by Rhys Hughes
“The streets aren’t paved with gold, are they?” I said.
He turned to look at me. I withered under that look and my mouth went dry and I muttered something very inane:
“If at first you don’t succeed, try and try and try again.”
He instantly turned his back on me.
I got off at the next station, burning with embarrassment, even though I didn’t want to alight there and would be late for a meeting with a friend. I was a fool to believe that my meagre interest in him would cheer him up after all the detrimental things he heard every single day.
But from that moment it appeared that a cosmic conspiracy had decided to make me part of its workings and the ultimate aim of this plot was to mock Frog. I took my place on the crowded escalator to ascend to ground level and the stranger directly in front of me began to hold a conversation over my head with the stranger immediately behind me.
It was a conversation about art. “I hear he holds the brush in his mouth, his enormous gaping maw,” said one, to which the other replied, “That makes perfect sense because he has no hands.”
“Excuse me, but Frog is a friend of mine,” I snarled.
It was a lie but I felt I was standing up for justice and yet the two men sniggered and rolled their eyes in reply and I was left uncertain if they had truly been talking about the amphibian painter.
“He is admirable and richly talented,” I continued but in a much fainter voice, and I was grateful when the escalator ride ended and I was able to rush off into the crowds that thronged the streets.
I decided that all I wanted to do was forget about art, but everywhere I went I encountered people who seemed to have some involvement in the art world. This made me rather apprehensive.
When I reached my apartment I disconnected the phone and refused to leave for several days. That broke the malign spell and the world was normal again when next I ventured out. Indeed I completely forgot all about Frog over the following weeks and then one day I was crossing a bridge when I saw some graffiti painted on the stone balustrade at the halfway point. I say ‘graffiti’ but in fact it was a picture of exquisite beauty.
It showed the view from the bridge but not as the view really was – sooty and grey and depressed – but vibrant and alive and bursting with positive energy. It was a skilful piece of work because it gave the impression that the entire spectrum of ecstatic colours had been used and yet, in truth, the work had been executed entirely in shades of pale green.
The signature said: CRIPEN and it was beautifully lettered.
I stood and appreciated it for half an hour.
Then I started to see other paintings around the city, all of them signed by Cripen and all done in green paint. Unable to exhibit in galleries he had decided to share his talent with the world on the streets.
I couldn’t decide if this was a wise course of action for him to follow or a sign of defeat, that he had started to give up.
So then I tried an experiment. I went along in the middle of the night with a tin of paint and a brush and obliterated his signature on a small selection of the paintings. It had occurred to me that if the works were anonymous, unattributed, people would like them better, would see them for what they really were, would finally show the appreciation they deserved.
But my plan backfired. Somehow, the rumour spread that these artworks without a signature were the work of Frog. And the fact they were unsigned was seen as proof that he even he disliked them.
In fact it soon became worse than that, for every example of street art that lacked the name of its creator was also cited as one of Frog’s latest efforts, and so the truth of his unique talent was turned into a big lie by tens of thousands of examples of urban dross and amateur scrawls.
I only saw him once more after that. He was standing in the rain outside an art gallery and peering through the window at the people inside. The gallery was a small one and the door was too narrow to permit him to enter. He gaped at the food he was unable to reach and his hunger was a palpable force. I was embarrassed and wanted to pass him without making eye contact but he spoke to me and I stopped in my tracks. He groaned:
“If only I had a patroness, but no woman will look after me. I’ll never be kissed, cared for, tolerated and indulged because there are no giant lady frogs in this city or anywhere in the wide world.”
“The world is not so wide,” I answered stupidly.
“It’s wide enough,” he said.
“Where do you get your green paint from?”
“That’s my blood, you see.”
This reply was delivered in such a lonesome tone of voice that I shivered with the fear and repulsion that are always just beyond sympathy and this shiver undulated me back into motion and I hurried on.
In the weeks that followed I tried to forget this meeting but it haunted me. I replayed the scene over and over in my mind. I couldn’t offer him any comfort for his predicament. But then, one day, as I was walking down a staircase, an appropriate thing to say occurred to me.
I knew I would never rest until I had delivered this message to him, so I went out to search for him, making enquiries among the places where artists go. Finally someone gave me his new address.
It was in the poorest quarter of the city, a dilapidated house in one of the most tumbledown streets I have ever seen. I knocked on his door to no avail, so I went to rap my knuckles on the window, and as I did so I happened to glance through the grimy glass into the interior.
I saw a room with walls and ceiling covered in murals, all of them superb and all of them green. In the middle of this room, which was bare of furniture, I saw a shape that surely belonged to him.
I shouted out my message, “Cripen is an anagram of Prince.”
But it was too late. He had croaked.
The Fairy and the Dinosaur
The fairy called Elisvet was feeling a little pensive.
She prodded the pensive with her strong fingers and sighed. It wasn’t ripe and, as everyone knows, fairies don’t much care for unripe fruits, not even young papayas which can be grated and used in a very delicious salad with chillies and other ingredients that I have forgotten.
She fluttered among the stalls of the goblin market.
Fruit was mostly what was for sale.
Bananas; tangerines; raspberries; cherries; apples; apricots; pears; mangoes and womangoes; pineapples; pomegranates; limes; the aforementioned pensives, mulls and ponders; cherimoyas, both brave and timid; peaches; figs and dates; grapefruits and apefruits (which are similar but more hairy) and even punnets of punberries from the Republic of Punama.
The market was overburdened with fruit domestic and exotic, and, in fact, the actual tonnage of fruit located here had never been calculated even by robots with abacus minds. There was too much.
It had been known during earthquakes for stalls to collapse and crush fruit in such quantities that the released juice had flowed into a river mighty enough to inundate the town with a flash flood, compelling the inhabitants to sail to safety on boats improvised from sofas and tables.
Goblins liked the fruit trade, no one knew why, and this particular market was the largest in the area. It was extremely popular with humans and mechanical beings as well as mythological lifeforms.
It was a morning in late summer.
Elisvet was preparing for a picnic. She wanted to take something different from what she usually took on picnics, which was broccoli. She had decided she was bored with broccoli and needed a change.
The broccoli agreed with her.
While she was flapping her wings and weaving between stalls, she caught sight of a mound of fruits that were unlike anything she had seen before. Bigger than the largest melons, they were deep purple and covered in a scaly rind. There were no customers anywhere near this stall.
Elisvet flapped down and hovered before the pile.
The goblin who sat behind the counter grinned at her. It was obvious that business wasn’t very brisk. “Half price today.”
“It is twice the half price.”
“That information isn’t much use to me.”
“You won’t find them cheaper anywhere else. I will go further and declare that they don’t exist anywhere else.”
“I don’t know what they are,” answered Elisvet, “and they look too heavy for me to carry, so I’m uninterested.”
“But you are clearly strong and much bigger than a normal fairy,” said the goblin. “In fact you’re the size of a woman.”
“That’s because I’m Bulgarian; and Bulgarian fairies are rather larger than any other kind, but that is missing the point. They are still too heavy. Even if you gave me one for free I would decline.”
“I could pump it full of helium and make it lighter.”
Elisvet considered this offer. “Would I be able to tie it to a string and pull it along behind me like a balloon?”
The goblin sighed. “Not that much lighter, I’m afraid.”
Elisvet shrugged. “Then I have no intention of buying one but, before I go, I would like to know what they are.”
“They are plums.”
“No, they are not,” said Elisvet.
“Yes, they are! I assure you. They are prehistoric plums.”
“You mean to say—”
“I do, I do,” nodded the goblin and, when she frowned at him, he added in a cooler voice, “Dinosaurs ate them.”
“Why aren’t they extinct if they are so old?”
“But they are extinct.”
“I am looking right at them, so they can’t be.”
The goblin smiled smugly.
“What happened was that a fruit fly was found trapped in amber and it was possible to extract the DNA of its last meal, which was prehistoric plums, and the miracle of science was able to clone them.”
“The fruit flies?” Elisvet raised a dainty eyebrow.
“No, the prehistoric plums.”
“I don’t eat genetically modified food,” said Elisvet firmly.
“But they are delicious, honest!”
“I might be willing to sample a real one but not a cloned one.”
“Oh, a fussy customer, eh?”
“It’s just that I have principles and stick to them.”
“To sample a so-called real one,” said the goblin, leaning back on his stool and crossing one leg over the other, “you’ll have to travel back in time, which is impossible, all the way to the dinosaur age.”
“In that case, that’s what I will do,” replied Elisvet.
“I just told you it is impossible!”
“Maybe and maybe not,” were Elisvet’s final words to the goblin, then she flew away and visited many other stalls.
But she couldn’t get the idea out of her mind that prehistoric plums were perhaps the tastiest of all fruits that had existed since the world began and might be a really amazing thing to take on a picnic.
If she could make a sledge, then transporting the massive fruit might not be such a big problem, but she still refused to eat anything that had been created in a laboratory, so the whole idea was impractical.
She stopped to buy an espresso.
The market was full of makeshift cafés and booths that sold hot meals and drinks. She sipped the brew at the counter.
“Time travel is impossible,” she muttered to herself.
“I beg your pardon,” said a voice.
Elisvet turned and found herself looking at a robot. He was one of the very clever models with an abacus mind. Robots often came to the market to buy nuts for their bolts, chiefly chestnuts and necknuts.
“I was talking to myself,” explained Elisvet.
“But I couldn’t help overhearing,” said the robot, with a polite bow, “and I distinctly heard you express strong scepticism about the plausibility of travelling through time. My curiosity was aroused...”
“Well, it is impossible, isn’t it? But I don’t really care.”
The robot rubbed his shiny chin.
She waited for him to speak but, as he was waiting for her to say something, they stood there like statues, or like frozen images in a film, and only the drifting steam of the hot coffee revealed that time was still moving. Finally, he cleared his metallic throat with a rusty cough and held up an arm. Elisvet saw that he wore a peculiar device on his wrist and she blinked.
“This is called a watch,” he said.
She peered closer. “What does it do?” she wondered.
“It tells the time,” replied the robot in a tone that he intended to be haughty but in fact was full of awe and respect.
“Tells the time to do what?” pressed Elisvet.
“That’s just it!” cried the robot. “It tells the time to do anything! Anything you like. You could tell it to tidy your apartment if you wanted, or tell it to kiss you goodnight, or tell it to hoot like an owl.”
“How do you know all this?” the fairy asked.
“The human who sold it to me explained everything. He said that it told the time, I know when someone is lying or not and he clearly wasn’t. So I bought it off him and now it’s mine.”
“Could I tell time to take me back through itself?”
“Yes, you could, I believe so.”
“Will you loan it to me?” inquired Elisvet.
“I’ll let you have a go of it,” said the robot, “because I believe that we non-humans ought to help each other out, but I won’t take it off my wrist. It has been welded in place, that’s why. I did that.”
“To deter thieves?”
“No, because I was feeling unweld at the time.”
“Is there such a word?”
“If there isn’t, I ought to write ‘sic’ in brackets after it.”
“Go on then,” she urged.
“I was feeling unweld (sic) at the time...”
“You caught a disease?”
“No, it was a lack of iron in my diet,” said the robot.
“You ought to eat broccoli. There is plenty of iron in broccoli and various other elements important to health.”
“I was very run down,” the robot replied.
“Your batteries were low as well? You need juice as well as broccoli.” And Elisvet fluttered her wings rapidly to cool her coffee, which was scalding and not in any fit state to pass her tender lips.
“Juice? That’s what they call electricity, don’t they?”
“Who are ‘they’?” she asked.
But the robot didn’t know. “No idea,” he admitted.
Elisvet drank her coffee.
“Thanks for the advice anyway,” said the robot.
“Don’t you have a name?”
“Clanky,” he said, and he held his wrist up higher.
Elisvet flew over to him and she hovered near the curious device known as a ‘watch’ and she leaned very close to it.
“I want you to transport me back to prehistoric times for one hour and then bring me back to the modern age,” she told it.
The robot nodded, then he seemed to fade away into a mist, and the market also faded away, and enormous trees appeared where the stalls should be, and the air suddenly was much richer in oxygen.
Elisvet felt very free because there seemed to be less gravity; this was a consequence of the faster rate of spin of our planet all those millennia ago. At the same time, the atmosphere was thicker and held her up more efficiently, so it was more like swimming than flying. Plus the increased oxygen levels gave her much more energy than she was used to.
“These trees appear to be giant broccoli plants!”
And it was true, they did.
She flew high among them, swooping and flitting with incredible precision between the monstrous stalks. Then, in a clearing, she spied what she was looking for. It was a prehistoric plum – but much bigger than the examples she had seen in the goblin market. This one was enormous!
It was three times her own height, she discovered when she landed n
ext to it and reached out her fingers to touch it. Then she walked all around it and there was a frown on her face. “How will I ever manage to carry this to a picnic? Even with the aid of a sledge it will be unfeasible.”
Suddenly, a door in the side of the plum swung open and a face peered out at her. So cleverly made was this door that the join couldn’t be seen; but the face belonged to a dinosaur of some sort. “Hey!”
“What’s the problem?” asked Elisvet innocently.
“Why are you prowling around my property?” demanded the dinosaur and he roared in a menacing manner, but, as most of his body was still inside the fruit, his scare tactics weren’t very effective.
“You live in a plum?”
“Yes, I do. Is that so very odd?”
“It is unexpected.”
“Well, it’s a perfectly agreeable habitation as far as I’m concerned. I made it into a house by hollowing it out with my teeth.” The dinosaur peered closer at Elisvet. “Have we ever met before?”
“I doubt it very much.”
“But you seem familiar for some reason.”
“I’m from the future, so there is no way you could know me.”
They stared at each other.
“Unless—” they blurted at the same time.
They fell silent. The dinosaur was the first to speak again.
“Unless I am your ancestor...”
“That’s perfectly logical,” agreed Elisvet. “Even fairies had to evolve from something else. So you are the dinosaur who is the ancestor of all the fairies and you live in a giant plum? It seems reasonable to me. I am delighted to meet one of my own primordial ancestors in the flesh.”
“And I am equally delighted to meet one of my distant descendants. Come in for a cup of fermented broccoli juice!”
The last thing Elisvet wanted to drink right now was that kind of beverage but she was too polite to decline the invitation to enter the plum. She flew inside and the dinosaur left the door wide open so that light would penetrate the interior of the building, which was surprisingly elegant and comfortable but perhaps just a little too plummy for the fairy’s taste.
“What shall we talk about?” the dinosaur asked.
She was worried they wouldn’t have any interests in common but, in fact, they got on like a plum on fire; not that plums are prone to bursting into flames, at least not in my experience – which is extensive. I’ve had a fruitful life, that’s why. They talked about everything. They debated politics, art, literature, philosophy, economics, music and cinema.