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Carvings Of The Cotton Wool Prince
Magpie Jay (John Kerswell) | | | | | |
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So there was this small boy, small enough so that he barely weighed anything
but his lungs were clearly very well developed. He could poise at high
altitudes without gasping, reaching or placing an urgent mail order request
for oxygen.
During the mornings he would sit cross legged, in his grey shorts that had a
silver thread running down the seam, on the third smallest cloud that hung
over the green valley at the edge of the earth. From time to time, when he
shuffled into a more comfortable sitting position, things would fall out of
his pockets. Considering the size of him he had very large pockets and one
would wonder how much useless stuff he actually could cram into them.
Every now and again a small blue marble droplet would roll out of his pocket
and drop onto the soft white cloud. It would sort of sit for a while,
cradled in the fluffy down, before sinking in and falling. When it was
nothing more than the size of a pin prick the boy would watch the hole in
the cloud close in on it's self until it was whole again.
It had been a while since anything happened up there, but he wasn't really
in the mood to try and make it rain heavily. The last time he tried to cause
a storm, he ended up beating the cloud to within an inch of it's life with
his bare hands. it didn’t hurt that much, but it took a lot of effort for
little to no return and even lungs like his can begin twitching for oxygen
when such effort is expeded.
He decided it may be easier to cause a minor snow storm. In all honesty the
luscious green pasture below was starting to hurt his eyes a little as it
really was very green, an emerald the size of a small cat could have been as
bright, even if it was held up in front of the sun. If successful his
snowstorm would mean the dazzling green would be turned to white and while
you may consider white to be a brighter hue than green, the boy had yet to
attain this realisation, as he hadn't made that much snow before.
You see the trouble with making snow is that it is a long and painstaking
process, requiring not just immense patience, but a degree of skill and art
you don’t often find in small boys these days. There are some misguided
fools who believe that snow is the product of exploding cows who have their
milk frozen, but they are sadly very wrong about that, it would take a lot
of cows to produce the snowstorm the boy had in mind. Besides snow is
obviously just constructed from tiny fragments of cloud. From deep within
his pocket he pulled out a small red handled penknife which had a couple of
semi-sucked green boiled sweets stuck to it. He flicked these off and with
the grey fluffy lining of his pocket still on them they fell into the
trickling stream far below escorted by a couple of tiny 'plops'.
He began to begin work on the side of the cloud nearest to him. It would be
somewhat foolish to carve away at the one upon which he was sitting so he
reached out over the drop and chiselled away at a pear shaped cloud to his
left. It was already not particularly symmetrical, so it would be of little
consequence if it were to lose a few more layer from it's outer.
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?
The boy began to notice how cold it was getting around him and his cloud, so
he sat down, drew his knees up close to his chin and felt sad, the belly
boulders of depression muddying up inside. He thought of the miles of the
grass beneath, laughing in the breeze at his failed attempt, each swaying
blade whispering his name as it moves. Every time he blinked where he would
usually see darkness or the red embrace of the back of his eyelids, he only
saw green. Lime, pine, emerald, mint, olive, papaya, spring and lawn green.
He thought of the others around, the boys who cast thunderbolts by merely
flicking a toenail or sneezing. It only made him greener, futility
germinated where fertility furrows.
A small, isolated tear snuck out from the corner of his bulbous blue left
eye and started to trickle down his cheek. The saline anti-freeze held it's
own for most of the journey, but just as the tear reached his chin, at the
final split second before plummeting to the ground below and becoming one
with the stream, it froze.
He sat a while mulling over his plight, the icicle tear silent under his
face. The thought of his idle horse suffering at the jeering strikes of
teverish thunderbolts weighed heavy on his mind. He didn’t know how to turn
this around, how can so much labour lead to so little, when he has seen that
so little can cause so much? He closed his eyes, and focused on his horse,
picturing not just a pile of snow that merely looked like a horse, but a
large, strong, actual horse, a stallion, with flowing white mane and strong
steel hooves lined with silver.
He saw the horse arise from the branch upon which it was sleeping and leap
down onto the ground where the tree was deeply rooted. After stretching out
it's legs in front of him, it shook it's head, little specks of
dandruff-looking snow falling from his mane, and settling on nearby pebbles.
The stretching broke into a walk, and soon after a trot. Before long the
white stallion was galloping around the pasture, splattering snowflakes
everywhere from it's mane, speckling the hill, and quilting the hoof prints
in the soil, sometimes even before the hoof had been lifted out. The river
began to freeze over as the cascading snow sent it's temperature plummeting,
the fish bemusedly peering out from beneath the crystallised surface, making
a puzzled 'o' with their lips, and blinking in the albino glare. The entire
pasture was coated in fresh, soft snowflakes, a baked Alaska, towering
tundra. The green was no more.....
The squawking of the big white bird circling below the cloud awoke the boy.
Still hazy from his waltz with the sandman, he paused for a few moments
before opening his eyes. He awoke half hoping to see the thing from his
dream, but all he saw was a sky full of stars, weaning their way out of the
encroaching darkness. From over the side of the cloud he could see the green
blades still waving below, taunting his every carve, craving his every
teardrop.
In despair he dropped his head down onto his raised knees, forgetting the
icicle tear that still clasped his chin, like a delicate brittle starfish on
an opal stone. The hands of the icicle lost their grip and cracked, until it
slowly slid from his chin, gliding swiftly in a straight line downwards, and
cutting a path through the cloud on which he was sitting. The boy expected
to hear a (admittedly very distant and quiet) plop as the icicle pierced the
water of the stream, instead, the sound of shattering china reverberated its
way upward to his small ears reddened by the cold. He held his breath in
surprise, and peered over the small hole left in the icicles wake, a wisp of
breath frost coiling around his face as it left his lips.
There below were the smithereens of his shattered tear, scattered on a small
round patch of ice on the stream. The ground all around the ice was
cushioned in the deepest, richest soft white down you could imagine. From
where he was sitting he could only see a pure albino snow quilt filling the
hole in the cloud from way below. On the quilt were two tree like, three
twigged footprints of a bird. The boy put his face right to the hole and
tilted his head at an angle. Only by doing this could he see the fringes of
green at the edge of the snow. On the grass beside stood a small magpie,
preening the snowflakes from his feathers. It stops and stares at the patch
of ice on the stream, tilting its head from side to side. It looks around
once more and takes flight, a metre off the ground. After circling the edges
of the cloud hole, it swoops down on the fragments of tear, shimmering in
the moonlight, picks up the largest splinter in it's beak and vanishes from
view.
The boy just lies there, on his cloud, not moving. He knows that his
snowstorm was unsuccessful in covering the green around, even though it was
now under the ebony glove of night anyway. But whenever he looked directly
down through the hole in the cloud no matter where he positioned his head,
all he can see is snow. The small space his tear made, was now filled. And
while he may have set his sights a little too high in the first instance, he
could now accept his place as a snowmaker. Not THE snow maker but a
handmaster of the winter at least.
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