Meager Beginnings: Chapter 1

"T, H, E, space, E, N, D."

 

 

A small girl of about nine years old sat at the computer, typing laboriously with one finger. At the conclusion of the last two words in her story, she stood and stretched, yawning largely. She sat down again and scrolled up the word document to the first page. Printed there, in large, 18 pt font, were the words "Mammoth On the Loose!" In slightly smaller print below that was typed, "A novel," and below that, "by Cherry Copeland". With this, the little girl's hand, poised anxiously on the mouse, directed that dreadfully stupid creature's arrow to the picture of a printer on the screen. Deftly, triumphantly, she clicked it. Underneath the desk, the cantankerous old printer hummed to life with great deliberation. A moment or so later, it began to swish and buzz with the fortitude and determination of a thousand armies. Finally, one page was complete, and there was a click as the machine dismissed it. Eagerly, the girl bent her skinny body down to reach the paper. She grasped it, and sat up again. With a great deal of decorum, she held up the page to the light in examination. The printer worked, always, in a backwards manner, so that clearly printed, the bold words of 'THE END' from the last page shone like the face of a clock tower at night. With a toothy grin, the little girl cheered and ran excitedly out of the room to show her mother. Cherry had every reason to be excited. This was her very first story in print.

 

 

........................

 

 

The year was 2001, and the month was early May. Cherry had worked, tediously, for the past three days, in order to come up with this story on paper, and then type it. Well, actually, she hadn't imagined the story herself, exactly; it was based on a dream she had envisioned in her slumber about a week before. However, it was her hard work and dedication that had made the dream a reality.

 

 

The actual dream was rather odd and disjointed. It consisted of dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures, namely a wooly mammoth, chasing a little boy around Cherry's backyard. As most dreams are, it was completely impossible. However, Cherry decided that she wanted to pen it, and it gradually morphed into the grand drama that was her first greatest story.

 

 

The actual story was rather plausible...or so it was in the first few paragraphs. The tale began with a professor, named ridiculously 'Professor Twinkle-Toddle', was in the process of cloning many extinct creatures at his lab. Of course, those were the aforementioned dinosaurs, mammoths, etc. Everything was all right and legal, until (gasp!) something went horribly wrong. The manifests of evil, otherwise called the Clones, somehow got loose, and broke out of the lab into the countryside. The Professor, so it was written, had not foreseen this event at all, and, thus, was reduced to pursuing after them...on foot. He didn't even have any weapons with which to bring them down at all.  Thus went the bizarre beginning by the young, naive writer.

 

 

The perspective then jumped to that of the narrator, an unidentifiable character to which no name was given, nor any other any information about him or her. The only fact at all one could gather was that he/she was still rather young, but this was only based on the idea that they still lived with their parents. Indeed, the character was intended to be approximately the age of the writer, Cherry, and possibly the character was her in the first place, but that knowledge was not easily attained except by questioning the girl. Anyhow, the character was one of the first victims of the stampede of Clones. He/she raced away from them, dragging his/her abovementioned parents. Somehow, they managed to reach central New York City in a ludicrously quick amount of time, where they found the president (George Bush Jr., since he was just beginning his first term in the White House at the time the story was written) delivering a speech in Central Park, of all places. The character then made himself/herself an instant hero by rescuing the president from the rampage of the great wooly mammoth.

 

 

Now towing along his/her parents, plus the bewildered Commander in Chief, the character made his way, again in too short a time to be likely at all, to the Statue of Liberty. Into this he/she raced with his/her quarry. They were safe, but only temporarily. The mammoth seemed very intent, actually, on getting our main character, or else the president, for then it picked up the actual Statue from its base and started to vehemently shake it. Emergency seat belts sprouted magically from the walls, and the president specifically instructed everyone to don them. As though anyone needed prompting! Anyways, then the military came to (finally!) save the day. The clones were all slain, and New York City was prevented from being destroyed. The president called a press conference and awarded the nameless character for bravery. The last few sentences of the story contained the fate of the poor Professor Twinkle-Toddle. Mainly, he was sued by numerous people, after which he was put to the electric chair. Of course, in this democratic society of America that we have today, this probably would not have happened if the story somehow became real, but this was the semi-fictional world of Cherry Copeland. She could kill off her least favorite character if she wanted to, and no one could say anything more about it.

 

 

The story probably took up six pages, in large, 14pt font, with added space for pictures and reviews. This is not hard to believe, considering the academic level of the authoress, in addition to the fact that it has been very nicely summarized right here in about five hundred words. All things considered, the real story was probably not much more than six hundred words. However, it was of this short, rather poor piece that Miss Copeland was amazingly proud.

 

 

..............

 

 

Cherry, after proving to her pretending-to-be-in-disbelief mother that she had indeed finished her 'novel', she raced back to the computer to watch the rest of the pages print off, sheet by sheet, one by one. When finally the last one finished printing, hot and sweet-smelling in her sticky hands, she compiled the papers haphazardly in order and read them all, savoring every word upon her tongue. Finally, satisfied and feeling quite accomplished indeed, she got out a pencil and started with the illustrations. After all, what was a good story without pictures?

 

 

The hours ticked by. Soon, Cherry found herself making the last few strokes on her picture. Excitedly, she hastily scribbled glasses onto the anatomically-deformed figure of the nefarious Professor, who, oddly, was smiling even while seated in the famed zapper of death. This complete, Cherry stood from her position on the floor (she liked to draw while lying on her stomach) and ran out to the Xerox machine her mother's office room. She needed to print five more copies, one for every member of her family.

 

 

Cherry came back to the computer with what felt, certainly, like quite a ream of loose paper. That was the trouble, actually; her 'books' were, as of yet, unbound. Now came for a bit of manual labor, but Cherry considered it a labor of love. Humming, she dug around in the drawers around the computer until she succeeded in discovering a roll of Scotch tape. She proceeded, then, to tape the pages together as neatly as an inept, clumsy-prone nine year old could do...which, that wasn't very neat at all...

 

 

Perhaps a half hour later, Cherry was finished with her 'books.' Grandly, with a black pen, she signed her name in a royal manner on the inside covers of the paper creations. The already rare copies of Mammoth on the Loose! were made instantly more precious now that they were autographed by the author, obviously. Stacking the bound papers and tucking them beneath her arm, Cherry jumped up and hurried outdoors onto the back patio of her home.

 

 

She came across the dinner party her family was hosting at the time. Actually, it was scarcely a party; it would be better described as a mere family supper. At the time, Cherry's parents, brothers, and grand-parents were all waiting for the hamburgers and hot-dogs to finish grilling, that they all might eat before they became too hungry. To occupy them, Cherry doled out the copies of her work. The completion of it was, after all, ostensibly the purpose of the little backyard gathering.

 

 

Everyone present either read or pretended to read the story before or during dinner, but Cherry was not satisfied with merely that. She insisted that her 'novel' be the only topic of conversation the entire evening. When she became bored of enforcing this, she began ranting about how Mammoth on the Loose! was of a quality good enough to be published, and that she was going to do that someday, if no one would assist her in that endeavor at that point in time. This was, perhaps just a bit too ambitious. Gracefully, someone thought that the time had come to bring out the fudge, so they did so, just in time.

 

 

.............

 

 

Months after the 'unveiling party' (as Cherry herself called it), Cherry still would get out her story and read it to the unwilling ears of whomever she could capture. It became so bad that she would bring along the extra copies of her story and pass them out to her friends' parents at the park. Note that it was her friends' parents, not her friends themselves, that she advertised to, for her friends were too young in spirit to really appreciate her work. Cherry knew and sadly accepted this. Nevertheless, she forced her atrocious plotline and unskilled words on anyone. She didn't understand the torture they endured while reading her piece. Thankfully for her reluctant fandom, however, she felt, for a long time, no inclination to write anything more at all. Of course, though, it also meant that she forced the same story over and over again onto the same people. Nevertheless, no one really seemed too angry, and most of them were kind enough to pretend to read it. This was easy, because Cherry would tell them the entire plot before they actually read the work, simply because she had nothing of much more worth to talk about. It was a sad, meaningless existence for a writer; wholeheartedly pity any you may come across in such a situation. They deserve your sympathy more than anyone else in the world, especially if they know, unlike Cherry at the time, that their work is so little appreciated.

 

 

Spring changed to summer, and summer changed to fall, and September dawned upon Cherry Copeland. With that, of course, came the terrible tragedy of 9/11/2001. What was very odd, though, was that once the initial shock of the country had died down, Cherry realized that the destruction of New York's Twin Towers by nearly-insane terrorists was remarkably like her story. This, indeed, was true. Although it is often said that fiction is based on fact, it appeared as though, this particular time, fact was based almost on fiction. Cherry maintained for years afterwards that the dream she had based her story on was a premonition of 9/11. Many people in the world are so small that they need to build themselves up by making themselves important, in the sense that they would claim after the disaster that they had dreamt about it beforehand. All the while, of course, most of them were making up the falsehood in their head. Unlike these people, of course, Cherry was one of those people who had actual proof. This gave her a feeling of superiority for quite a while, once she came to the realization. One other thing interesting about the coincidence was that Cherry had actually considered seriously sending the president a copy, because she used his figure in it. She rather fancied, for a while, that if she had sent it, and the president saw deeper meaning somehow behind it, he might have been able to prevent the calamity in some way.

 

 

Gradually, however, Cherry matured, gradually placing the story of Mammoth on the Loose! into the furthest recesses of her mind. It no longer became so important as she experimented with other stories, some of which included one uncompleted narrative about a drunk bug getting himself into an awkward predicament, and a fictionalized account of her long-dead great-aunt Frieda working as a detective on a mission in South Africa. She learned the hard truth of rebuke from one of her English teachers who despised everything she wrote, and said that Cherry's pet subject matter of murder and death wasn't anything that a decent young Christian girl should be writing about. However, gradually, year by year, she improved, only to forget completely about her first great accomplishment.

 

 

Five years later, a fleshy, dirty-blonde teenager discovered a worn copy of Mammoth on the Loose! while sorting a bookshelf. At first, all she saw was the scotch-taped binding, stuck tight between the other tomes. Curious, she yanked out the slip of papers from between a dictionary of plants and a picture book about electricity. The 'novel' was falling apart, but still fairly intact considering how klutzy its maker had been. An amused look on her face, the adolescent flipped through the pages, her expression unfathomable. Finally, with a combination of genuine bewilderment and revulsion, the girl pronounced aloud one sentence:

 

 

"How the hell did I ever write this and not immediately fall dead on the spot!"

 

 

Time and experience definitely improves one's perception.