not hard to figure out how it’s all sorted. ‘Oasis’ is written in the list of nouns: they’re potential product names. He marks an X next to it.
“You’re right, that’s no good,” he says, circling the words ’safe’ and ‘controlled’ in the second column and ‘paranoid’ in the third one. A minute or two go by, the sound of his own intermittent writing filling the air, before he sighs and grumpily runs his fingers through his hair, still holding the pen. A feather comes off and lodges itself in his curls.
“Sanctuary covers everything, but that also might be too churchy and it doesn’t really sound great. What sounds better is haven. You could say Dreamhaven, sounds like some place in a fantasy movie. It’s more vague than something like sanctuary, though, or even oasis, if you’re thinking about the actual definition of the word. But that could be a good thing. People could interpret it how they wanted, you know, what does ‘safe and happy’ mean to them? Is it a sanctuary? Maybe they love churches. A haven could be that.”