paradisa | page nineteen

[Henry dictates to the journal this morning, his consonants slightly scrambled by the fact that he's a young boy given a credit card in a place with a truly extensive selection of candy stores.

Behind him, there's the beeps of what can only be arcade games, one of the few times he's actually gone to the arcade when he said he was going to.]

You know, while we were here I read something. [A pause while he chews.] It was a story, like the fairy tales we have at home, but from here instead. It was about a boy who liked to draw cats. Everyone told him he shouldn't, that he drew cats too much, and that he should stop to pay attention to other things. He tried, but he couldn't stop.

One day, the boy was in a temple and he drew a cat on one of the screen things. A huge cat, the biggest and best he'd ever drawn.

Then, in the middle of the night, there was a huge fight in the temple. When the boy came back, he found out that a huge monster rat had come to attack the temple, and that something had killed it before it could hurt anyone. And he found out that the drawing he'd made of his cat was facing the complete opposite direction than how he'd drawn it.

[Another pause, and more crunching.]

I'd never heard that story before. I don't think it's in my book. But, there's so many places, so many worlds.... I mean, if we can do this, then it's not that weird to think it might be true somewhere.

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Afterwards, when the villagers realized what happened, they all called the boy a hero. I think it's supposed to be about being true to yourself.

[That sounds nicer, anyway....]

That is a much more optimistic interpretation. Makes a bit more sense that way, I suppose.

[Though she'll still be wondering about the specifics and attempting to make sense of it all.]

You're quite correct, though. I've often thought about the newfound validity of tales such as those, seeing the sorts of things we've experienced in Paradisa.

In my world, regular fairy tales that everybody knows about really happened, they just happened in a different world than ours. And since, well, there's a ton of other worlds, I don't see why not.