Puddle: A Tale for the Curious

by Elena "Birch" Bozzi

  A spark of life did remain. It smoldered and, one evening, it lit my core that had turned to coal. Heat and fire came out through my words. Nobody expected my reaction, as they assumed I had turned quiet because of my studies.

  The combustion of my anger spread through my family. I was told to leave and never return. I flew away from the oasis faster than a tumbleweed in a tornado.

  My core had burned away. I shuffled over the sand, inside my numbing cloud of shame and self-loathing. I thought I deserved my pain and held on to it, and drifted. I survived without thinking. The knowledge of locating water and safe plants came from a lifetime of reinforced instinct. I tasted nothing. I was ashes all the way through.

  There was one continuous storm on my planet. It orbited through the atmosphere, and replenished water reservoirs. The storm had its own agenda, and could be absent for years. There were times when that liquid life took an unnerving length of time to return. The plants survived on the heavy morning dew, but the moisture came from those reservoirs. And reservoirs could run dry.

  I am not sure if the rains were on time that year because I did not know or care how long I had been walking. But, they came. The very rocks drank and swelled to twice their size and the plants jumped up and danced in celebration. The sky water washed my eyes clear, and the misery I had coated my heart with let fresh air through for the first time since I left. I was glad to exist in the world once again.

  A beautiful stillness remained after the rains. The air smelled thick as honey, sweet as pollen, and cool as the breeze of bee wings. The sky, in shades of blues and greens, watched the growing things. I watched the sky reflecting in the many pools of water. I laid stomach-down on a flat boulder as the clouds made shapes with their reflections on the land. My thoughts drifted around the shapes. How nice it would be to wander the entire world as a cloud playing with its shadow on the ground.

  That was when I learned the tektite stone I wore was the key to waterjumping.

  I held the tektite because I felt it wanted to watch the clouds with me, and wished as hard as I could wish for my world on the ground to be like where the clouds lived. They were free as anything bound by the laws of the wind.

  I rolled over, stretched, and somehow found the only slippery part of the boulder. Gravity kicked me over, and I fell headfirst toward the ground. The fall would have been on the deadly side, had I not gone through that shallow pool into a world made of clouds.

  ~

  Puddle looked at me as he came back from his memories.

  Filled with emotion and wanderlust, and the silence of soaking up his saturated words, I said, “That is amazing. I mean, it makes me want to cry for your loss, and hug you to try to fill up all the spaces and sing you a song to do those magical things that songs do. I want to help you find your world.”

  The smile Puddle had when we met slowly began to sneak back to his lips, though it hesitated with memory.

  He nodded, “I appreciate your enthusiasm, Birch, and it helps to know I have a friend. Finding my birth planet is not so easy. I have searched through many waterjumps. However, this is a big universe. Actually, I am not sure if I am still in the same universe in which I started. Some of the worlds have had strange physics.”

  We had stopped moving when Puddle began telling his story, and now started again along the trail. A couple of ducks landed in the river to our left and flirted with each other, while squirrels chased and chittered around a mighty maple.

  I mused, “Good thing the puddle doorways always seem to work. So far, you haven’t gotten stuck in a place where physics was more deadly, or else you probably wouldn’t be here. Wait. I thought you were studying crystals, not physics.”

  “I have studied many subjects because all things connect so well. The more I learned, the more questions I gathered. As for physics, I had studied only the preliminaries of such science, so perhaps my observations are misguided. Personal, empirical evidence supports that physics works similarly in most worlds. A splash in a puddle makes expanding ripples in most worlds. Friction exists. Wind happens. Inertia.”

  “Oh. What about the strange physics?” I asked.

  “In one world, gravity was strange,” Puddle remembered. “Things had mass, but different sorts of mass did not attract each other, like normal gravity. The ground held itself together with a vine-like system, and the species living there got around by attaching themselves to that network. The water was held in woven containers. I rose from the portal when I entered that world, and kept rising. I am not sure what would have happened had I not grabbed a floating tendril that was barely attached itself, and dragged myself back down, soft as a soap bubble, for fear of breaking that vine.”

  I shuddered, “Too scary! You would have lost all your air in the vacuum you were heading toward. Well, unless that part of physics was different too. If the gravity was different, than the air pressure could be different. Gravity holds the atmosphere to the planet, which makes up air pressure. Did the saliva on your tongue boil? That would happen if there was too little pressure. Er, the puddles would be boiling too with the lack of pressure, or would they be frozen? Was being frozen how the water stayed as a puddle? Can you go through frozen puddles? Have you been able to breathe on all the planets you’ve gone to?”

  “Maybe there was a bubble around the world that held in the atmosphere,” mused Puddle. “The pressure seemed pretty similar to that which I left. The temperature was the same as well. I have not tried a frozen puddle. I think that being able to survive on all the planets has something to do with the portals. The elements reflected in the pool are often the predominant elements in the planet on the other end. I have always left from breathable air and arrived in breathable air. I can only hope that pattern will remain. I would need a better jacket for a frozen puddle.”

  I wondered, “Do you think that since the gravity was different, it would cause a whole chain reaction of things being different? The forces depend on each other so much. Gravity helped the planets in this solar system form as spheres, and gravity helps keep them in elliptical paths around the sun. I wonder if that vine planet had a different way to orbit, then.”

  Puddle thought back, “I did not stay long enough to observe. I remember climbing the vines that created ladders to satellite plateaus that floated above the main land. I had no fear of falling. I did fear floating away on a broken vine.”

  “I’m glad you found your way to a puddle before that could have happened.”

  My imagination took me to depth defying heights. I imagined leaping from one plateau to another, but my momentum was enough to set the first plateau in motion, where it collided with the one next to it. A whole chain reaction of colliding plateaus went *bonk* *bonk* *bonk* in my mind. Then the vines weakened, and each plateau broke free, calling behind it goodbye cruel world. My imagined self waved from one hunk of rock sailing through the sky. I thought mostly oops, and a little about how useful rocket boosters would be. Then, since we were talking about big forces, I thought of magnets.

  “Even small magnets defy gravity,” I began as I stumbled through my thought. “Earth’s core has a liquid layer outside its innermost solid layer. The churning iron causes a planet-sized magnetic field, which pushes aside a lot of scary solar winds and such that would obliterate life as we know it on this planet. Magnets do amazing things. Maybe the magnetic fields on the viney planet were aligned just right in order to make some things seem like they were floating.”

  “You are saying magnetism compensated for the seemingly different gravity,” Puddle paraphrased. “Their fields balanced things out with a twist. Hmm. Overall, the physics still worked the same, but appeared different than what I was used to experiencing. There may have been something floating in the puddle through which I jumped that influenced those fields. I just was not aware at the time. Perhaps the portal creates the world.”

  “Then the world would die as soon as the puddle dried up,” I countered. “At the same time, I don’t think the portal a
nd the makeup of the connecting world are mutually exclusive, at least from what you’ve explained. They are connected. The reflection shows parts of the other world, like an introduction to the world. It gets you ready to go to that world, but doesn’t influence the content of that world.”

  “So, the world is the world. It is the portal that is fluid in where it connects. Whenever the puddle changes, the destination changes.”

  “Ooh. Endless possibilities. Good thing the math of the universe supports it being infinite. That is a lot of possibilities.”

  The more we talked, the more plausible waterjumping felt. A big part of me was attached to a small part of this world. I knew Earth was far bigger and more complex than my tiny section that I knew. My life was a miniscule side quest in the MMORPG of Earth. I loved my family. I loved my garden. At the same time, I thought they would do well enough without me, and I had curiosity taking over my every neuron. There were oodles of Earth-based pursuits to explore here. Yet. I wanted to see what somewhere else was like. The bug of curiosity bit me, and its inquisitive venom spread throughout my body.

  “Do you think I could waterjump?” I asked.

  “You would leave your world?” Puddle asked incredulously. “You may never be able to return.”

  “I know. Sometimes I’m not sure if I really truly belong here. It’s just. That I just. It’s difficult to explain. I know my family mostly loves me, sometimes because I think they have to. I’m not sure if anyone else likes me, except for the herbs in my garden. The plants are very understanding, and patient, and nonjudgmental, but not my species. I feel too different from anyone around here. I need a journey far away.”

  We walked in silence for a moment before Puddle said, “It sounds like you have spent much time learning your mind, and I think the plants have helped you find quiet moments for contemplation. Do you think, with time, you could create a sense of belonging for yourself, or within yourself enough to stay?”

  “Maybe. At the same time, I feel something is missing, and I’m not sure if it’s coming from me or from an outside source. It’s a something-missing-stuck-bored-routine-required-which-makes-me-grouchy feeling, and I just have to get out so I can see better. I feel as if I’ve been caged for such a long time.”

  Puddle connected with that point, “To truly appreciate the life you have known is to leave it all behind, whether on purpose or accident. Now that I am rift from my family, I see even more what they meant to me.”

  I was glad he was patient. He let me express my thoughts without making me feel wrong wanting to leave because of his own regrets. He made good points, too. I might never get back.

  At the same time, I might never experience exploring another world. I might wait forever for something exciting to come along, then not go with it because I was afraid I’d never see those I loved again. I might feel lost forever, like a part of me was missing out on something big.

  I wanted to go. I wanted to see what happened, even if it all went haywire. I might live swathed in regrets no matter what.

  “My heart goes to you for your loss,” I said. “My heart is in two places. I am still interested in waterjumping. I’ve needed an adventure for so long. A real one that is not mainly in my imagination. I know this is a big decision. I feel scared of the unknown, and also solid about waterjumping. My toes are restless.”

  “Could you not wander this planet?”

  “Yes. But no. Would you explain more how it works when you step through a puddle?”

  Puddle stood silently for some time. His words seeped slowly when he spoke again, each phoneme a restrained drip from the rusty pipes of his voice, as if he wanted to remain silent.

  Eventually he creaked out, “Be open to the concept of a real world on the other side, and stay open because it may take some good amount of tries to get there. I splashed around a lot while attempting to leave that second world full of clouds.”

  “It’s about your mental state, then?”

  “Yes, quite a bit. Do not think it might work. Believe it will work.”

  “I could do that.”

  I knew magic existed, whether it could be explained with science or not. It also helped that I saw Puddle waterjump to this world. Even more, the most magical people I knew were also the most practical.

  I tried to keep in mind practical matters, and asked, “Would you get hungry in any of the worlds? How did you know you could eat the food there?”

  Puddle nodded. “I have known hunger and I have known bounty. I have felt discomfort so acutely that my stomach-groans turned to primal screams in a final stand for endurance, as my body turned in to eat itself. Often, if I saw a creature eat something, the food would be safe for me as well. However, some creatures build their tolerance to that plant’s toxins. One trick is moderation. Anything could be toxic, it just depends on the dose. Sometimes cooking it changes the harmful components.”

  “That reminds me of the monarch butterfly,” I supplied. “As a caterpillar, it only eats milkweed, which is poisonous for people. We can boil the toxins out, though. The young seedpods are quite tasty, if done right. So many edible plants are not considered food, but they are delectable.”

  “Or, like with the milkweed, it only needs a small change to make it edible,” agreed Puddle. “Flavor is a good indicator. If it tastes bad, that is my body telling me that it is not ready for that food.”

  I retorted, “Over the years, our taste buds have matched with foods we could eat. The joys of evolution. However, not all tasty food is good food around these parts. There is a whole field of study concerning chemical effects on the olfactory system. It can trick our bodies into craving something that makes them grumpy, or lethargic. Simultaneously, it is fascinating to study smells. In the end, I love any occasion to get to know the farmers who grow real food.”

  “Do you know what I love?” asked Puddle. “I love how food creates beautiful opportunities to connect with creatures along the way. Plants eat sunlight. Plants have other growing requirements, but I have always considered them lucky in that way. I have been to several worlds where the creatures gather together to eat and celebrate the sunshine that went into their food. I always feel like I glow after those meals.”

  “I bet you did glow,” I said. “You’re glowing now. I see sunshine in your eyes and your smile.”

  “You glow, too,” replied Puddle.

  “I don’t always feel it,” I said. “Especially lately. I feel distant a lot. Unconnected from everything. I retreat inside my head. It’s sometimes safer there, and easier than dealing with people and their expectations. My imagination never let me down, or tried to trick me for its own amusement. My imagination never told me my shoes made me look unappealing, or my nail polish was out of style. It never called me lazy for forgetting to do my homework. That homework wasn’t actually useful anyway. It was just something to grade in a feeble attempt at accountability or whatever. My imagination never accused me of being childish for trying to start an epic game of tag, or flighty because I changed my mind about something. My imagination accepts me fully, just like my garden.”

  “Those expectations can be harmful,” agreed Puddle. “They can steal your energy and dim your heart.”

  “Back to food,” I said. “Food is more than just something to eat. It creates the cells of your body. Food has the power to bring people together. I just read about a town that passed a law to stop people from growing food for themselves. Tomato plants were not aesthetic enough. They outlawed beekeeping at the same time. Banning people’s empowerment over their food is a great way to spread hunger, and take away opportunities to connect with both food and each other.”

  “How frightening.”

  I nodded, and continued, “I have felt guilty because there are so many people suffering from things out of their control, so I tried to make suffering of my own in order to make things fairer. I would skip meals because I felt guilty that some people didn’t get enough food. I was mad at so many intricate injustices happen
ing in the world that I thought the only way to make things ok was to suffer myself. Something seemed wrong about that. I just didn’t know what to do. How could I end suffering by creating the pain I wanted to soothe? I don’t want to feel guilty for crap happening in the world, but I want to figure out why we do things the way we do them. Too often I cannot understand why.”

  Puddle agreed, “You would not be doing any world any good to create your own pain in order to deal with knowing others are hurting. That is one benefit of an empathetic heart. You can feel the grief of others without living it. Pained energy brings about painful results, and I feel focusing on the suffering can overshadow the real issues. Perhaps because I have felt pain, I have tried to understand it when I see it in my travels. The roots are often underground. You can only see their tops: the symptoms. There are many winding offshoots that try to control and cause the suffering in others, which may only transpire as surface symptoms.”

  I attempted to think through the causes of hunger, disease, fighting, pollution, and the innumerable inequalities and injustices. It was overwhelming.

  I sighed, “There are so many reasons to give up and just go party. Sometimes I feel the world is already destroyed, and all I actually do about it is sit bored in school, and grow plants.”

  Puddle made a sound somewhere between a laugh and a sob, which sounded vaguely like a hiccup.

  He said, “In a way, a party or friendly gathering can be part of a solution, so long as that is not the only one. Growing closer through enjoying the company of others is necessary, and strengthening. Going in with an open heart is magical in itself. Patience to see from many angles is close to unconditional acceptance. Even those you try to blame for causing destruction in the world need to be understood in order to conduct change.”

  “How do you know if it’s a helpful change?” I wondered.

  “Mindset is a powerful creative force,” said Puddle. “It opens the portals for waterjumping. It also opens portals to understand another. A very wise person passed this mindset to me, and I will keep it going:

  “We are all a family, and we must love our families. We do not necessarily have to like our families, but we do have to love them. Solutions from love have the strongest branches, far stronger than the seeds sown in pain.”