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Carvings Of The Cotton Wool Prince
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Cutting pieces away was far easier than he remembered and the liquid candy
floss seemed to cling to his hand when he cupped it, requiring no effort.
The cloud was moving very slowly so he had plenty of time to pull away
several large handfuls of it and place them gently on the edge of his own
cloud cushion. Surprisingly, as this often happens when you put two clouds
together, the small flossy clumps did not merge with their new shelf,
deciding to just sit, and await their fate in the boys’ hands.
Once he had enough clumps to make a snowstorm, he flicked open his butterfly
knife and a glint from the suns' reflection flashed across the left side of
his face, making him blink. He started to fashion the cloud into shapes of
things he had seen the day before. The peak of the tall grey mountain (the
one that shrouded the moon even from the height he was sitting), the big
white bird that circled below before diving out of sight and the spear
shaped fork of the lightning which sometimes struck in the distance. He
could but dream of how such an effect is produced, and the results that
would have on his mission to reduce the glare of the green.
Fun as it was to make these ornaments they were not assisting him in his
snowstorm quest, and his choice of subject for sculpting was limited, as he
hadn't seen very much of the world just yet and it never is very exciting to
just mould snow balls. So, he began to chip away at his sculptures and the
remaining flossy clumps with his knife . The clumps grew smaller and smaller
as feather-like fragments of cloud slipped from the knife and either drifted
up or down, dependent on the direction the breeze was blowing.
Like the speckled sheep shearers he would occassionally see in spring, he
clipped away at the woolly cloud, and the fragments of fleece continued to
scatter as if he were a sneeze over a mound of glitter.
Satisfaction weaned his brow at the first sight of snow, a white spot on the
top of the tallest tree and while it was a long way down, and could easily
have been a roosting bird, the boy instinctively knew his task was coming to
fruition. The momentum of that sight spurred him on, so he tugged and
clipped at a faster rate, his arms almost in a blur as if he had to get the
job done before he could go to bed, or go and play outside.
The single speck on the treetop had not flown away, in fact it had grown to
resemble a roosting horse, and it was as the horses tail started to unfurl
and slide down the side of the tree that the boy stopped.
He put down his knife and excitedly peered over the side of his cloud,
cheeks rosy red from his toil, eager to witness the storm billowing bellow.
It had taken him 2 hours and seventeen minutes of lacklustre labour to build
this horse, yet as far as the inhabitants of the grass below were concerned,
there wasn't a cloud in the sky. For all the boys efforts there was no
snowstorm. Merely a few graceful sprinklings that settled upon the tree
before they could even reach the ground.
Upon this realisation, the boy became very disheartened. The edge of the
world below was so large, how could he possibly make a snowstorm that would
even reach the grass, let alone wrap the landscape in the albino quilt of
silk he dreamed of? All of his friends seemed to unleash blizzards in their
sleep so why after so much effort could he only make a feeble snow horse?
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