Some of the Kinder Planets
Tim Wynne-Jones
Groundwood Books
House of Anansi Press
Copyright © 1993 by Tim Wynne-Jones
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A shorter version of “The Night of the Pomegranate” appeared in Owl Magazine, Vol. 16, No. 5, May, 1991.
This edition published in 2013 by
Groundwood Books / House of Anansi Press Inc.
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LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Wynne-Jones, Tim
Some of the kinder planets
“A Groundwood Book”
ISBN: 0-88899-418-4 ISBN 978-1-55498-475-6 (ebook)
I. Title.
PS8595.Y59S6 2000 jC813'.54 C93-94902-1
PZ7.W95So 2000
Cover illustration by Tracey Wood
Cover design by Michael Solomon
We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF).
For Marg and Klaus Gruber—
two of the kinder people you
could ever hope to meet.
Acknowledgements
A crow likes to steal shiny bits of the world and hoard them away in its nest. Pull-tabs, gum wrappers, bread-ties, rings. Writers are like crows. They call their nests stories. I would like to thank all the people from whom I have stolen stuff to make the stories in this collection, but, unfortunately, I can’t remember them all. So this list of acknowledgements is only partial. It also includes the names of a few brave souls who have clambered up my tree to comment on how the nest was doing, whether maybe it needed another gum wrapper or so. Thanks, everyone: Peter Carver, Aaron Nault, Michael Nault, Mark Gryski, Sarah Ellis, Rachel Sinn, Janet Lunn, John Lianga, Shelley Tanaka, Jim King, Harry MacKay, Sheila Wynne-Jones, Denise Baker and Jean-Pierre Chrestien of the Museum of Civilization.
I also want to thank Xan, Maddy, Lewis and Amanda, who are a constant source of shiny story-building material.
Table Of Contents
The Night of the Pomegranate
Save the Moon for Kerdy Dickus
The Hope Bakery
Tashkent
Strangers on the Shore
Tweedledum and Tweedledead
The Clearing
Some of the Kinder Planets
Star-Taker
The Night of the Pomegranate
HARRIET’S SOLAR system was a mess. She had made it—the sun and its nine planets—out of rolled-up balls of the morning newspaper. It was mounted on a sheet of green bristol board. The bristol board had a project about Austria on the other side. Harriet wished the background were black. Green was all wrong.
Everything about her project was wrong. The crumpled paper was coming undone. Because she had used the last of the Scotch tape on Saturn’s rings, the three remaining planets had nothing to keep them scrunched up. Tiny Pluto was already bigger than Jupiter and growing by the minute. She had also run out of glue, so part of her solar system was stuck together with grape chewing gum.
Harriet’s big brother, Tom, was annoyed at her because Mom made him drive her to school early with her stupid project. Dad was annoyed at her for using part of the business section. Mostly she had stuck to the want ads, but then an advertisement printed in red ink in the business section caught her eye, and she just had to have it for Mars. Harriet had a crush on Mars; that’s what Tom said. She didn’t even mind him saying it.
Mars was near the Earth this month. The nights had been November cold but clear as glass, and Harriet had been out to see Mars every night, which was why she hadn’t got her solar system finished, why she was so tired, why Mom made Tom drive her to school. It was all Mars’s fault.
SHE WAS using the tape on Ms. Krensky’s desk when Clayton Beemer arrived with his dad. His solar system came from the hobby store. The planets were Styrofoam balls, all different sizes and painted the right colours. Saturn’s rings were clear plastic painted over as delicately as insect wings.
Harriet looked at her own Saturn. Her rings were drooping despite all the tape. They looked like a limp skirt on a ... on a ball of scrunched-up newspaper.
Harriet sighed. The wires that supported Clayton’s planets in their black box were almost invisible. The planets seemed to float.
“What d’ya think?” Clayton asked. He beamed. Mr. Beemer beamed. Harriet guessed that he had made the black box with its glittery smears of stars.
She had rolled up her own project protectively when Clayton entered the classroom. Suddenly one of the planets came unstuck and fell on the floor. Clayton and Mr. Beemer looked at it.
“What’s that?” asked Clayton.
“Pluto, I think,” said Harriet, picking it up. She popped it in her mouth. It tasted of grape gum.
“Yes, Pluto,” she said. Clayton and Mr. Beemer walked away to find the best place to show off their project.
Darjit arrived next. “Hi, Harriet,” she said. The project under her arm had the planets’ names done in bold gold lettering. Harriet’s heart sank. Pluto tasted stale and cold.
BUT LAST night Harriet had tasted pomegranates. Old Mrs. Pond had given her one while she busied herself putting on layer after layer of warm clothing and gathering the things they would need for their Mars watch.
Mrs. Pond lived in the country. She lived on the edge of the woods by a meadow that sloped down to a marsh through rough frost-licked grass and prickly ash and juniper. It was so much darker than town; good for star-gazing.
By eleven p.m. Mars was directly above the marsh, which was where Harriet and Mrs. Pond set themselves up for their vigil. They found it just where they had left it the night before: in the constellation Taurus between the Pleiades and the Hyades. But you didn’t need a map to find Mars these nights. It shone like rust, neither trembling nor twinkling as the fragile stars did.
Mrs. Pond smiled and handed Harriet two folded-up golfers’ chairs. “Ready?” she asked.
“READY, CLASS?” said Ms. Krensky. Everyone took their seats. Harriet placed the green bristol board
universe in front of her. It was an even worse mess than it had been when she arrived. Her solar system was ravaged.
It had started off with Pluto and then, as a joke to make Darjit laugh, she had eaten Neptune. Then Karen had come in, and Jodi and Nick and Scott.
“The planet taste test,” Harriet had said, ripping off a bit of Mercury. “Umm, very spicy.” By the time the bell rang there wasn’t much of her project left.
Kevin started. He stood at the back of the classroom holding a green and blue marble.
“If this was Earth,” he said, “then the sun would be this big —” He put the Earth in his pocket and then pulled a fat squishy y
ellow beachball from a garbage bag. Everybody hooted and clapped. “And it would be at the crosswalk,” he added. Everyone looked confused, so Ms. Krensky helped Kevin explain the relative distances between the Earth and the sun. “And Pluto would be eighty kilometres away from here,” said Kevin. But then he wasn’t sure about that, so Ms. Krensky worked it out at the board with him.
Meanwhile, using Kevin’s example, the class was supposed to figure out where other planets in the solar system would be relative to the green and blue marble in Kevin’s pocket. Harriet sighed.
UNTIL LAST night, Harriet had never seen the inside of a pomegranate before. As she opened the hard rind, she marvelled at the bright red seeds in their cream-coloured fleshy pouches.
“It’s like a little secret universe all folded in on itself,” said Mrs. Pond.
Harriet tasted it. With her tongue, she popped a little red bud against the roof of her mouth. The taste startled her, made her laugh.
“Tonight,” Mrs. Pond said, “Mars is only 77 million kilometres away.” They drank a cocoa toast to that. Then she told Harriet about another time when Mars had been even closer on its orbit around the sun. She had been a girl then, and had heard on the radio the famous broadcast of “The War of the Worlds.” An actor named Orson Welles had made a radio drama based on a story about Martians attacking the world, but he had made it in a series of news bulletins and reports, and a lot of people had believed it was true.
Harriet listened to Mrs. Pond and sipped her cocoa and stared at the Earth’s closest neighbour and felt deliciously chilly and warm at the same time. Mars was wonderfully clear in the telescope, but even with the naked eye she could imagine canals and raging storms. She knew there weren’t really Martians, but she allowed herself to imagine them anyway. She imagined one of them preparing for his invasion of the Earth, packing his laser gun, a thermos of cocoa and a golfer’s chair.
“WHAT IN heaven’s name is this?” Ms. Krensky was standing at Harriet’s chair staring down at the green bristol board. There was only one planet left.
“Harriet says it’s Mars.” Darjit started giggling.
“And how big is Mars?” asked Ms. Krensky. Her eyes said Unsatisfactory.
“Compared to Kevin’s marble earth, Mars would be the size of a pomegranate seed, including the juicy red pulp,” said Harriet. Ms. Krensky walked to the front of the class. She turned at her desk. Was there the hint of a smile on her face?
“And where is it?” she asked, raising an eyebrow.
Harriet looked at the calculations she had done on a corner of the green bristol board. “If the sun was at the crosswalk,” said Harriet, “then Mars would be much closer. Over there.” She pointed out the window at the slide in the kindergarten playground. Some of the class actually looked out the window to see if they could see it.
“You can see Mars,” said Harriet. “Sometimes.” Now she was sure she saw Ms. Krensky smile.
“How many of you have seen Mars?” the teacher asked. Only Harriet and Randy Pilcher put up their hands. But Randy had only seen it on the movie Total Recall.
“Last night was a special night, I believe,” said Ms. Krensky, crossing her arms and leaning against her desk. Harriet nodded. “Tell us about it, Harriet,” said the teacher.
So Harriet did. She told them all about Mrs. Pond and the Mars watch. She started with the pomegranate.
Save the Moon for Kerdy Dickus
THIS IS Ky’s story. It happened to her. It happened at her place in the country. I wasn’t there when it happened, but I know what her place in the country looks like, and that’s important. In this story, the way things look is really important.
There’s more than one version of this story. If Ky’s younger brothers, Brad or Tony, told you the story, it would come out different. But not as different as the way the Stranger tells it. We know his name now, but we still call him the Stranger. Perhaps you know his version of the story. It was in the newspapers. Well, the National Enquirer, anyway.
KY’S FATHER, Tan Mori, built their house in the country. It’s a dome. It looks like a glass igloo, but it’s actually made of a web of light metal tubing and a special clear plastic. From the outside you can see right into the house, which Ky didn’t like one bit at first, because it wasn’t very private. But the house is at the end of a long driveway surrounded by woods, so the only things that can look at you are bluejays, raccoons, the occasional deer and, from way up high on a hot day, turkey vultures circling the sky.
It wasn’t a hot day when this story happened. It was two days before Christmas and there was a bad freezing rain. But let me tell you more about the house, because you have to be able to see the house in order to understand what happened. You have to imagine it the way the Stranger saw it.
For one thing there’s.all this high-tech office stuff. Ky’s parents are both computer software designers, which means that just about everything they do can be done on a computer. Word processors, video monitors, a modem, a fax machine — they’re always popping on and off. Their lights blink in the dark.
You also .have to know something about Ky’s family if you want to see what the Stranger saw when he arrived at their door. You especially have to know that they have family traditions. They make them up all the time. For instance, for the past three years it’s been a tradition that I go up from the city for Ky’s birthday in the summer, and we go horseback riding. I’m not sure if that’s what tradition really means, but it’s nice.
It’s also a tradition with Ky’s family to watch the movie It’s a Wonderful Life every Christmas. And so, two nights before Christmas, that’s what they were doing. They were wearing their traditional Christmastime nightclothes. They were all in red: red flannel pyjamas, even red slippers. Ky had her hair tied back in a red scrunchie. That’s what the Stranger saw: this family in red.
They had just stopped the movie for a break. They were going to have okonomiyaki, which is kind of like a Japanese pizza and pancake all mixed up together with shredded cabbage and crabmeat and this chewy wheat gluten stuff called seitan. This is a tradition, too. Ky’s father, Tan, likes to cook. So they watch It’s a Wonderful Life and they have this mid-movie snack served with kinpara gobo, which is spicy, and other pickly things that only Tan and Barbara, Ky’s mother, bother to eat. But the kids like okonomiyaki.
Tan Mori is Japanese. Here’s how he looks. He wears clear rimmed glasses. He’s short and trim and has long black hair that he wears pulled tightly back in a ponytail.
Ky doesn’t think the Stranger had ever seen a Japanese person up close before. He probably hadn’t ever seen someone who looked like Barbara Mori, either. She isn’t Japanese. She has silvery blonde hair but it’s cut very, very short so that you can see the shape of her head. She’s very slim, bony, and she has one of the nicest smiles you could imagine. She has two dark spots beside her mouth. Ky calls them beauty marks; Barbara laughs and calls them moles.
It was Barbara who first noticed the Stranger while Tan was cooking the okonomiyaki and the boys were getting bowls of shrimp chips and Coke and Ky was boiling water for green tea.
The freezing rain was pouring down on the dome, but inside it was warm, and there were little islands of light. A single light on a post lit up the driveway a bit.
“There’s someone out there,” said Barbara. “The poor man.” She went to the door and called to him. The kids left what they were doing to go and look.
He was big and shadowy where he was standing. He was also stoop-shouldered, trying to hide his head from the icy downpour.
Barbara waved at him. “Come!” she called as loudly as she could. “Come.” Her teeth were chattering because she was standing at the open door in her pyjamas and cold wind was pouring in.
The Stranger paused. He seemed uncertain. Then a gust of wind made him lose his balance and he slipped on the ice and fell. When he got up he made his way towards th
e house slowly, sliding and slipping the whole long way. He was soaked clear through all over. He only had a jean jacket on. No gloves or hat. As he approached the house, Ky could see that, although he was big, he was young, a teenager. Then Barbara sent her to the bathroom for a big towel.
By the time she got back with the towel, the boy was in the house, standing there dripping in the hall. Barbara wrapped the towel around his shoulders. She had to stand on her toes; he was big. He had black hair and he reminded Ky of a bear she had seen at the zoo after it had been swimming. He smelled terrible. His wet clothes smelled of alcohol and cigarette smoke. The kids all stepped away from him. Tony crinkled up his nose, but Barbara didn’t seem to care.
“Come in and get warm,” she said, leading him towards the kitchen.
I haven’t told you about the kitchen yet. Well, there is a kind of island shaped like a kidney with a built-in stove and sink. Since the walls of the dome are curved, all the cupboards and drawers and stuff are built into the island. Lights recessed into the ceiling above bathe the island in a warm glow so that the maple countertop looks like a beach.
Tan was already pouring the Stranger some tea when Barbara brought him over and tried to sit him down near the stove where it was warmest. But he wouldn’t sit. Tan handed him a tiny cup of steaming tea. The cup had no handle. The Stranger didn’t seem to know what to do, but the warmth alone was enough to make him take it. His hands were huge and strong and rough. The tiny cup looked like it would break if he closed his fist.
He took a sip of the tea. His eyes cleared a bit.
“Dad’s in the truck,” he said.
“Oh, my God,” said Barbara. “Where? We should get him. Tan?”
The Stranger nodded his big bear head in the direction that the truck was but, of course, you couldn’t see it from the house. Ky looked down the driveway, but there is a bend in it so she couldn’t see the road.
Tan had turned off the gas under the frying pans and was heading towards the closet for his coat.
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