page nineteen

[fantasies]

[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.

Comments

[savethedarkness]

[she laughs] Honestly, the way he speaks of you, I was led to believe there was nothing but "good stuff".

[fantasies]

Leeeet's go with that. Yep. That's me, all good stuff.

[savethedarkness]

[that earns him a quiet laugh in response] If we were all "good stuff", I don't think we'd have earned ourselves a place here, do you? After all, we have to be interesting in some manner for this place to want us around.

[fantasies]

[That sounds like a grownup trap!!

Warily:]

You can be good and interesting at the same time.

[It sounds a little bit like a question, like he's fishing to see if that's the answer she wants.]

[savethedarkness]

That's very true, you can. But in a place like Paradisa, which seems to get its energy from the things that go wrong ... I should think it would like people who can get themselves into a little trouble, now and again. Myself included.

[fantasies]

[A pause.]

Well....

August leaves a lot of stuff out. He does that sometimes.

[savethedarkness]

Most storytellers do, so it doesn't run long. People don't have the attention spans they used to, unfortunately...

[fantasies]

I don't think that's why August does. Not most of the time, anyway.

[savethedarkness]

Oh? Why do you think he does it, then, Henry?

[fantasies]

Because... [He has to think for a moment, to figure out how to word this.] Because he knows which parts are important. And he wants to make sure people hear them.