The Wonderful Roundabout

by Mandy Olina

swimming.’

  She said it in her normal tone so I knew she was serious. I stopped laughing.

  ‘What do you mean swim? This is a puddle!’

  ‘You’re saying that like it’s a bad thing. I know Puddle is a puddle.’

  ‘Well how can I swim in it then?’

  ‘Try and see.’

  Swim in a puddle. Well, it couldn’t be more unusual than meeting a fairy, walking across an endless field suspended in time or watching birds learn their song. So I took off my worn out shoes and looked at the puddle. The water was so clear you could count the blades of grass on the bottom. I got up on my feet and touched the water with one of my fingers. Ripples spread out wide. First one, then two, then five and then more and more as though the water was vibrating. The ground itself started to shake, and as I tried to keep my balance I tripped on one of my shoes and fell into the water. And fell and fell and fell in the water.

  I just kept falling down with something as fine as silk sliding around me. My heart beat faster than it ever had, but my mind had stopped. I could hear a faint sound, like I was making music as I was falling through the silk. Only there was no silk or anything else for that matter. I could only see strands of light like lightning around me, once in a while, and I felt something like a breeze or a current from below. I closed my eyes again and realized that I would soon wake up somewhere and the little girl will be there and we will go home. I stretched out my hands and they touched something. First discretely, then more and more clearly. It felt like rock and, when I dared to look, my eyes were filled with the sight of a tall, white mountain. There were white cliffs all around me and I seemed to be resting on some sort of peak, because I could see clouds gathering below my feet.

  ‘You touched the song. We have to go where you can sing it, now. Home.’

  ‘We’re almost there, aren’t we?’

  ‘Yes. We are. Follow me!’

  CLIMBING THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN

  PPart IV

  I couldn’t make out what kind of rock the mountain was made out of. When I touched it, it would remain on my fingers like chalk but in the distance it seemed to glow like marble. I came to the conclusion that it must be some type of limestone, but just as the thought entered my mind I heard the little girl’s voice.

  ‘Why are you talking silly?’

  ‘I didn’t say anything.’

  ‘It really doesn’t matter what the mountain is made out of. We must get home and that requires no talking.’

  ‘But… I was only talking to myself. You could hear my thoughts all along?’

  ‘No. Only after we met Puddle. You started talking louder because you touched the song, so your song is braver now and wants to come out.’

  ‘My song is braver?’

  ‘Yes, the song knows we are getting closer to home.’

  I proceeded to be silent, inhale deeply and take a good look around. Where was I?

  ‘We are on the magic mountain’ she said. ‘We have to start climbing. Home is at the top of the mountain.’

  Well, of course, when on a mountain, whatever you seek seems to be at the top.

  ‘How do we climb?’ I thought, looking at the smooth, steep walls. ‘There’s nothing to grab a hold of or set foot on.’

  ‘We have to build an umbrella.’

  ‘An umbrella? We, the two of us, here on this empty rock, have to make an umbrella?’

  ‘Yes. We can use my dress.’

  I realized then that her dress had changed and was made of twigs. They were white so I imagined they were birch. However, I still had a hard time figuring out how to make an umbrella out of twigs.

  ‘We will knit them,’ she quickly said, obviously reading my thoughts.

  ‘With what?’

  ‘With your two hairpins.’

  It struck me at that moment that after what seemed to be days of walking and falling down a magic puddle, my hair was still perfectly in place.

  ‘Well, fine then. Can you knit?’

  ‘Yes. All fairies can knit. We teach spiders how to make spider webs.’

  ‘Good. Show me how, then.’ I said, taking out my hairpins and handing them to her.

  She sat down on the chalk like surface, pulled out two ends of thread from her wooden dress and started to knit with the exact same delicacy and speed with which a spider spins his web.

  ‘Wait, you have slow down so I can understand.’

  ‘No, I don’t. Try it.’

  So I sat down, pulled out my own two ends of thread, took the pins and… Glared at them.

  ‘Well, go ahead.’

  ‘How?!’

  ‘Move your hands.’

  ‘How?!’

  ‘Just move them. If you believe that you can knit you will knit.’

  I smiled to myself again considering how easy my life would be if everything worked out just like that. Then I figured that if I could reach a magic mountain, I could do anything, so I started getting the twigs closer together and swirling them one around the other and before you know it I was knitting like there was no tomorrow.

  ‘The world is strange in proving things to us,’ I thought.

  The little girl proceeded to knit using two sturdier twigs she’d taken from her own dress. Our wooden thread seemed to be endless and, after a few hours of knitting, though my hands were chapped and sore, I had knit myself one cool-looking umbrella.

  ‘Now we tie the umbrellas to each of our right hands with a thread… And throw it into the clouds.’

  After knitting wood on a magic mountain, that seemed like a perfectly reasonable thing to do, so I went along. We each had an umbrella to match our size. I tossed the mushroom shaped wooden construction into mid air and, as gravity would have it, it fell and fell, through the clouds until we could no longer see it.

  ‘What now?’

  ‘We wait for the umbrella to come back.’

  ‘How on earth is the umbrella going to come back?’

  ‘Well, on earth it wouldn’t. We, however, are not there. We have strong winds here. Let’s wait.’

  So we did and I tried my best to keep from thinking how silly all this was – Puddle the puddle and the granny-like activities and the short, mysterious sentences. I knew she could hear me think and I wanted in no way to do the faintest bit of harm to this creature, but my mind just swooped me off my feet. Only, after feeling swooped for a moment, I realized it was not my mind that did it and that I had been so unbelievably self-absorbed that I didn’t realize… We were flying. The wind blew from below into our umbrellas and they shot up into the air, pulling us after them.

  The little girl was laughing happily and around her everything seemed to be golden and joyful, though I could only make out passing cliffs, clouds and every once in a while what seemed to be giant birds made of ash. I stretched my arms out and felt wonderfully alive for a long, deep moment. Then… I started falling.

  ‘Aaaaaaaaaa! Heeeeeeeelp!’ I got to yell before being pulled vigorously up for a second, at the end of which I proceeded to descend slowly. Our umbrellas had turned into parachutes. The little girl was drifting down slowly and smoothly right next to me and I felt like I loved her.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I asked.

  ‘Back to the top of the mountain. But look! Look up!’ she said and as I did my world became all the more wonderful. I think we were somewhere very high above the ground or the sky because it looked we were so close to the stars that their light fell warmly around us like a rainbow. Pink, gold and blue light was somehow suspended in mid-air. The beauty of it filled my eyes with tears.

  ‘Thank you!’ I whispered and she burst into soft, joyous laughter.

  ‘Look down now! We’re close to home,’ she said, and with her voice I heard the sound of music coming from above.

  Below us there was actually… A house. A small wooden cabin, covered in moss, with a chimney that sent little tufts of smoke up. It looked warm, cozy and friendly. I could imagine myself having hot chocolate on a cold day sitting on
its old wooden porch.

  We landed right in front of it and walked slowly to open the door. The room was small but perfect: the fire was burning in the stove and there was a large and comfy looking armchair in front of it. The walls were covered in what seemed to be story books, save for one that had cooking instruments hung all over it. Under one of the windows, close to the fire, there was a little, cozy bed.

  ‘We are here and I have to go. And you are tired and you have to go to sleep.’

  ‘Are you leaving? Don’t you want cocoa?’

  ‘I have to go help a child that is lost in the woods. I am a forest fairy. I help children who need to find home .You are here now, so I have to go.’

  I felt a deafening sadness as she just turned around and went outside. She closed the door and when I ran to open it, she’d disappeared.

  I went and sat on the bed and started hugging the pillow. I wished she would have stayed for cocoa. I stretched out on the clean sheets and immediately fell sound asleep. Can you guess where I woke up?

  THE LIZARD PRINCE AND THE FIRE FROG

  PPart I

  The prince went out every morning, earlier than anyone, to climb the sharpest white boulder by the edge of the river. He ran to get to the top before the frame of the sun could be seen above the dusty clouds in the morning horizon. He grabbed on to the knife-like edges with his long claws, embodying an ease that had made him famous among his lizard clan. He was a natural born climber, and he had crawled up every tree or rock that stood in his way since he had been a hatchling.

  But the prince would not see the end of his journey that day. No sooner had he crossed the shallow river than the ground split open before him with