Thu, 19 May 2005

micha superstar
[This is an old book for children I started years ago and never got around to finishing. I’ve fixed the names because the original names made everybody think it was something else.]

Micha Superstar’s backyard is huge. If you stood at the beginning and threw a rock as hard as you could that rock would still be at the beginning, it’s that big. Micha spends most of the time in the backyard, peering over the treeline from any of the dozens of tree-forts, and working on incredibly cryptic plans which nobody but Micha seemed to be able to find any kind of logic in. once, Micha’s daily strategy required climbing into a tree-fort left abandoned for months, and inside Micha found a big hive of bees. Micha began to back away, noting from the diagonal stripes across the thoraxes of the bees that these were Decimation Bees, which according to the Young Person’s Guide to Bee-Culture were not friendly bees at all. One of the bees approached Micha, cautiously, and explained to Micha (in simple terms: Micha knew basic Bee Language but did not know the specifics of the Decimation Bee dialect, so communication was necessarily rudimentary) that Decimation Bees weren’t intentionally harmful, they couldn’t help themselves, they just got that way.

“Well now that’s just preposterous” said Micha, who had no patience for this kind of victim-stancing, as Micha’s mother would call it. “You can do anything you want to do!”

The bees were flabbergasted at this notion. “You dork! all we want to do is decimate things! it’s the only time we don’t have to act like bees!”

“So you’re telling me you never watched the aeroplanes, then?”

“No. Why watch something fly when you can fly? That’s such a human thing to say!”

“Mo, come with me and we’ll watch the aeroplanes. Maybe then you won’t feel so much like decimating things.”

So Micha and the hive of decimation bees got into Micha’s bus (which had no engine, and could only go downhill, but fortunately the aeroport was downhill from Micha’s backyard) and went to the aeroport, which was in between the shifts of day travelers and night travelers and thus Micha and the bees got a good look at the areoplanes. The decimation bees seemed to love the aeroplanes, and sat perfectly still, fixated. Micha was tickled and began the long walk to the backyard just before the night travelers came into the aeroport. Unfortunately, it was not the sight of the aeroplanes but the roar of their mighty engines which made the bees so still, upsetting their delicate sense of balance and making flying impossible. Either way, there were no more decimations due to the decimation bees, which means this part of the story is over.

…

Pretty much everybody loves Micha, even in a way her enemies and nemeses, who if you asked them they would get a thoughtful look on their faces and scratch their chins and nod “Yes, Micha is a worthy adversary, there’s no question about it”. In fact the only people who wouldn’t say that are the pilots who live in the wrecked aeroplanes, who are grouchy and don’t like anybody, and her friends Ernest Erp Erplington and Zeke Diblitz. Now it’s going to take a bit of explaining to explain this, as Erp and Zeke are convinced that if you’re somebody’s friend you can’t tell them. Nobody’s exactly sure why this is, and if you ask Erp he’d say that’s just part of being inscrutable. If you ask Zeke he’ll just run into the hills, which is what he usually does when somebody asks him a question and he doesn’t know the answer, which is awfully frustrating to his teachers.

So what Erp and Zeke mostly do is get buckets of water and pour it on the dirt and make mud, because they are mud farmers, and there’s a good market for mud among people without access to water, or dirt, or both, which isn’t very many people but the cost of production is nothing, so it’s a break-even sort of business. Erp and Zeke were two of the only kids who got boots out of Micha’s whole boot fandango, which was very good for the business as there’s no good to come from wearing your good shoes while you make mud, and that’s how Erp and Zeke and Micha became friends, because they all had boots, and sometimes that’s all it takes.

So anyway Erp and Zeke weren’t big on talking about things like being friends but they were big on contraptions. Now some kids are into contraptions like putting a board on a log and jumping on it, but Erp and Zeke would have none of that, as a contraption is only as good as it takes a long time to make, and requires intricate plans and lots of supplies which getting are an adventure in and of themselves. So you know that it’s a super-big project if Erp and Zeke feel like they have to bring another person in on it, and when they went to get Micha to get her to help there was a lot of hemming and hawing and shaking their hands together and such before they actually got started. What they needed was a boat, see, and they didn’t have the time to build their own boat, which normally they’d be ready to do in a flash and had in fact once even done before with barrels and two by fours and paneling they found out by the Different Tree and they even made a flag only that boat, which they called the Super Death Prow Eight, fell apart before they even got out of the drainage ditch and they spent the afternoon chucking rocks at it until it all sank. So now for some reason they thought Micha had a boat, or had access to a boat, which she did not have, but she did have a way to make a bridge of fish so she could walk across the water. After heated debate Erp and Zeke decided this would do, though a boat would be better, so they should keep an eye out for a boat while they walked out to the fish-bridge just in case.

…

Everybody in The Big Empty Space likes nearly all of the monkeys except for the Crazy Monkeys, who live underground and dig up under you when you’re just standing around minding your own business and they go AAAAAAAADJF! and you jump up in the air and the monkeys steal your shoes, which you were so scared you just jumped right out of them, and then you have to walk all the way home really slow so you didn’t step on anything that would cut your feet.

Possibly the worst thing about the Crazy Monkeys is that nobody who hasn’t seen them believes in them. This includes Micha’s parents, who are none too pleased to have to buy Micha a new pair of shoes, Crazy Monkeys or no.

“But but but! They nearly took my feet off! They were gonna wear my feet like shoes and walk around town!”

“I thought the Crazy Monkeys lived under the dirt, like moles.”

“But first of all the moles are nice, and second the Crazy Monkeys only do that because they think they don’t have enough shoes. They sit in their holes way deep in the ground and go ‘Oh bother, I just don’t have enough shoes, and what would go really smashingly would be a pair of feet-shoes! I could go out on the town if I had a pair of feet-shoes!’ So you see the direness of the predicament!”

“I’m thinking maybe we just shouldn’t buy you any more shoes, is what I’m thinking.”

“But my feets will be defenseless to the world! You don’t want that, and I don’t want that! The only people who want that are the Crazy Monkeys!”

“I think what we need is a pair of shoes you won’t jump out of. I think it’s time for you to get a pair of boots.”

Now Micha wasn’t all that pleased about this at first, as the boots looked laughably laughable on her feet and the kids at school thought they were even more laughable, but Micha realized that with boots like these she could go walking in anything which she promptly set about doing. All the kids were much impressed with this, where most kids might splash through a mud puddle Micha would jump in like a commando and then go stomp in the mud and kick pieces of mud at people, and the kids thought that was a worthwhile thing to do with feets, so they all requested boots from their parents. Most parents knew something was amiss, and refused the request, but some didn’t, and those kids who got boots didn’t have any trouble with Crazy Monkeys until the Crazy Monkeys stopped being shoe fetishists and got really into backpacks.

…

You may wonder why it is that there is such a preponderance of poison apples in some of Micha’s stories, and there is a simple answer for that. If you leave Micha’s house house and go across the road and then the field and then the traintracks and across the place where the aeroplanes have crashed into the ground you will come across a shack stuck up in the trees, and that’s where a witch named Iara lives, and Iara the witch makes her living when not doing witchy things by selling poison apples. Only the market has recently fallen out in the poison apple market, with all the ne’er-do-wells and evil princes and whatnot having gone over to the new poison puppets, which you put on your hand and then go up to somebody and pretend to tell them a puppet-story and when they get into the story and get up close you reach out and the puppet bites them with fangs in its mouth full of whatever kind of poison you may want for the job at hand, whether it be a princess-to-hideous monster potion or just a simple herbicide. So Iara the apple-surplused witch started having deals and two-for-one offers and even gave away free apples with the purchase of an evil witchy contract hit but nothing worked.

Micha heard about Iara’s problems and how the First National Bank of The Big Empty Space was going to foreclose on her shack stuck up in the trees, and this was just no good, so Micha decided that from that point on all her stories would have at least one poison apple and sometimes even more, if they could be worked in reasonably, though Micha isn’t big on the more high-end poisons so mostly the poison apples in her adventures are more like Pretty Miserable Week Poison and Vague Insecurity Poison and sometimes even Poison You Think Is Bad But Isn’t. So people eventually started coming back around to the tried and true method of poison delivery that is the apple and the poison puppet fad passed into oblivion just like that Poison Mattress fad did back before Micha was even born, except for a couple people who were really into the puppets but they were happy everybody else had stopped doing their thing and they could be known as the Poison Puppet Gang again.

And everybody was pretty much happy for the rest of the month.

…

Micha has been hiding under the table for three days. Perhaps not hiding. Maybe we’ll say she’s built herself a fort. A super-fortress! The Fortress of Ineptitude! she proclaims, looking out over the battlements and the tiles and the particles of foodstuffs. All a castle truly is, however, is a center from which to plot adventures. Micha knows this because she reads Heroic Adventure comics, which make this sort of moral lesson apparent to even the youngest reader. Micha’s friend Erno reads Sophisticated Gadabout comics, and generally scoffs at this talk of quest and glory, but Erno isn’t here; he’s throwing rocks at beehives and will be dead soon.

“Is this the path of glory?” Micha asks herself from beneath the table. “Is this route of jewel-encrusted brilliance? And what foul daemon stalks the way between hither and yon? Would that I had my trusty stick!” Earlier in the year, as she does every hear, Micha scavenged through the Big Forest to find the proper walking and whacking things with stick, one which felt good in the hand and looked cool at her side. Alas, she tossed her walking stick bolt-like at a stray train which had creeped off the tracks and was nesting in the bushes.

“Forsooth! My cape and my staff and I shall ready myself for my queen’s quest! I will—”

Then Micha had to be quiet, because her dad came in and yelled for a while, and she had to postpone the quest until he took his afternoon nap.

…

It was right around the middle of summer when Micha became fascinated with balancing things. Certainly she had balanced things in the past, but in a productive way, as a means to an end. At this time, however, just the idea that you could put something on top of something in such a way that it would stay there even though by all rational logic it really should fall over. Micha’s father told her this was due to science, but she’s incredibly skeptical there’s a force in the universe whose job it is consists of being able to put things on top of other things in such a way that it would stay there. Of course, there are a lot of forces, and Science is obviously important as it has its own magazine. Of course, Science is also other things, like where plants live and different kinds of rocks. “Nevertheless,” Micha would say, a look of sheer consternation on her face, “skeptical.”

But how else could it be explained? She put her entire penny collection all on their sides across the floor of the magic basement and they all stayed that way until, terrified, Micha kicked them all over and then put them back in the dragon-china vase where none of them would stand on their sides at all. Micha discovered there were Natural Forces and Unnatural Forces, and while she went back and forth on what she thought of Science (outside of being skeptical, obviously), she was convinced that Balance was an Unnatural Force. Which meant she couldn’t stop messing around with it.

Eventually, if you stack enough chairs on top of each other, the stack will become so high you can’t stack any more chairs on top, until Micha came to the startling realization that you could build two stacks of chairs, side by side, and thus keep adding chairs to one stack while scaling and descending the other. “I,” said Micha, “am a genius!”. Thus she gathered chairs from her kitchen table, from the machine shed, from a pile in The Big Empty Space, from Erp and Zeke’s house, from a fisherman out walking around in the lake on a pair of stilts, and from one of the abandoned carriages, taking special care not to be too rough with those chairs in case the drivers ever returned. Erp and Zeke even came along to help hand up chairs, and to wisecrack from beneath the apfel tree.

“Hey, Micha! Can you see our house?”

“No! It’s all trees up here!”

“Can you see the clocktower?”

“Well, yeah, I can see the clocktower.”

“What time is it?”

“Would you gentlemen please refrain from your shenanigans and hand me another chair, please?”

Eventually Micha ran out of chairs, but that wasn’t the point; if she wanted to just get up high she would have taken the afternoon tour of the clocktower, or else climbed up in the tree queen. The point was all the chairs she knew about were now stacked on top of each other, and she was stacked on top of the top of the chairs. Which shouldn’t be, and yet was. Micha pondered this at length, so deeply she didn’t even notice at first she was falling.
(12:09.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #