The Storyteller

by Aaron Starmer

  “You’re kidding me, right?” I said with a gasp. “This is so, so beyond confusing. Help me, because I don’t have a clue what you’re saying.”

  “Should I start at the beginning?”

  “You better.”

  And so it was that Alistair told me a story.

  Only this wasn’t just any story. This was the first story. An origin story for Aquavania. It was the tale of a sister and a brother. It was rather long, and I don’t have the time to delve into all the details, but I’ll give you the highlights. To keep you in the loop, Stella.

  The sister in the story was named Una. And the brother? Well, he was named Banar. How about that?

  And how about this? Poor Banar died. In a creek. Tragically, because there’s no other way for a boy to die. It was partly his sister’s fault. And so the heartbroken, guilt-ridden Una ran away from home and came upon what? Well, a waterfall, dummy. Are you writing this down? Oh yeah, I’m the one that’s doing that.

  At the bottom of the waterfall there was glowing fur, and when Una touched it, she went to Aquavania. She was the first person to go, and while she was there, she created what she thought was a perfect world. She filled the world with replacements of her brother. Numerous figments of her imagination, and she named them all Banar.

  Problem was, none of the replacements were good enough for her. Her perfect world wasn’t good enough for her. She decided to abandon it and all her creations.

  The other problem was, her creations weren’t ready to abandon her. And so it came to be that one of the replacement Banars captured Una’s soul. He sucked it out of her ear and into a hollow reed. Her soul became liquid. Her memories and ideas were like ink. Banar knew he was supposed to release her soul. Because by releasing it, he would have sent Una home and given her back the life she once had. He also would’ve shared the images and ideas she created with all of us storytellers in the “Solid World.”

  But that’s not what he did.

  Instead, he climbed into a lonely tower where he hid her soul. The tower was surrounded on all sides by … a waterfall. Are we noticing a theme, here?

  One day, Banar made a mistake, because mistakes are always made. Things got, as Alistair said, confusing. He spilled Una’s soul, like someone spills a drink. Some of her soul fell in the waterfall. Some of it fell on Banar.

  “The parts of Una’s soul that fell in the waterfall leaked into the Solid World and inspired the world’s first storyteller,” Alistair told me. “A guy named Cabal. He saw Una’s images and ideas and incorporated them into his own stories.”

  “And the rest of her soul?” I asked. “The part that got on Banar?”

  “It changed him,” he said. “It turned him into something else. The same thing I am now.”

  “The Riverman,” I stated.

  “The Riverman,” he confirmed. “Or the Whisper. The Bugbear. The Boogeyman, if you like. There are a lot of names for what I am, but I am not the first to have these names. Banar was the first. Each Riverman absorbs the soul of the Riverman that came before. It’s a calling. It’s a job, really.”

  “A job? Like being a … mailman?” I asked. Which was Mom’s job occasionally, especially when the post office was short-staffed and desk workers had to pick up some delivery routes.

  Alistair smiled at the comparison. “Sort of,” he said. “Only the Riverman delivers inspiration from Aquavania and returns souls back to their homes. But some have abused that power. They’ve absorbed souls they shouldn’t have and failed to deliver them home.”

  I’m not sure if it was due to Alistair’s skills as a storyteller or the lingering shock of the phone call, but I was fully invested in the absurdity by this point. “So how’d you get the job?” I asked. “Doesn’t sound like something you interview for.”

  Alistair turned toward his dresser and stared at the fishbowl that was sitting on top of it. “I’d like to say that I was chosen, but I suspect it has more to do with the fact that I was willing.”

  “Willing to do what, exactly?”

  “Guard over the inspiration. Take on all the burden of all the souls that have been absorbed. To be a home to all the daydreamers who went to Aquavania and never came back.”

  “How many is that?”

  “Too many.”

  “Fiona? Charlie?”

  Alistair nodded.

  “So they’re … part of you?” I asked.

  Alistair nodded again. “Just like Una was part of Banar.”

  “Una never went home, then?” I asked.

  Alistair massaged his scalp and said, “She did, actually. Years later. She washed up on shore. There were issues with her memory, but she essentially made it home.”

  “How?” I asked. I’m not sure if I wanted a logical or magical explanation. I simply wanted something to believe.

  Alistair seemed to want the same thing. He shrugged and said, “I think … I hope … that someone put her back together.”

  OPPOSITE DAY

  Kids used to kid about Opposite Day. There was no rhyme or reason to it. On some random day, some popular person would decide, Hmmm, let’s make today Opposite Day. Then everyone would go around saying things like I love you! when what they meant was I hate you! Or they’d say Want to share my lunch? when what they meant was Get your own lunch, you lousy creep!

  Of course, no one ever truly meant these things. It was all harmless fun. And it wasn’t real. Until it was.

  One sunny morning in April, Felicia Bromley woke up underneath her bed instead of on top of it. This is odd, she thought. Perhaps I was sleepwalking. But it wasn’t that. It was that things were flipped. Opposite. Not everything, of course. But enough things that it caused the world to go haywire.

  In Felicia’s closet, all her clothes had changed to the opposite colors. Reds were now greens, blues were now orange, and so on. In the kitchen, instead of cereal in her ceramic bowl, there were pieces of ceramics in a bowl made of cereal. They did not taste good. They were sharp.

  A kid was driving the school bus that morning, while a bunch of bus drivers were sitting in the back. Felicia thought it best to walk. When she reached school, she found that school was inside out, with the desks and blackboards all surrounding the building and the grass and sports fields inside of it.

  “Can you believe it?” Felicia’s friend Marcy said. “Opposite Day has become a real thing!”

  “Well,” Felicia replied, “if you say that’s true, then wouldn’t it make it false, and if it’s false, then…”

  It was a confusing time, to say the least.

  As the day went on, madness was the norm. Felicia failed a test in math (she always aced them), dunked a basketball in gym (she’d never even been able to dribble), and ate the most delicious meal of her life (from the school cafeteria, of all places). Some kids loved the changes. Others hated them. No one could deny that the day was interesting at least.

  School schedules must have been immune to Opposite Day, because classes let out the same time they always did. But instead of going straight home to do homework (which was her daily obligation) and to sew sock puppets (which was her daily hobby), Felicia spent the afternoon making out with Lance Garrison under the bleachers at the football field. Lance Garrison was the coolest kid in school, not the type of guy who would normally give Felicia the time of day.

  “I love you,” Lance told her as he caressed her face.

  “I hate you,” Felicia told him as she stroked his chest.

  “What?” he said.

  “It’s Opposite Day,” Felicia said. “We mean the opposite.”

  “So I don’t really love you?” Lance asked.

  Yep. Confusing.

  “Let’s just appreciate this moment for what it is,” Felicia said.

  “So, we’re not supposed to appreciate it?” Lance asked.

  “I don’t know, just—” And instead of talking, Felicia went back to kissing, because she knew if she woke up the next day and things were back to normal, then she mig
ht never get this chance again.

  That realization led to other realizations. All the things that used to not go Felicia’s way had a chance of going her way today. So she went to the bank, where she had an account with $142.85 in it.

  “I’d like to deposit a million dollars,” she told the teller.

  “Very well, ma’am,” said the man behind the glass, and he walked into the back and returned a few minutes later with a bag full of cash. “One million dollars. Please don’t come again.”

  He handed the bag to Felicia, who said, “A bad day to you, sir,” and she walked out whistling a tune. She’d never been able to whistle before.

  She planned to use the money to buy the one house in town she had always loved, a mansion that looked like a castle, with a moat, a parapet-lined tower, and a steel gate at the front. But when she showed up at the gate, she didn’t even need to negotiate with the owner, an old man with a big puff of white hair and a mustache that was so long that it drooped.

  “It’s all yours,” he said, handing her the deed and grabbing the cash as he sped over the drawbridge, his mustache flopping as he ran. Delighted, Felicia went inside, only to find that the place was jam-packed with awful things. The moat was made of stinky pea soup. The beds were covered in poison ivy. The showers sprayed blood.

  Her dream house was a house of horrors. That was the problem with Opposite Day: bad things became good, but good things became bad. Some things stayed the same. All in all, there was a balance, like in the normal world. Only this world was much, much weirder.

  Felicia decided it wasn’t worth experimenting and trying to get exactly what she wanted. There were too many contradictions involved. She decided to go about the day and hope for the best. Or hope for the worst? Even the most basic things were beyond confusing. Which gave her one more idea.

  What would happen if she tried to kill herself?

  If it truly was Opposite Day, would she end up immortal in the end? Immortality lasts more than a day. Was it worth the risk?

  She decided it was. She climbed to the top of the tower in her new mansion. It was at least fifty feet to the ground. Jumping would normally have killed her. But now? There was only one way to know for sure.

  Felicia was not a risk taker. At least not on an ordinary day. But today was Opposite Day, and she was impulsive and more than a little bit nuts. Without hesitation, she ran across the top of the tower, handsprang off of one of the parapets, and threw herself into the air.

  The opposite happened. But the opposite of falling from a tower isn’t immortality. It’s flying upward. So that’s what she did. Felicia shot straight to the clouds, straight through the clouds, and into the atmosphere.

  It being Opposite Day and all, the change in temperature and pressure didn’t bother her. It made her joyous, euphoric, happier with life than she’d ever been. But when she was beyond the atmosphere and beyond Earth’s pull of gravity, something strange happened. Without gravity, there was no up or down. No east or west.

  Opposite Day got confused. Which way was Felicia supposed to go now?

  Felicia bounced around in space like a rubber ball. Contradictions kept piling up. If this really was Opposite Day, why wasn’t everything opposite? Why only some things? What was the opposite of outer space? What was the opposite of Felicia?

  Even the most omnipotent of entities couldn’t answer these questions. And so, Opposite Day was pronounced over.

  Felicia’s body froze in the cold air of outer space and she floated there for a while, until she was struck by a frozen cloud and sent on a trajectory that led her straight into the Sun.

  Which is the opposite of having a nice day.

  MONDAY, 12/18/1989

  MORNING

  Part of me would like to think that yesterday was Opposite Day, to chalk it all up as a moment when the world got turned upside down. But here I am, having slept on things, and I feel the same as I suddenly felt last night.

  I believe my brother.

  It was the wombat. It was the waterfall. It was Banar. And, finally, it was Sigrid. Sigrid is not a common name. Well, perhaps in Norway or Sweden it is. But not here. And not in Australia. Or at least I don’t think it is in Australia. Australia seems like the type of place where everyone has names that end in Y. Billy. Bunny. Marty. Jenny.

  Jenny Colvin. I still don’t understand who she is or what exactly Alistair wants her to do. I don’t know if Alistair’s tactics convinced her of anything. But they convinced me. She convinced me. Simply by saying the name Sigrid.

  The name Sigrid came to me on Thanksgiving morning. Through the water? Maybe. Water is everywhere. So ideas are everywhere, I guess. I only remember that an image and idea popped into my head. A princess named Sigrid in a lonely tower. Like a fairy-tale princess—Rapunzel is the obvious comparison—only this princess didn’t need saving. She’s the one who did the saving.

  Was Sigrid the name of one of these kids who went to Aquavania? One of the kids, as Alistair said, the Riverman released? I don’t know. I only know that Jenny mentioned Sigrid and it flipped a switch in me. I’m not sure what will flip it back.

  AFTERNOON

  The switch stays firmly in place, flipped over to the part of my mind that is willing to believe unbelievable things. School today did nothing to switch it back. Actually, it did quite the opposite.

  We have a few days of school left before Christmas break, and I went this morning hoping that there wouldn’t be any pop quizzes, group projects, or classes where we had to talk or actually think about things. Because my mind was occupied with Jenny Colvin. Aside from her mention of Sigrid, I wanted to understand what Alistair needed her to do. Aqua means water, and Jenny was supposed to go to a fountain. A portal between this world and Aquavania? Seemed like it. Jenny was also supposed to be “a swimmer” and needed an atlas and a spacesuit to reach some people named Chip and Dot. So she needed to navigate Aquavania by swimming from place to place? But she’d end up in outer space?

  It’s safe to say there’s so much I still don’t understand. I could ask Alistair questions, and I did ask Alistair questions, but they led to more questions.

  The most important one I had last night was, “What can I do to help?”

  “Remember what I tell you,” he said. “In case I forget.”

  So today, I’ve been trying to remember, trying to put all the pieces in their right places and keep them there. Which meant I was distracted, so distracted that I’m surprised I didn’t walk into the lockers during the migrations to and from classes. Glen certainly noticed. Between third and fourth periods, he joined me on my way to math and said, “You’re not talking much today.”

  “I’ve got a lot on my mind,” I said.

  “My dad says that psycho’s mind blacks out,” Glen replied.

  “What? Who?”

  “Milo Drake,” Glen said. “My dad talked to an editor at the Bulletin who said that Milo Drake told the police that he ‘loses time.’ He’ll get in his car and drive somewhere and then end up at home and have no idea what happened. That’s why he confessed. He really did think he snatched Fiona and Charlie, but then forgot about it.”

  “He’s not well,” I said.

  “Sufferin’ succotash!” Glen said with a cartoony lisp. “That might be the understatement of the century. Any guy who scoops up roadkill and buries it in his yard is as nutty as a fruitcake.” He put a finger near his temple and spun it around and whistled the sort of tune that plays at a circus when a clown rides in on a tiny tricycle.

  “Does your mind have a filter?” I asked.

  “Like a pool?” he replied. “Don’t think so. If it does, I should probably get it cleaned.” He laughed as if this were incredibly funny, which it wasn’t.

  “I mean, do you say everything that pops into your head?”

  “Hmmm … yes,” he said. “It’s called honesty.”

  “It’s called annoying,” I responded.

  He’d been cheery up to that point, but I must have h
it a nerve, because his tone got distinctly peeved. “Hey,” he said. “Why are you talking like this? You’d better tell me today is Opposite Day.”

  I stopped midstride. “What?”

  “Up is down. Dogs are cats, that sort of thing.”

  “Did you really bring up Opposite Day?”

  “Yeah, so? It’s not a real thing, in case you didn’t get the memo.”

  My backpack was hanging off one shoulder, and it was so heavy that all I had to do was shrug a little and it slid down my arm to the floor. I unzipped it and pulled out my diary.

  That’s right. You, Stella! Out there and exposed in the hall at Thessaly Middle! I opened you up to the page where I had written my latest story, the one titled “Opposite Day.”

  “Look,” I said with my index finger crushing the title.

  Glen squinted. “So?”

  “I wrote this last freaking night!” I said. “You don’t understand, I’m writing about Opposite Day, you’re talking about Opposite Day, and there has to be a reason why and—”

  He snatched the book out of my hand. “So it’s, like, a story?” he said. “You write stories?”

  “Yes,” I said. “But not for you.” Then I reached to rescue you, Stella, but he blocked me with his back and hunched over so he could give the story a closer look.

  “We’re in a relationship,” he said. “All of this stuff should be for me too. We should be sharing everything with each other.”

  I didn’t realize how strong Glen was until I was trying to wrestle you away from him. He bobbed and spun and bumped me with his shoulders as he tried to read more.

  “Come on!” I shouted. “Give it back!”

  You’d think a crowd would have gathered or a teacher would have stepped in, but it must not have looked like a big deal. Maybe it looked like we were having fun. A game between a boyfriend and girlfriend. Maybe that’s how it felt to Glen. But to me it felt like life and death.

  I don’t think Glen had the chance to read more than a sentence or two of the story, but then he started flipping through the pages and seeing other things I’d written. “Wait a second, wait a second,” he said. “Is that my name in here?”