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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.
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