Table of Contents
Title Page
Also by Susan Gabriel
To the Dream Maker
The Dream
Nature Calls
Hiding Places
The Stranger
The School Bus
Prison Time
Go, Tigers!
Survival of the Fittest
Food Fight
Ancestors
Elvis Has Left the Building
Hiccups
Action Hero
Road Trip
Ancient Rituals
Cave Art
Paparazzi
There’s No Place Like Home
Sneak Peek of Susan Gabriel’s novel: Circle of the Ancestors
About the Author
Quentin and the Cave Boy
A Humorous Adventure Story for Kids 8 to 88
Susan Gabriel
Wild Lily Arts
Quentin and the Cave Boy
Copyright © 2014 by Susan Gabriel
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
ISBN 978-0-9835882-2-1
Published by Wild Lily Arts
ALSO BY SUSAN GABRIEL
Fiction
The Secret Sense of Wildflower
Seeking Sara Summers
Circle of the Ancestors
Nonfiction
Fearless Writing for Women
Available at all booksellers in print, ebook and audio formats.
Visit www.SusanGabriel.com for more information.
TO THE DREAM MAKER
THE DREAM
“Quentin, are you up yet?”
The Voice yelling up the stairs is my mom’s. I’ve heard it for the last twelve years of my life, and I’ve got to tell you, I’m getting tired of it. It’s there when I wake up. It’s there when I go to bed. Sometimes I even hear it in my sleep, like a recording of everything she’s ever said to me has soaked into my brain cells or something. To think that same voice used to sing me lullabies! And like most babies who drool in a crib all day, I probably loved it.
I wish Dad still lived here. Dad’s voice doesn’t bother me at all. He used to wake me up on school days, but not at the crack of dawn like Mom. Six months ago, Dad moved to Oregon—three thousand miles and three time zones away—with the waitress at the diner who used to serve us blueberry pancakes every Saturday morning. That leaves me, my mom, and my sister, Katie, who is four years and three months older than me. As the only guy in our family, I’m outnumbered two to one.
I can tell you’re still in bed, Quentin,” The Voice yells. Not only can her vocal chords penetrate steel, but she has X-ray vision, too. The clatter of bowls and silverware in the kitchen adds exclamation points to her words. My dog, Coltrane—named after my dad’s favorite jazz sax player, John Coltrane—licks my face, like he’s trying to warn me. I crawl deeper under the covers and drift off to sleep for one last dream:
A Stone Age kid sleeps on the floor of his cave and pulls a bear hide around his shoulders. His mom grunts from overhead, “Boy, get up.” The cave woman is missing teeth and looks like a dirty, primitive version of my mom. The voice sounds familiar, too.
The boy rolls over and looks like a dirty, primitive edition of me. He grunts and goes back to sleep.
The cave mom yells a prehistoric version of “Get up!” She throws a pile of animal bones in his direction. They clatter to the floor inches away from his head.
“Quentin, get up!” The Voice yells at exactly the same time.
Startled awake, I sit up straight in bed. In the next instant it’s like the dream and real life collide, because somehow––don’t ask me how––the cave boy crosses from his world into mine and is now sitting on the end of my bed. Coltrane begins a low growl behind his teeth and starts sniffing like crazy in the direction of my dream.
“Hey, what’s happening?” I say. I rub my eyes to wipe away the mirage in front of me. Surprise, it doesn’t go away.
Cave boy grunts. He rubs his eyes, too.
“I’m dreaming,” I say to myself.
We stare at each other. In a way it’s like looking in a mirror, but a really old one, where one of my ancient ancestors is glaring right back at me. And a mirror where I’m having the worst hair day of my life and bugs are living in the tangles.
The boy in my dream has dirt covering his face, wears a necklace made of animal teeth, and is naked except for an animal hide around his waist. I wonder if he’s collected the teeth right off the animal because he has scars on his chest like he had to fight an enormous cat to get them. He’s looking at me like I’m strange, too: a modern version of himself in boxer shorts.
Whatever is happening, I’m convinced it isn’t real. Since when do dreams come and hang out in your room?
I laugh to myself. What will Dex say about this one? He thinks my imagination is in overdrive as it is. Dex is my best friend. We used to hang out in diapers together. We have photographs to prove it, which we’ve hidden and hope nobody ever finds.
I wait for the dream to fade. I hum to myself while I wait. To prove the dream isn’t real, I reach out to touch the cave boy, expecting him to vanish. But what I touch is a real shoulder. In fact, it’s hard as a rock. This kid has serious muscles. He shows his very real teeth and growls at me.
“Whoa!” I say. Then add a few words that could get me grounded for a year.
I jump out of bed and land on my feet. At the same time the cave boy jumps up toward the window.
“This isn’t a dream at all,” I say to myself.
Coltrane barks like he does when the UPS delivers a package to the door. But this is the strangest package I’ve ever received, delivered priority mail from a dream into my real world.
“What’s going on?” I ask. I don’t know whether to be excited or terrified. I make Coltrane stop barking because the cave boy is starting to bark back.
Coltrane cowers. For part-bulldog but mostly mutt, he acts tough, but isn’t.
The cave boy grunts. He stands on my bed like he’s about to pounce on me and wrestle me to the ground. I flash back to Brad Blankenship pushing me off the swing in second grade because he thought I stole his bubble gum. I was so scared I peed a little in my pants. I cross my legs so history won’t repeat itself.
The stranger across from me growls and shows his teeth again. Coltrane hides under the bed like he does when Mom wants to give him a bath.
“Hey, calm down. Nobody’s going to hurt you,” I say to the cave boy, though my first instinct is to run like mad. But this kid could outrun me in a heartbeat. Besides, I’m not the type of guy that wins fights, especially against some kind of prehistoric enemy.
The cave boy growls again. I back up further against my wall, which isn’t that easy to do with your legs crossed.
“I’m harmless. I swear,” I say. I wonder if he’s always this grouchy when he wakes up in the morning.
He grunts again.
I figure out that the grunts are like words, and I’m supposed to know what they mean.
“How’d you get here?” I ask. I talk slow and loud like those bad movies where earth people try to talk to aliens. “Do. You. Know. Where. You. Are? Where. Did. You. Come. From?”
He snarls at me like The Voice does when I ask too many questions.
Where’s Dad when I need him? I remember how far it is from Atlanta to Oregon and snarl, too. I’ve been deserted at the worst possible time.
“Okay, okay. We can figure out how you got here later,” I say. I take a deep breath to relax so maybe my brain will unfreeze, a
nd I’ll know what to do. No such luck.
“This is not a dream,” I repeat to myself.
The cave boy scratches his head. Several prehistoric insects fall from his hair and onto my bed before scurrying away under my sheets. Coltrane snaps at one of them on the floor, but it gets away.
“And Mom thinks my hair’s a mess,” I say and manage a smile.
“Mess,” he repeats back to me.
My mouth drops open. Did this guy just speak to me? Coltrane sniffs in the direction of our guest. “You can talk?” I ask the cave boy.
“Talk,” he grunts back.
I guess they speak English where he’s from. Or maybe dream people who become real always speak your language. If some guy in Africa had the same thing happen, the cave boy might be talking in Swahili. But either way, my English teacher wouldn’t be too thrilled with his grammar.
“This is unbelievable,” I say.
“Unbelievable,” he repeats, stumbling over the syllables.
The cave boy and I keep staring at each other, like our brains have short-circuited, and we need time to get used to the idea. But I’m starting to think there’s something about this kid I like.
“How’d you get here?” I ask him.
He shrugs—the universal kid gesture for ‘I don’t know.’
“Do you know how to get back?” I ask.
“Get back?” He shrugs again.
He’s a lot smarter than I imagined a cave boy would be. I love reading about history. My room is full of history books. But having a genuine cave boy in my room is way better than reading a book.
“This kind of thing is not supposed to happen,” I say. “Never.”
“Never,” he repeats.
My brain is working way more than usual to figure this out. Maybe the cave boy was dreaming about me at the same time I was dreaming about him and it created an opening, like a black hole or something. Except it’s a dream hole, where dreams travel back and forth in time and visit real life. It could happen, right?
I’ve always had really vivid dreams, anyway. My Grandma Betty says it’s because we have Hungarian gypsy blood in our ancestry from seven generations back. Once I dreamed a shark was chasing me and when I woke up I was totally wet and I found a shark tooth in my Batman slipper. Another time I dreamed I was pitching for the World Series and I woke up with a ball glove on my hand. Granted, a cave boy isn’t the same as a ball glove, but still.
“Quentin, are you up yet?” The Voice yells.
The cave boy jumps like he’s heard a ghost. Our eyes reflect panic. Coltrane whines.
“Quentin, if I have to tell you one more time, I’m coming up there!” The Voice sounds serious.
At that moment it’s like I know his thoughts and he knows mine. A mom showing up—present or prehistoric—is the last thing we need.
“What are we going to do?” I ask the cave boy.
His eyes case the room for an escape.
Mom only comes into my room when she has to; she says the mess in here is toxic to human beings. I hate to think what she’d do if she found a dirt-covered cave boy with bugs in his hair stinking up my already stinky room. Not to mention that I get in trouble if I don’t ask her before friends come over, and I’m guessing that means friends from another time period, too.
Footsteps ascend the stairs of our small, two-story house in the suburbs outside Atlanta. The cave boy and I look at each other like a Tyrannosaurus Rex is stalking us for lunch. Coltrane dives under the bed.
“Hide!” My whisper has urgency in it.
We leap in different directions at the same time. The door to my room opens. The cave boy jumps behind it. He’s standing inches away from my mom, but out of sight. If he breathes too heavy, grunts, or growls he’ll be discovered. And there's no telling how Mom will react. But I’m pretty sure it will involve screaming, calling 911, and dialing an exterminator for the bugs.
“Hi, Mom,” I say. Ever since I had a growth spurt over the summer, we stand eye to eye. She’s all of 5 feet, 2 inches tall, but her voice is 6’4. I wave my hands like I’m steering small airplanes into their hangars in order to distract her. She looks at me like she’s not sure whether to call the pediatrician or Homeland Security. “I told you I was up,” I add. I smile and turn on the charm she says the Moss men are famous for.
She sniffs and wrinkles her nose. “It smells like something died in here,” The Voice says. She turns over a shirt on the floor with the toe of her shoe.
“Dirty clothes,” I confess. A visible pile of filthy clothes, about waist high, fills the closet. But what she’s really getting a whiff of is prehistoric boy.
“No television until those get done,” The Voice says. “Come on, Dog,” she motions to Coltrane. “Time for your breakfast.”
Coltrane whimpers, crawls out from under the bed, and follows her. Mom and Coltrane haven’t gotten along since he ate kitty poop from Mrs. Zimmer’s flower beds and then jumped into Mom’s lap and licked her in the mouth. The Voice takes poop personally.
“See you later,” I say to Coltrane. I know how he feels. Mom’s never forgiven me for the time I discovered that if you shellac dust bunnies with hair spray and run over them with roller blades, they can ignite.
One last time, The Voice surveys my room before telling me to get dressed and come to breakfast. Then The Voice leaves the room.
As soon as she’s gone, the cave boy staggers into the center of the room and we both exhale, like we’ve been holding our breath for the underwater world record.
“That was close,” I say.
“Close,” he says back to me. He breathes heavy, as if he’s escaped the jaws of a saber-toothed tiger.
“What are we going to do with you?” I ask.
He scratches his head and looks as bewildered as I feel.
Getting him back to where he came from is like trying to get toothpaste back into the tube. Not that he’s ever used toothpaste a day in his life from the looks of his mouth. I guess they didn’t have dentists back in prehistoric days.
“You can’t stay here. We’ve got to get you home,” I say.
“Home,” he repeats, like he’s already a little homesick.
I look at the clock. I don’t have time to figure it out now, or I’ll be late to school.
“Mom works at home so you can’t stay here,” I say to him. “And I’m pretty sure she snoops in my room when I’m gone.”
“Snoops,” he repeats. He looks at the door.
“I guess you’ll have to come to school with me,” I say.
“School,” he says with confidence, but I can tell he doesn’t have a clue what school is. If he did, he’d be running as fast as he could back to the Stone Age.
“I guess it can’t be worse than what you’re used to,” I say.
I notice the scars on his chest again and think how middle school can leave scars, too, except ones you can’t see. Your parents getting divorced can leave them, too. That’s when The Voice was born. Plus, your dad leaving home is like getting socked in the gut hard enough that you never want to eat a blueberry pancake again.
I glance over at my new prehistoric friend. If you want to survive, the first rule of middle school is to fit in, and this dude doesn’t even begin to.
“First things first,” I say. “You need a shower!”
The cave boy grunts and shakes his head no, as if taking a shower is the last thing he wants to do. As we look each other in the eyes, I understand his resistance completely.
NATURE CALLS
From my bedroom door I look to see if the coast is clear. Then I sneak the cave boy down the hallway and into the bathroom. As soon as I close the door and turn on the light, he freaks and jumps up onto the toilet seat shielding his eyes as if four tiny suns have just appeared in his orbit. I’ve never seen anybody jump that high and that fast. But I guess you have to be quick if you live in a cave and wild animals want to eat you for lunch.
“It’s only a light,” I say. “See?” I fli
p it on and off a few times to show him how it works.
He cowers as if Thomas Edison had invented a total eclipse of the sun instead of a light bulb.
“It’s like fire, except better,” I say.
He reaches up and touches the decorative bulbs over the mirror. He jumps, then blows on his fingers. “Fire,” he says. He snarls at me like I should have warned him.
I realize I’m in for a long day if I have to explain everything invented between the Stone Age and now.
I open the shower curtain and motion for the cave boy to get into the bathtub. He looks at me like I’ve invited him to step into the arms of a Velociraptor.
“I know the feeling,” I say. “But it’s only water.” After I turn on the water, I splash a handful in his direction. He scrambles behind the toilet and covers his head like I’ve thrown a hand grenade.
“Relax,” I say. “It’s only a shower.”
His eyes narrow.
“You can trust me,” I say. I hold my hand out to him and talk soft like a fireman trying to coax a kitten from a tree. “I hate showers, too,” I continue, “but it’s something you have to do once you hit middle school or the other kids will make fun of you.” I wonder if peer pressure was around in prehistoric times.
The cave boy edges his way closer to the shower. He sniffs the shower curtain, then the handrail and the faucets. I wonder if he’s sniffing for danger or mildew. He steps inside the tub, not bothering to take off his animal skin underwear. He’s examining the shower nozzle like it’s a telescope and he can see the entire solar system from there. When I turn it on he screams. Not a regular scream like girls do if you throw a spider on them, but a primordial one, like something wild is after him and threatening his life. I cover his mouth and he bites me.
“Ouch!” I yelp.
“Quentin, are you all right?” The Voice calls from outside the bathroom door. The woman has ears that can pick up the splitting of subatomic particles. She knocks. I lunge for the door, pushing in the lock with my throbbing finger right as she turns the knob. The cave boy’s eyes widen. My mom is probably as wild as anything he’s ever met in the jungle.
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