The Colors in the Woods
Below you’ll find the first chapter of a story I have been writing with input from my children. They tell me crazy things they want in the story, and I weave it into a complex-but-coherent whole. The fun bit of character art above is from world renowned twitter fox @JoKaiGonZo and a lot more art from my own kids will be sprinkled throughout the story. Go ahead and pass this along to all your homeschooling and classical education friends who are always looking for decent children’s literature that is imaginative, aesthetically rich, full of poetry, and not profane.
Once the entire story is complete I will be releasing a final edited version in paperback with illustrations. I’ll be putting the whole thing out for free here, but if you want to support the creation of stories like this you can now change to a $5/month subscription and I will send you copies of this and other books as they are released. In a few weeks I should be releasing the first chapters of my 3rd book for adults, and will be putting out a collection of short poems (some released here, some not) in the next year. If you’re interested in one or more of these books, this is a great setup for all of us. You can support the creation of some very unique works of literature (I don’t know of another Chivalric verse allegory similar to Phineiad, and I may be the only author who has described a work as “Shakespearean pulp sci-fi”), and I can have peace of mind devoting a little more time to writing knowing that I already have the support.
Index:
Chapter 2 - Set Sail!
Chapter 1 The Badger
In the Land of Rainbows there was an ugly old woods with almost no color. There were dark greens and darker browns, but the trees were thick and blocked most of the sun. Very few people walked through those woods, and those who did sometimes felt the world had turned black and white.
In that ugly old woods there lived a man named Brock, whose name meant badger. His mother was going to name him Sydney, but when he was born he had a brown stripe down the center of his forehead. His father laughed and said, “he looks like a badger!” His grandmother– who had been a friend of Chaucer in her youth and still recalled some of the older words– called the badger a “brok,” and so they gave him the English name Brock.
The Land of Rainbows was a land of happy children. Except for Brock. When the sun came out colors would flood the sky. It was no simple blue, and never a gloomy gray, but changed and swirled with cheerful greens, danced with pink, shimmered with gold, and waved a long and peaceful purple. Every morning the children of the town would run out their front doors and grab their favorite colors from the sky. A child might leap into the air, grab a streaming ray of green, giggle with joy and say, “I can feel the happy growth of moss and the silly jokes whispered by budding trees!” Another might catch their favorite red and sing out like a cardinal. Many would wade into a pool of yellow and feel their hearts warmed with the tenderness of the first smiling day of spring. When the sun went down and the colors vanished the children would go home for bed, excited to tell their parents all the delightful things they’d found that day. Children were always happy in the Land of Rainbows, except for Brock.
People guessed it might be because of his brown stripe, but no one could tell. Brock could see the colors, more or less. He could grab them from the sky as well as anyone. But he did not taste or see, he did not smell or dream or sing or laugh, he did not feel anything special at all when he pulled down the bright rays of light for himself. He was, in that respect, like a normal boy. If he had been born anywhere else in the world he would have been like the other kids. No one could grab colors from the sky outside the Land of Rainbows, and so he would not have felt he was different if he had been born in New Zealand or in Egypt. But having been born in the Land of Rainbows he felt that he was both different and deprived. Though he had all manner of book and game; though he had a loving father and mother; though he was very intelligent and took well to his studies, because he could not feel the colors he felt that he was lacking. He had so many, many friends and relatives who loved him, but feeling he was a bit odd inside he always felt alone.
And so, when Brock came of age he said to himself, “I will become a badger, indeed.” He put on his favorite brown trousers, warm stockings his aunt Rita had made, a heavy, gray. collarless shirt, a brown waistcoat to match the trousers, rubber boots, and around his neck he tied the red handkerchief his mother had given him for his birthday. The last item reminded him that he was a man of the Land of Rainbows, however far from it he might feel. He packed his dirty old smock for when he had to labor, the complete works of William Shakespeare, a book of famous English poetry and the Brother’s Grimm, a flashlight he could power with a crank, two wool blankets, a mirror, a comb, a razor, scissors, a knife, a shovel, a hammer, a saw, a box of nails, a bucket filled with old towels, and the Saxon harp his grandfather had carved for him when he was a boy. He took his life savings from the bank and said, “today I turn eighteen. I will buy myself a cart and a birthday mule.” Brock bought the scrawniest little mule in town and the most run-down little cart, but it was enough to get him where he was going. He loaded up his things and took the rest of his savings to the grocery store. He bought them out of cans of green beans and corn, chili and Vienna sausages, peas and pintos, dumpling soup and tomato bisque, shredded chicken and sliced carrots, and whatever other delicious things he could find sealed in aluminum, tin, or steel. He said goodbye and walked his mule and every worldly good into the dark gray woods to live.
He felt he was like a badger already. He could see well enough, but colors did not affect him like they did his friends, and he felt sympathy when he learned the badger was almost blind. Though he’d lived his life with the love of family and friends, his loneliness let him identify with the badger’s solitary home. He used his shovel to dig a great big hole, thinking of the burrowing badger. He used his saw to cut a tree and assembled over the hole a little house. He hammered the nails to hold it together. He built a chair and a little bed and made a mattress out of dead leaves. He gathered water in his bucket and placed it in the corner where he’d hung the mirror so that he had a little place to shave and wash up. If anyone had visited him, they would have said it was tiny and cold and somewhat sad. To Brock it was a tidy, cozy place where he felt something much like happiness.
At night he charged his flashlight, plucked his harp, and read his favorite speeches from Shakespeare. He opened to Henry V and read, “…from this day to the ending of the world, but we in it shall be rememberèd— we few, we happy few, we band of brothers…” He felt quite brave and less alone. He opened the book of poems and found a favorite sonnet by William Wordsworth. Plucking a slow but hopeful tune he read, “Nuns fret not at their convent's narrow room, and hermits are contented with their cells; and students with their pensive citadels; maids at the wheel, the weaver at his loom, sit blithe and happy.” Brock saw that the world had long been filled with people who felt happy when they were alone. Nuns and hermits and students, and even many workers at their trades. “I am not alone at all,” he thought, “because the world is full of people who share my same feelings. If I can’t taste the colors of the sky, still I have the greatest words ever penned in English, and in my soul I may delight more in these words than any eye or tongue or ear may know.”
Brock lived this way for 15 months. At times he felt lonely and wondered if he should return. Perhaps it was better to be with his friends and family even though they did not understand each other? At times he felt he was the happiest of men and wondered that so few had thought to live alone in the woods with a small pile of books. Then one night in the darkest dark he thought he saw something. He couldn’t tell for sure. It was almost like a ray of light, but nothing around it was illuminated. It was almost like a drop of the rainbow had fallen in a puddle of black oil, yet it wasn’t colorful. It was more that a bit of the darkness seemed to shimmer like color and light could shimmer, but it was still all black and white. And strangest of all, that shimmering seemed to be in the moving shape of a man walking briskly through the woods at night.
“Who goes there?” Brock called out. The shape stopped moving. It was something alive. Brock grabbed his flashlight, turned the crank, and pointed it toward the shape. It was a man in black slacks, a white shirt, suspenders, and a dark gray hat with a wide brim. He was not colorless like the woods whose dark tones were merely muffled by the lack of light. The man was truly black and white just like an old photograph.
“I’m surprised you can see me,” the man responded, “but tell me how do I look? What colors are my clothes?”
“No color at all,” said Brock.
“Just as I thought. It would be a great surprise if you could see it all. This shirt is the finest threads of blurp and erklow, zet and weend, woven by the finest craft guilds in the sunken city of Erstoire. It’s colors do not exist in this realm at all, and no one here can see them. I usually travel these woods unseen in search of seeds, but you must have half your mind in another world.”
“I grew up in the Land of Rainbows, but I’ve lived here alone for over a year. I’ve never heard of far-off realms and other worlds.”
“You’ve never been alone here. My kind comes through twice a year to gather the seeds we need for our own world. It’s a wonderful place to harvest, so cut off from those gaudy rainbow tones. But you’re not quite like us either… here, take some of these.”
The man extended his hand to Brock and dropped a pile of seeds into his palm. Some were tiny and almond shaped, others were big and spiky, and others round like tiny balls. All seemed to shimmer without light or color, as the man had seemed to shimmer before Brock saw him in the light.
“You barely saw me,” said the man, “so I’m sure you would never find these tiny seeds without being able to see their colors. In three more weeks the weather should warm up and it will be time to plant. Try it out and eat the fruit if you’re successful. They don’t often take root outside my world, but you’ve surprised me already just by seeing me. You might find the world is different than you thought.”