Dreamland
Treats of Pulp and Empty Stomachs
You’re snacking on In Different Color, a fairy tale.
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Time went a-reaping...
A shoulder punctured the warty, rust-mottled shell of a hovel-sized pumpkin. A flaxen head followed the shoulder. A body in a lily-patterned robe appeared behind both. Thick fragments of pumpkin fell away, and Honeydew tumbled from the gourd. She landed, wet with seeds and pulp, on a bed of pine needles, crumbly leaves, and writhing tree roots. Mr. Grey emerged after her.
Honeydew jumped to her feet. She shook herself. Mr. Grey threw wet strings of amber away with mechanical arm-flicks. The pair scanned the trunks of a thick forest. The moon shone - through a dense ceiling of limbs - in sparse, chiffon blades. One blade cut across the backs of their necks like a zephyr chill.
Mr. Grey’s stomach rumbled. He tried transferring some of his hands’ dryness to his arms, and said, “I believe we’re lost.”
“That’s new,” said Honeydew. Her belly echoed the sentiment with its own growl.
Mr. Grey wiped a cobweb of gourd-guts from his face. He looked up. Among the leaf-and-needle furred canopy he saw darker, rounder silhouettes. They weighed on the limbs and bobbed in the high breezes. While Honeydew scrubbed her robe with a handful of duff, Mr. Grey reached back into the soft, wet gourd-hollow. He withdrew his seed and pulp-coated fiddle coffin, and their suitcases, and arranged all on the forest floor. In his own luggage he found a candle. Mr. Grey dug up his fiddle, and tuned it, and tossed out a shiny pebble. He played two short measures of notes. The music moaned between the trunks, and mingled with the undergrowth’s rustling-things, and transformed into flame on the candle’s wick. While Honeydew laved at the guts on her arms and threatened the dark wood around them with her shoulders, Mr. Grey set the violin down and lifted the candle up.
The flickering butter-glow just reached the forest roof’s bottom. High above, gently waltzing out of reach in the whispering crowds of leaves and moonlight fragments, there hung apples, corn, and regular-sized pumpkins. The candle’s distant edge lit on the three edibles and transformed them into giant stones of ruby, and heliodor, and citrine; like jagged fragments clinging to a stained-glass window-lattice, against the backdrop of night.
A leaf drifted down and stuck to Mr. Grey’s face. He brushed it aside. Mr. Grey’s stomach rumbled again, followed by Honeydew’s. He brought the candle down and looked to the woods’ floor. He saw only the soft bed of leaves and needles. And the huge roots burrowing like mole-lines below it. And, here and there, a tenacious forget-me-not, or morning-glory, or aster. But no fallen food.
Mr. Grey cleared his throat. Honeydew discarded her wet leaves and looked to the canopy where he gestured with the candle’s light. She repeated his survey of the forest. Then she said, “Hmm, we could test our luck on a trunk climb.”
Mr. Grey said, “It’s a long way up. And these are peculiar trees. No lower branches.”
Mr. Grey placed the candle on the ground. He set his dry fingers into a static, concrete lace, and walked to a trunk. He leaned against it. Then, in the exact-reverse motion, but sped-up, he pulled away. Honeydew brought her shoulders to point and said, “What’s wrong?!”
She grabbed the candle and brought it closer. They examined the tree. The bark looked like standard-issue tree-bark; hard and rugged, umber and lumpy. When Mr. Grey and Honeydew set their palms against it, however, the tree’s outside had soft, smooth, squishy qualities. Like babies’ skin.
Honeydew said, “Hmm. Very peculiar trees. Still worth a shot to climb.”
Mr. Grey set his back against the trunk again, with caution, and laced his fingers in the foothold. Honeydew made a half-dozen sorties scrabbling up the side of the baby-soft tree, with Mr. Grey giving as much boost as he could. All to no avail. She shook her head and backed off. Both panted, while their stomachs grumbled.
“No good,” said Honeydew after catching her breath. “We’ll need a stick. And good aim.”
Honeydew grabbed the candle and pushed a foot through the leaf-and-needle bedding. Mr. Grey plucked another strand of pumpkin from his robe and said, “All-told, this is far better than the Glory Days reception. Or even Wine Medo. I don’t miss those itchy chicktails.”
“Think we’ll get tossed this time?”
“Pardon?”
“First we’re thrown into a wine lake. Then we’re thrown into prison. My bet? This time we’re thrown to the moon. Could work out, if we snag some apples on the way up.”
They heard rustling in a shrub by their suitcases. Mr. Grey and Honeydew whirled to face the noise, Mr. Grey with his candle, Honeydew with her shoulders. A lonely jackalope poked its horned head from the bushy tangle. The pair relaxed. The Jackalope and Mr. Grey stared at one another for a moment; mirrored, blank expressions. Then the little mammal hopped off into the dark.
“Perhaps we’ll meet someone who can give us more substantial light,” said Mr. Grey. “This flame does its best, but it’s not quite equal to the setting.”
“Probably they’ll be hostile whoever they are. Keep your eyes shucked for danger.”
“Oh, I don’t know. It could be a woodsman and his cart. Or a carriage driver. Or a man with cattle. Who knows but we might get lucky. We might buy or rent rides that’ll last us through our search for Jodee; through this woodland in Dreamland. Maybe they wouldn’t even need treasure-payment; maybe everything’s done by barter here. We could trade them a song, or a valued possession in exchange for a lift.”
Mr. Grey took out his treasure purse and counted his funds. At the same time he finished wiping the last of the pumpkin from his robes, and dried himself with the anchor shawl. Honeydew paused in her stick-search to look at him. She clicked, an auditory raise-of-a-brow, and said, “Someone’s eager, aren’t you?”
“We can’t be far behind Jodee. She hasn’t got the lead on us as in Wine Medo.”
“Right.”
“I say, better to begin with a will.”
A breeze crackled its fingers softly through the canopy leaves. A howl followed behind . Mr. Grey held the candle higher and scanned, while Honeydew tensed before resuming her search. She said, “Ridiculous! How is it that there’s leaves, and needles, and flowers all over the rooty place, and not one stick?”
Another noise, a heavier rustle, disturbed the woods. Mr. Grey heard the muted squawks of crows in it; he thought, perhaps a murder had come to roost. But the rustling only filled the atmosphere as ambient sound, with an additional skin-tickling chill. A few branches fell. Honeydew rushed to the nearest stick and grabbed it. She squeezed the soft-skinned wood tight enough to blanch her knuckles. Mr. Grey sheltered the candle with his hand. After waiting for a greeting, he said, “Hello there, Wind.”
“Oh my breath!” said The Old Wind in a quick whisper. “It runs so fast before me, and I cannot keep pace. But wait, what are these I see?”
“Hello Wind. It’s Mr. Grey and Honeydew,” Mr. Grey waved, then gestured at Honeydew. She was trying to land a stick-throw on a low-hanging apple cluster. She couldn’t quite get the distance.
The Old Wind said, “Why always so? Why twos and threes and lonely ones, pestering the dark woods with heavy feet? Witless to walk the woods with only a candle. Witless...”
“You seem a bit off, Wind?”
Honeydew said, “Do us a favor; shake some apples loose. Or a corn or two.”
The Old Wind blew cold in their eyes. “Shake this. Turn that. Not so much as a by-your-leave.”
“Forget it,” Honeydew went back to her stick and chucked it; supposedly at the fruits and veggies. The stick clipped The Wind and flew into the dark. Honeydew frowned. “‘A bit off’. Hardly. She’s the same as ever.”
“Wind,” began Mr. Grey, “could you point us toward a settlement? Or give us the time? Is sunrise many moments off?”
“Sunrise!” The wind’s chortle shivered the trees. “Not through the live-long night. If you walk, it’s under the moon; over hedge and ditch; through bog and brake. You’ll cross without the sun’s rise. Fare thee better next time.”
The Wind made tiny cyclones of dust and leaves at her departure. When the whirling air had settled - leaving only the uppermost limbs still whispering - not a pumpkin, corn, or apple had dropped.
Honeydew’s stomach growled, worse than ever. “Forget the Wind. We’ll help ourselves,” She tried the branches with her stick, but anger made her throws inaccurate as well as short.
Mr. Grey looked where The Wind had flown away through the trunks. He said, “Not the worst first meeting. But you’re right. We’ll figure it out. Let’s pick a direction and walk.”
“Randomly?” asked Honeydew with a repulsed exhale. “Why the verve?”
“I’d like Dreamland to turn out differently.”
The leaves and needles seemed to shift louder under their feet. Honeydew held her peace and collected her stick. Mr. Grey made their luggage presentable. He also pushed the sludgy pumpkin-gunk they’d scraped off themselves in a single sludgy pile; leaving the forest clean as they’d found it was only decent. Soon they stood ready on either side of the gourd’s rupture. Mr. Grey and Honeydew stared at the brink of Mr. Grey’s candlelight globe. They paused at the first step.
When a third rustle shook the shrubs while they hesitated, neither was taken by surprise. Honeydew readied her stick; she assumed the next progression after skittish jackalope and crotchety Old Wind would be overtly hostile.
Surprise did catch them in the end; it widened Honeydew’s eyes and forced Mr. Grey’s hands into his pockets. From a tall wall of camellias spreading between two soft trunks, a parade entered the light. A process of rustic sorts - wrinkly women in curlers, and creaky old men with walking canes - shuffled through. All wore silver-buckled shoes, and knit robes with thick padding over the upper body, in the pattern of a cardigan. Mr. Grey felt a pang of jealousy, shivering in his cold, pumpkin-juiced, stiff grey robe. The parade walked beside a half-dozen floats on creaky wooden wheels, rimmed in the same forget-me-nots scattered among the roots and leaves. Despite having only heard a rustle before the parade’s arrival, Mr. Grey and Honeydew’s ears now rang with a jovial trombone-and-drum fanfare. No food was there among the partiers. No lanterns or candles lit the way for the parade. Moonlight shimmered brightly off the trombone pipes, and the balding heads of the players. Mr. Grey noticed that all the attendees were middle-aged or older. There were no children.
The revelers passed with shouts of, “Huzzah!” and, “Oh what a night!” and, “Charming, charming, charming; through the charming woods we go!” Honeydew tensed every muscle around the axis of her stick. Mr. Grey took one hand from a pocket and waved. He said, “Excuse me, hello. My name’s Mr. Grey. I’m afraid we’re turned around.”
Most of the ageds strode right by. One warty old woman sidled a little away from her float. She squinted her eyes in an up-down scan of the two beside their broken pumpkin. She said, “You’ll not trick us. Shame on you damsels. Distressing! And on a queen’s holiday.”
“King’s holiday, you mean, miss? Could you give us the date, perhaps? And the time?” But the warty elder scampered with unexpected liveliness, back to her float. Mr. Grey and Honeydew watched the parade vanish, as suddenly as it arrived, through the opposite end of their candlelight. It disappeared between two trunks, through a hedge-wall of laurel. Mr. Grey and Honeydew shared a glance, shrugged, and went to follow.
They couldn’t find it. Somehow, after moving through the shrubbery, the noise of the parade had faded in a blink. They found no trace of people or floats on the other side of the hedge. They returned to the broken gourd.
“This is a fine hello,” said Honeydew. She switched her stick through fallen leaves and needles. “Better taken into custody than totally ignored.”
Mr. Grey nodded. “It’s not the reception I expected.”
Another twin grumbling of stomachs. Honeydew said, “I should’ve grabbed some trail bars from the diegeonary before leaving… I’m famished. So are you. What are we supposed to do?”
Mr. Grey grabbed Honeydew’s suitcase and held it out for her. He tightened his anchor shawl. Using cotton-bale twine he fastened the partially-melted candle to a stick of his own; the twine dug grooves in both the wax and the soft wood.
With this lighted walking-stick in his right hand, Mr. Grey hefted his suitcase and violin coffin in his left. He scanned once more the tall trunks and forest floor, a tangle of wood and earth and detritus. Mr. Grey took a step from the pumpkin and said, “I say we sally forth.”
This has been In Different Color, a fairy tale.
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