by Mark Jacobs
Chapter XX
Looking out the bottleneck, Pence had rapidly cycling views of the tower, the sun, and the sea. Then the tower was gone, in its place a collapsing fury of stone and a mushrooming cloud of white dust. With another spin he saw two birds fly in front of the sun; another, and the sea below was blocked from his small, round window–all he could see was a single gray storm cloud intercepting him on an otherwise beautiful day. On his final rotation, the tower was no more, the birds were gone, and the bottle crashed into the unlucky storm cloud with a squelching plunk.
The jarring catch threw Pence from the bottom of the bottle–now topmost–to the top of the bottle, now at the bottom. He wiggled like a totem dancer twirling a hoop around his stomach, trying to somehow free himself, but his legs were once again jammed in the slick funnel of the bottleneck. He succeeded only in creating enough free space between his waist and the glass for a trickle of grog to siphon away. It dribbled down his legs, past the sluice-gate penny, and out of the bottle.
The storm cloud shook violently–Pence’s torso slammed left and right into the glass–and a baritone explosion blasted from every direction as though the cloud itself had a case of whooping cough. A pocket of pressure built under Pence with nowhere to go but up. “That’s not what I meant about enjoying the breeze on my backside,” Pence groaned regretfully. He wiggled again, releasing more grog down the bottleneck.
The cloud lurched, followed by another tuba-groan of asphyxiated strain. The pressure underside Pence ballooned. His gemstones bulged like a bullfrog’s eyes and his brain jutted farther out the back of his head. Then his rice nose zipped free from his face like a dart from a blowgun and ricocheted off the glass walls repeatedly until it lost steam and slid back down the side of the bottleneck. Pence sandwiched it between his two stumps and pressed it back between his eyes a bit crookedly, but no worse off.
“This cloud must be one of the Sun’s henchmen,” Pence reasoned, his speech slowed by the pressure building inside his body. “Ow… my head hurts. Must get… to stump. Save… penny. Meet… women.” He tilted his head back sickly. In his daze he tried to dislodge himself one more time; as he squirmed, the last of the Prince’s grog escaped out of the bottle.
Again came the thunderous moan, lower than before–a sound of stress and suffocation–and the clot of pressure under Pence swelled to a bursting point. Jets of hot air whistled up the miniscule gaps between his body and the glass. His flesh blushed, his eyes rolled in their makeshift sockets like marbles. “Big… scary… cloud… Ha! Can’t even handle… a little… grog.” Pence chuckled with delirium, then hiccoughed and a finger of yellow steam curled out of his mouth. He stared at its trail cross-eyed. “What was it… that old man told me?”
Steam drifted out of his seashell-sculpted ears. His cheeks turned umber, his head pressure-cooking from the inside out.
“If I… get in any… tight spots–”
His brain was near fully exposed out the back of his head, threatening to shoot out in the same kinetic manner as his nose. Thin, spiderwebbing cracks crept up the glass walls as the pressure below flexed against every edge of its confinement.
“–use my head!” Pence recited. He frowned. “How’s that going to help here?” He giggled drunkenly. “Crazy old man. I’m going to… kick him in the shins… when I get… home.” With his last word, he feinted. His mouth hung open slack and his head slumped back and bounced against the sloping walls of the bottleneck, where his protruding brain chipped one of the hairline cracks, releasing the pressure. The bottle instantly shattered and was blasted out of the storm cloud in a geyser of boiling air. Pence was blown high and away along with one brown penny and a shower of glass shards.
This was a view for Pence like no other. He wiped the grog and the daze from his eyes as he flew up. Stalling at the top of his trajectory, he gave a thoughtful glance left and right–the mushroom cloud, quick to form but slow to fade, looked like a big white tree of broccoli; “I like that better than the tower already,” Pence said to himself–and then he came back down like a limp-limbed rag doll. As he fell, his perfect eyes picked out the penny against the backdrop of empty sky and purple sea. He spread his arms and legs, causing his body to level out horizontally. He tried to swim through the air to reach the penny, flapping his arms like a bird and kicking his legs together like a fishtail. This had no effect.
Pence put his stumps under his chin, stymied. A flake of glass had slashed him above the eyes in the aftermath of the storm cloud’s eruption and his brow was cut with deep concern once more. After some consideration, he reached a hand out just as he had with the white splinter at the fence. The penny sparkled for an instant, but Pence saw this was only the light from the sun toying with him. “A cape would sure come in handy right now,” he observed.
On his next slow rotation Pence saw that he and the Queen’s clay flowerpot shared intersecting lines of descent; they were very near to each other already and closing in quickly. Pence was the higher of the two, falling as fast as a bird without a third breakfast. The flowerpot fell marginally slower–its few remaining petals had fanned upward to create an array of tiny umbrellas, giving the simple vase just enough drag for Pence to catch up, or down, as it was.
He landed bulls-eye in the dry soil, using one arm to brace himself against the flower’s stem like a man planting a flag on a newly discovered island. With his added weight aboard, the handful of petals broke away and the flowerpot accelerated to full freefall. Peeking over the side of the pot, Pence saw how the sea was lined with waves in rows to the horizon, like a field of corn seen from a mountaintop, and that there was no chance of the flowerpot landing anywhere but in the water. “Well, this was a bum deal,” he noted like a man whose new hat has a hole in the top. “Abandon ship!”
He jumped for his life over the side of the flowerpot, but remained inevitably beside it as they both continued to fall. “Why didn’t that old man tell me how to calculate relative terminal velocities of bodies in motion,” Pence griped. Resignedly, he reached an arm out and climbed back aboard the clay pot.
The once-white, twice-withered flower began to glow. The brown decay on the stem was swept away in the upward wind like sawdust; underneath, healthy growth shone root-white. Pence’s heartbeat doubled its pace. The stem pulsed with light.
Then the green mist flamed to life, shedding trails of snaking floral patterns, phantom vines intertwining to write sideways-up scripts in the empty sky.
One more look over the edge of the flowerpot at the approaching sea was all the impetus the boy required: he scrambled up the white stem and when he reached the top he continued climbing right on up the green mist without a second thought. “I’m going to make it!” he elated. But when he reached the top–the point in space where the green mist had first begun to glow–the makeshift ladder ended. He looked around with one hand shielding his eyes from the sun, searching for the penny, but he could no longer see it. He hung his head, mourning his poverty.
“I suppose I can wait here until I’m rescued,” he sighed. “I saw a pair of birds earlier… they’ll have to do. But fancy me needing to be rescued by a bird! Impossible! Obviously I’ll leave that part of the story out when I get home. Hmmm, I wonder what’s taking them so long. Birds!” he called as if they were right in front of him, wearing blindfolds. “Are you daft? It’s me over here! Where are you?”
Out of the corner of his eye Pence saw the sun watching him. “Oh, I bet you’re just loving this, aren’t you?” The sun said nothing. “Shut up!” Pence cried. “Birds! Hurry up! You’re killing me, here! Where are you?”
Not so far below, the flowerpot plunked into the purple waves. The green mist faded with the soft sound of the splash, but just before it did so Pence leapt from his perch, soaring high–limbs flayed like a four-pointed star–and grabbed hold of a dangling line of string. The Queen’s threadbare apron, light as a tissue, had been running a more leisurely race to the sea.
After a flurry of panicked g
rasping and chomping, Pence held one of the waist-strings between his stumps and the other in his mouth. The pouch filled with air—a parachute—but the holes which the Prince had torn in the fabric worked against Pence like so many leaks in a rowboat. Despite its condition, he found that he could approximately steer by angling his legs this way and that. He set himself a course for the shoreline, for now he saw the Prince riding into the entrance of the tunnel road with the Queen stuffed in his haversack, her legs stuck out upside-down like a pair of branch-thick arrows in a giant quiver.
“Mmph gmph mmmph!” Pence shouted in a rage with his mouth stuffed full of yarn. He shook his head savagely, which is how he caught sight again of the penny.
“Mmmph, mmn mnny!” he celebrated and, forgetting the Prince for an instant, aimed his legs to steer himself back over the sea, losing priceless altitude in every degree.
The penny, however, was already well beneath him, too far away to ever catch up with, even if he let go of his parachute.
“Mmmmmm,” Pence said sadly.
A white bird swooped into view like a painter’s brushstroke across a landscape. Using her colored purse like a butterfly-net, the bird caught the penny in mid-air so near to the sea that her wingtip cut the water like an inverted dorsal fin. The bird immediately executed a quick loop and disappeared behind Pence’s latitude of view.
“Mmmm, mrrt mmn mnny!” Pence shouted angrily. He kicked his legs like a pedaling prince to turn himself around and see where the white bird was making off to with his beloved coin in tow.
There was a whale, finally. The colossal creature moved through the air without a sound.
“I can see what the big fuss is about these guys,” Pence said dryly, forgetting to bite down on the apron-string.
The whale’s wingspan could have shadowed a small city, with webbed feathers layered like humongous, flat ferns. Its slick trunk was gray with dark swirls and milky blotches. As it fanned its wings up and down, slow as the tide, Pence saw waves form in the sea below where the beast’s reflection swam.
The white bird landed on the whale’s back, next to a little brown nut wren.
“The two-bit thief, its got a cohort in crime!” Pence shouted. “Conspiracy to commit aerial robbery–that’s got to be some sort of a felony!” He bit down on the second apron-string again, but his diatribe had cost him valuable height. He was nearly level with the whale, now.
The whale tilted its wings and curved its tail up like a scorpion; the effect was a slow veering, like a large ship turning against the wind.
“Oh, ffffffertilizer,” said Pence, for the mammoth beast was going to intercept him.
The whale ebbed closer. The white bird and the nut wren waited patiently, their talons anchored in thick blubber.
Pence set his jaw square as he touched down deftly on the whale’s back just behind a ridge of holes of scaled sizes, like an overstuffed oboe. The birds were only a step away, watching him with furtive twitches of their heads.
Pence released the apron-strings–the tattered fabric blew right away and was gone–and gave the birds his utmost admonishing stare. “Forgive me if I don’t offer to shake hands with you two goons. I’m here for my penny. Don’t make me ask twice.”
