Let’s face it, it’s only just beginning and you’re already tired of hearing SCOTUS opinions from your friends, colleagues, relatives, and pundits. Take a minute out of your day to read the next chapter of this new fairy tale I’m writing with input from my children. Today’s installment makes use of the suggestion, “a nice pirate riding a giraffe who helps people,” from my 7 year old daughter.
Be sure to check out the first chapter if you missed it, and if you think you’d like a physical copy complete with illustrations once the tale is concluded and edited, please consider changing to a paid subscription. I can devote more time to writing if I know I am getting at least a small secondary income from it, and you can get a copy of this and other books by making a relationship with an author rather than ordering them on Amazon later on.
Chapter 2 Set Sail!
The seeds had been planted. The seeds began to grow. Brock wasn’t sure at first. He didn’t know if he would be able to see the sprouts, so he had made a circle of stones to mark off a little garden and to prevent him from stepping on them. He used his bucket to water the seeds. After a few days he began moving his hand ever so gently over the top of the ground to see if he could feel anything. He thought something tickled his palm when his hand hovered close to the dirt, but he still wasn’t sure. After another week he could feel tiny leaves and stems. He tried carefully pinching them in his fingertips and tugging ever so gently to make sure he had not deceived himself. The seeds had sprouted, but he still couldn’t see them.
Brock began shining his flashlight on the garden bed at night. A week went by, but he hadn’t seen any sign of the mysterious shimmering that had drawn his eyes to the strange traveler. On one particularly chilly night he felt discouraged. He thought, “I’ve waited so long, and I still can’t see what I’ve grown!” He decided to go to sleep early, but he found his mind was restless with worry.
Brock tossed and turned in his bed of straw. “My little seeds,” he said to himself, “I’m so cold here with my blanket, but there’s no one to shelter you from the cold.” Brock felt a bit silly talking to his seeds like they were people as he lay half awake, but they were the first thing he had ever helped to grow. A change had begun to take place in his heart, though he was not yet able to understand it. He still loved his solitude, his poems, his stories, and his dreams, but some small part of him had come to love the small and helpless seeds even more. “I’d better check on them,” he mumbled. “This seems an unseasonable freeze, and all my labor could be lost.”
Brock wrapped himself in one wool blanket and rolled the other up under his arm. He turned the crank a minute to charge his flashlight then stepped out into the cold. He had felt fine during the winter, but now, accustomed to the warmer weather, he found his teeth immediately began chattering. He was tempted to go back inside. “How would I even know if they’re freezing? How do I even know the plants from Erstoire don’t grow better in the cold?” He saw he was right, that there was no way of knowing whether these little sprouts were susceptible to the same dangers as the native plants, but he shut up the temptation to return to bed and walked on with new determination to at least do what seemed most nurturing.
The beam of light cast over the garden, but Brock still couldn’t see anything. He called out, “little seeds, little seeds! Are you alright? Are you shivering in the cold tonight?” Even alone in the woods with no one watching he felt a little embarrassed talking to them, but some sweet and loving feeling deep inside him felt better when he called out. “Talking to plants!” he muttered. “Perhaps I’m losing my mind… Well little seeds, if you want my help tonight maybe you ought to show yourselves.”
The night seemed suspiciously silent. The air was still. Occasionally Brock heard the distant song of frogs and crickets, the hooting of an owl, or the ruffling of branches, but it was not the constant surge of the full chorus of night life he had come to expect. “It seems most of my animal friends took this cold seriously and decided to stay in. Yet here I am, standing around like a fool, almost expecting these plants to answer me.”
Brock felt even more embarrassed, but still he waited. Suddenly a great howling and shaking could be heard in the distance. It sounded like it was miles away but approaching quickly. Brock had heard it before. He knew it was only the wind, but it seemed mysterious. The night had been so still and peaceful despite the chill. There had been no sign of a storm. He kept the flashlight on the garden and waited until the great wind came up behind him. It was such a hasty, unexpected blast that he thought it might knock him over. He held onto his blanket, worried it could blow off and get lost in the trees.
The biting sting of the wind stiffened Brock’s face. He closed his eyes for a minute, clenched his jaw, and replanted his feet. Once he felt stable and protected he opened his eyes again and saw shimmering all over the garden. Tiny vines with leaves shaped like stars, heart shaped flowers with stems like dandelions, little spiraling stems with cubic leaves, along with many other alien wonders appeared to Brock as the plants were tossed in the wind. He thought of Wordsworth’s famous poem on the daffodils:
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
“Why you, my little seeds, have become more glorious than any galaxy of stars, let alone a field of daffodils,” whispered Brock in admiration. He saw on one of the vines what appeared to be a diamond with eight sides, but he guessed to be some unknown species of berry. He picked the tiny fruit and put it in his pocket. “Well, I don’t know if you’ve somehow brought this wind or if my mind has made much work of a coincidence, but it seems you’ve held up your side of the bargain. You’ve shown yourselves at last, and now I’ll keep you from the cold.” Brock laid his extra blanket over the garden bed and laid beside it on the ground. He slept poorly, but happily, waking up shivering now and then and muttering in love, “there, there, my little ones, I’ll see to it you grow strong at last.”
In the morning Brock ate the little diamond berry and found himself changed: about an hour after swallowing, he was able to see the plants during the daytime. They were still dim, and he could not see their colors, but he could recognize their rough outlines.
Brock had never seen squirrels, rabbits, chipmunks, or any other expected invaders of gardens, but over the following weeks he became aware that something was nibbling at his garden. He couldn’t quite see the animal, but he saw a bit of blurry motion dashing in and out of the garden at times. He hid in a tree for hours everyday waiting for the animal to show up, until finally he saw an indistinct ball of fur going from plant to plant and taking its choice of leaves and petals. Brock jumped from the tree, trapped the creature in his bucket, and sat on it until the sun went down.
That night he turned the bucket over and shined his flashlight inside. The culprit was about the size of a squirrel but with the face of a toad, two tails – one bushy and one scaled– and six little arms. Brock looked at it in wonder, and it stared back into his eyes with equal amazement. And then it spoke, “Master, free me and I will help you.”
Brock had no idea what this creature was or what kind of help it might give, but he thought it best to play along. “You are the thief who has been stealing from my garden. Why shouldn’t I cook you up and eat you for my supper?”
“Your little garden is bad fare. Better than most of the bland food one finds in this spectrum of the rainbow, but it seems you hardly know how to cultivate it. I do not see you munching on these leaves and petals. Perhaps you would like me to take you to a place where you can learn how to make this garden bear good fruit?”
Brock thought on the great change that had occurred after eating only a single berry. He had not seen any signs of further sweetness coming from the vines. “If you will take me to such a place, I will free you.”
They agreed to leave at once. Brock gathered his most necessary belongings and plucked a handful of flowers from his garden. The creature led him into a tunnel inside a hollow tree. Brock, remembering the tale of Hansel and Gretel and fearing he would be lost or enchanted, left a trail of the flower petals behind him.
Down, down, into the earth they climbed. Brock lost all sense of time but felt they had been traveling for hours. Then, almost without warning, they went through a small passage and emerged higher than he’d ever been before. He had only been aware of going down, never of climbing up, but found himself on top of a great mountain. He could see for miles in every direction, but nothing seemed familiar. It had been early in the evening when they left, but the height of the sun suggested it was close to noon.
“This is usually a good place to catch a ship to other lands,” the creature squeaked and croaked. “Only it seems to be a slow day for traffic.”
Brock wondered what kind of a ship he might hail from a mountaintop, but that seemed no greater a wonder than the creature or the passage to the mountain itself. He sat and waited. He watched clouds and saw in their shapes the forms of strange animals and plants as he had dreamed he might see in far off lands. The tiny guide dozed off to sleep on Brock’s lap as he sat leaning against a tree, exhausted from a sleepless night of travel.
“Ahoy!” The two companions were startled awake by the yell, but it was too late. In front of them there stood a giraffe nearly twenty feet tall, and on its back there was a pirate, eye patch and peg leg and all. Before they knew what was happening the pirate had cast a net over them and begun drawing them in.
“I’ve got you now, ye little fishies. Come on my ship and I’ll force you to take my treasure!”
Brock struggled in confusion. He cried out for help. “It’s no use,” croaked his guide, “these are the pirates who help the poor. The most fearsome captors in all the world.”