Puddle: A Tale for the Curious

by Elena "Birch" Bozzi

Puddle

  A Tale for the Curious 

  Copyright © 2015 by Elena Bozzi

  The meditations in this book are intended for fair use. They are original compositions by the writer of this tale, who has poured time, energy, and life into their creations. If they are helpful, let them be helpful.

  Overall, all rights are reserved.

  Please note all illustrations have been removed from the ebook edition. Many may be found at puddlestory.weebly.com

  Dedicated to the forest and the trees.

  “We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of the dreams…” - Arthur O’Shaughnessy, Ode

  Table of Contents

  Welcome to the Fireside

  Gathering Rain

  The Garden

  A Walk in the Park

  Wreets and Portals

  Planet Veorda

  Purpose and Wholeness

  Spoken Words

  The Council

  Nooks and Knacks

  Sticks and Songs

  Wanders, Wonders

  Another Game

  Refractions, Returns

  Lake of Oblivion

  Acknowledgments and About

  Welcome to the Fireside

  We pass by a thousand stories just walking from one point to another, without even being cognizant of that fact. Look at this rock. At one stage, it may have been buried among tree roots at the top of a distant and long since crumbled mountain. At another time, it was pressed within the innards of this planet, and subject to more intense heat than we could survive. And further back in deep time, further than we can fully comprehend with our comparatively instantaneous lives, this rock was stardust: a nebula of gas and dust waiting for its equilibrium to shatter in order to form a solar system.

  Look at this leaf. Tell me its tale. Tell me its tale through the eyes of a scientist, of a poet, of a deer. Consider what it would say if it told its own story. It may not say anything with words, but perhaps it can articulate itself beyond places language can go. Can it still be a story without words? Even then, can words tell the whole story?

  We desire stories, though that itself is an understatement. We need stories like we need air and water, or a hug when we’re lonely. Stories explain our essence. Stories give us meaning. Imagine a world in which all the stories have been forgotten. They’ve floated away quietly, as if gravity was too weak to hold them close. What would those poor creatures have left?

  Our stories are the substance that connects us. They enrich our lives. They are our lives. Stories have power with endless affects. A story can call to our passions and spark our creativity. A story can motivate, moderate, frustrate, alleviate, soothe, suppress, oppress, set free, and fool us. What it does in the end, the teller may never know, because stories are alive. They change and adapt. They move like liquid, with their viscosity dependent on the mood of the weaver of yarns, and the receptivity of the audience.

  Ah, a story wanders near. If it passes by, we may not even lament its loss, for it would not have touched us. Perhaps, however, its call is strong. Curiosity brings you closer. It waits for you to join the circle before it tells itself. Listen to its language, simultaneously too simple and complex to translate fully into words. The language of the soul is one without vocabulary. Listen there, and with your heart.

  It begins, like all stories, somewhere in the middle. Come. Gather close. It is ready for you.

  Let the more pleasantly aromatic parts waft across your nostrils like a late spring breeze in an evening meadow of awakening moonflowers. Be ready with a sturdy clothespin to hold at bay moments sprawled in stagnant pools of despair that do not so much stink as sting the olfactories, like a nest of angry hornets kicked by the neighbor’s barking wet dog. This story tells of more plants than putridity, so let free your worries. You will smell more flowers than soggy mutts.

  You catch the scent of a forgotten secret as you follow the story’s winding trails. Reach for it. It reveals the two most important things in this universe to take seriously: everything, and nothing.

  The story continues.

  *~*

  Gathering Rain

  Bored.

  Bored. Bored. Bored.

  I sat at my (assigned drab yellow square with its unsatisfying backrest and fake wood restrictive rectangle for writing on top of) desk. The only nice thing about my anti-ergonomic seat was its reflective metal connecting parts, in which I often watched the world in a funhouse mirror way. I tilted my head over and looked at my green eyes, stretched and peering back, as if to sigh uuugh.

  I liked watching the world, especially when it looked strange. Unfamiliar. Through the eyes of objects. Objects didn’t seem to mind being bored, or, at least, had no choice in the matter.

  My musty copy of this month’s required reading book was open to page twenty-five. Mrs. McClunk stood up front, squeakishly reading Frankenstein aloud with the passion of a plastic potted plant. She didn’t seem to care that the man they called monster had already lived his life on this plane and moved on to other things. It wasn’t fair to make him stuck, trapped in a body he had already left. There were some things I did not want to have control over, and another person’s life was one. I had enough trouble controlling my own life.

  I also didn’t approve of this exercise because of one word: required. I tended to consider anything required as unpleasant and often dangerous. Climbing a towering tree to the top and swaying between raindrops as thunder made its windy way closer was much safer than being bored to death by tedious requirements. Perhaps I could deal with required if it were tempered with an occasional choice.

  We were never given any choices. What were they afraid of anyway? They who made all the rules. That I might have a thought? Too many thoughts in a room could cause chaos. Giving away choices meant giving up control. Anything could happen.

  I didn’t have anything personal against this book in itself, either. In general, I loved books. Fact books were fascinating. Stories that beckoned my wanderlust for adventure were even more fascinating. What better way to experience another person’s mind than to ride on their imagination? Facts presented as stories were unstoppable. They had power over my logical side and over the parts of me that chased dandelion fuzzes in a swirling breeze.

  In fact, just because something was imaginary, didn’t mean it wasn’t real. Imagination could hold more truth than objective reality. What was pure objective reality anyway? We saw through subjective lenses. Our eyes were made up of our own experiences and ideas about existence.

  Anyway, back to the point. Required reading. One day this tale in front of me perhaps could potentially become my favorite book, maybe. Its requiredness just felt so arbitrary and pointless.

  Glancing to my right, I saw a girl doodling curly hearts. A growing puddle of drool spread from a sleeper further down my row. One kid hid a graphic novel inside his required reading book, only the secret one was twice the size of the required one. Mrs. McClunk kept reading, or squeaking, aloud. Her voice was a hrm hrm hrm guinea pig, disappointed and snackless, wishing it was somewhere else besides sitting and waiting for something to happen, but not knowing quite what.

  I glanced left and saw someone scratch at his desk, look closely at his finger, scrunch his eyebrows and bring the offending finger up for a quick smell. My own eyebrows scrunched and I decided that was enough looking left for now.

  Staring forward, I watched Mrs. McClunk’s nose a while. It was sort of fascinating in the kind of way watching fish in a tank is sort of fascinating. Nearly meditative. Her mouth didn’t move very much, but certain letters would pull the tip of her nose down, then release it. Like a rabbit sniffing out w’s and o’s. Sniff. Sniff. Sniff. She must h
ave been a rodent in a past life.

  Bored again.

  I watched the clock. It counted the minutes until the end of class. It counted away the minutes of my life. I wondered if the clock was satisfied that it knew its place in the world so well, or if it really liked counting at all. Maybe someone told it that it had to count second after second with the perfection of gears and wires, or else it would never make anything of itself. I wondered if it ever resented whoever told it that. The skinny red second hand made its rounds, lapping the other hands. For a moment, I thought it stopped and started stepping backward. Scared, I looked away. Cruel clock tricks. It tried to take its angst out on me. I didn’t feel the need to be here longer than was required.

  The window behind me sent a draft to the back of my head. Ah, minty mouthwash for the brain. Through the window was my favorite place to look while trapped in this School of Uncaring. It was the only thing that really understood. Outside was the place where life actually happened. Watching it was learning.

  Fluffy sky sheep grazed the gray morning, eating away the overcast so the blue would show. The drizzle clouds had leaked the whole walk to school. Sunshine winked at the Earth the moment I stepped inside. Fine. I enjoyed the soggy walk. The water helped my plant friends out. They stretched as they woke, thirsty after their chilly season of slumber.

  The drizzle was nice, but stepping inside felt like poking an ulcer. The fluorescent lights were not morning people. Locker combinations were not morning people. Or afternoon people. Nobody seemed like they wanted to be there anyway. Always an alpha battle of raging hormones or the mind-blowingly inconvenient busywork, which taught nothing but compliance, infested these walls.

  Caged and bored.

  The sun made all the puddles outside the window reflective. The puddles sat so still and held upside down worlds, reflecting the sky sheep. The sun didn’t even need to show all the way, just enough to make the rainwater shiny. I loved to stand at the edge of the tiny lakes and watch those upside down reflected puddle trees, and the clouds so far away. The reflections looked like different worlds. I wondered what life would be like for all those reflection worlds. Was the light in their world slightly darker and greener like the way I saw it inside the puddle, or was it my world that seemed dimmer to them? Did those other worlds have the same soggy sticks and leaves soaking in their puddles, or were they only in my mini floods? If the debris was different in the reflected upside down world’s water, did it still smell the same?

  Nobody else seemed to care about those other worlds inside the puddles. I watched people try to avoid getting wet, not really noticing what they were walking around. They looked too busy to notice my imagination worlds. A mere inconvenience, rather than a place of wonder.

  One particular ground-mirror seemed to be calling for my attention through the classroom’s window. The gray-blue sky swirled around the puddle, rippling it with breeze. It settled and reflected a gaggle of faraway migrating geese.

  “Birch,” Mrs. McClunk’s guinea pig voice turned my head to the front. “You’re not listening.”

  “Yuh-huh. Promise.” My hand gripped the black stone, shaped like a leaf, on my necklace. It was comforting to touch when I was about to get in trouble, or feeling happy, or feeling anything. It helped come up with answers.

  “What did I just read?” asked the squeak. I tried to think about what I knew of this story.

  “Maiming. Benign benefactor…” I trailed off, dismayed that I was being picked on because I had to turn around for my amusement while, clearly, nobody else was listening either. At least they could fake pay attention. Mrs. McClunk squinted at me, unsure if I was making things up. Pft, as if she was paying attention to what she was reading. She just didn’t want people looking outside. Such an unhealthy habit. Fresh air. Hope.

  I gave her a slight smile with a mental look away note. She dropped her eyelids to halfway and squeaked on, seemingly appeased. For now. I felt guilty until proven innocent, and even then innocence was still questionable. Bored.

  Tic. Tic… Tiiiic. C’mon clock, I didn’t think we were foes!

  I twirled my hair, which resembled my name like leaves in autumn. Birch. Deep yellow blonde with crinkly browner streaks. I dyed the bottom part dark green with a marker earlier in math in honor of spring. The green jagged line hovered just above my shoulders.

  I counted freckles. Mine were strange and sort of streaked horizontally over my pale skin. I used to think they were a sign of sickness because people usually have dot freckles, rather than lines. They’re ok though. We had them checked out. My parents were right in naming me Birch all those seventeen years ago.

  Freckles got boring and I hazarded another peek out the window. The particular puddle that had called my attention before looked back at me as much as a puddle could. It started to glow a faint indigo. A pair of hands stretched out and grabbed the muddy asphalt. The knuckles strained and two elbows poked out, rippling the surface of the puddle. I blinked.

  Sometimes I make things up when I’m bored. I’m not embarrassed, even though I’m told daily to stop using my imagination. Sometimes I’m told explicitly, and sometimes a mere stern look does the job. I liked imagining things, however, and have learned to do it in private most of the time. I’ve even convinced myself I’ve helped push along certain events by imagining them and working from there. Imagining was the first step of noticing the right stuff to get the job done. Though those elbows may have been imaginary, they looked quite solid. Also, I had felt the laws of physics enough through trial and error to know puddles on school grounds were too shallow to have elbows poking out of them, while everything else remained hidden below the surface. I concluded I was growing into my crazy hat, and, honestly, I was fine with letting go of reality. Reality was boring. So many pointless aspects of reality drained the life from the living, and enforced that insufferable state of being called boredom.

  The elbows in the puddle strained.

  Following the elbows came a fluff of dreadlocked brown hair, rather drier than I would think a head emerging from a puddle would be. Then again, I wouldn’t think many heads would emerge from such shallow schoolyard puddles at all, unless they were of earthworms, whom I always stopped to save.

  Shoulders heaved, one before the other, and dragged a torso along behind them. Legs swung back and forth before momentum helped them out. The boy looked around from the edge of the puddle, with one eyebrow raised at the empty football field and soggy track, where a woman in a long green jacket walked a pug. His face turned toward the school building, and his eyes grew wide as he saw me stare. I tilted my head the way that would sound like huh, if head motions were audible.

  He coughed in a way that said, “I have not just crawled dryly out of this puddle. That was a figment of your imagination. Whistle, whistle,” and walked off.

  I decided to take his cough for what it said, and turned back around just as the bell rang. Still. That was a pretty cool trick.

  The halls dripped with sweaty, we-are-outa-here noises. Lockers smashed open and closed. Certain people pretended to ignore certain other people, and waited around to make sure they noticed. Don’t notice me not noticing you. Are you noticing me? Giggle.

  The boredom of the day thought about releasing its hold.

  Thank you, Friday.

  *~*

  I took the long way home, through the power-line field, where a massacre of the middle-aged forest happened years ago in order to bring people electricity. Sometimes I wasn’t sure if the loss of so many critter homes was worth the modern conveniences brought to life by the harnessed power. Sometimes I wondered if many of those conveniences were truly convenient. How much time did they save, and what happened with that extra time? Have we controlled the electrical currents, or have we become so dependent on plugs and cords that they’ve begun to control us? Did they make us appreciate life more? Did they inspire creativity, and personal connections? Too many questions and not enough answers came from the hum that sounded like f
ar away swarms of bees, or flies.

  The rush of life in my town made me dizzy if I watched it too much. How quickly tasks could be completed, only to be followed up by more tasks! More busywork. A suspicion was growing in me that the point was to appear busy without actually doing anything. My whole week at school was full of that. Spare time was dangerous because we would probably start trouble, or conversations. I have become a master of faking busy. Well, more of an accomplished apprentice. I got in trouble too much to be a master.

  I was suspicious of busywork, but a bigger suspicion had grown in me. Choices. I was suspicious of the why behind the choices I saw. The answer because I said so was unacceptable. I felt trapped by the choices of my predecessors. I felt trapped by my own choices. I felt trapped in feeling I had no choice. I had to waste my days confined in tired lecture, not learning but being taught, because facts were supposed to be more important than experiences. I was supposed to live by expectations crammed in my brain-hole since birth. Those expectations seemed to hurt more people than help. Sometimes I felt so stuck I wanted to follow my cat’s example and explode, running chaotically with wild eyes and puffy fur, then kick and bite at the great woven rug of society. I wanted to flip tables filled with delicate flatware. I wanted to sing a deep old song, of which I could not remember the words, if they existed at all, that would bring freedom. Where was that song?

  In actuality, I did none of those. I continued calmly walking through my thought-tangent, while a tuneless hum seeped through my vocal chords. Maybe that forgotten song of freedom did exist somewhere unknown.

  The buzz of the energy flowing along the power-lines permeated my thoughts, and made my hair tingle and my concentration waver.

  The walk home from school always held little wonders. I passed some flattened grass. The city deer lived in the copse of cottonwood, and made their beds in the tall grasses. They liked to snack on my begonias, which I planted to keep them away from my tomato flowers.

  Maple syrup season was coming to a close as the trees’ leaf buds burst open. Last year’s flower skeletons gathered in brown shaded bunches, while new growth poked up to test the weather. A few bees lazily searched for dandelions and those slightly invisible purple flowers, of which only they knew the whereabouts.