Storytime 3

Word List:

1. wander

2. meeting

3. eerie

4. book

5. asparagus

6. sponge

7. links

8. pain

9. resemblance

10. regulation

11. Mankad

12. trigger

13. withhold

14. dot

15. Morocco

16. absorb

17. trauma

18. Ginger

19. jhuming

20.gossip

HuMan:

“This ice cream is too cold”, little Jimmy said as he bit into his ice cream. Jimmy had only now fully regrown his teeth after they had fallen out weeks ago. His mother didn’t pay much attention to his complaint. Her mind was wandering elsewhere. This behavior of zoning out was common and so Jimmy didn’t take offense, and continued trying to find just the right angle to bite into the ice cream so that it would be more delightful and least painful. Jimmy and his mother were taking a simple Sunday walk in the park. It was a healthy habit they had developed. Jimmy was reluctant at first, as all children are due to laziness, but eventually he began to learn to enjoy the time away from his iPad. He would look up from his ice cream and observe a meeting of squirrels, possibly conspiring to overtake all the governments on earth at a moment’s notice. He took a lick of his ice cream this time as his intrigue shifted away from devouring to observing the eerie surrounding, he had suddenly found himself in. He double checked his palms and yes, both were grasping the ice cream and none his mother’s safe warm hand. Jimmy was still in the park, but in a part that he was not familiar with at all, and for a child like Jimmy, he questioned just how far away he had strolled from his route. Jimmy didn’t have much of a choice than to pick and direction and keep moving forward. With every step he could hear the gossip of the trees. They were talking about a very naughty petulant boy who did not listen to his mother and was now going to pay for his mistakes. Jimmy felt the sudden urge to begin jogging, and as his anxiety took over him his jogging turned to sprinting, and now he wasn’t running in one forward direction, instead his instincts found a new route for him. A route that could be identified by certain expert navigators as being a loop. But Jimmy was too naïve to notice, he just wanted to find his mother.

Meanwhile, mother was at the visitor center. She ran past a stand full of books that detailed every aspect of the park from its variety of floras to a literal map that described every nook and cranny of the landscape. God only knows if she would’ve benefitted from this information, but we shall never know as she grabbed the first person, she could find who would listen to her predicament. Her panic made her impatient and difficult, but the officials would take care of it despite her unnecessary threats to the park should they fail to report the whereabouts of a child she had lost. Jimmy in some part of the park was documenting the flora he kept coming across. He was slowly identifying the presence of a certain species of asparagus that kept popping up in his path, and every time he saw it, he felt that there was no way it looked exactly like the one he had seen 15 minutes ago. Then he got really scared when his eyes spied something completely out of place in his environment. A yellow sponge just like the one mother used at home. However, it made no sense why it was there in such dense vegetation, but there it was. One could easily blame it on negligence and littering, but it was useful this one time because it allowed Jimmy to join the dots and form the links to figure out that he was stuck in a natural labyrinth. He and his mother were common with one emotion now, the pain that accompanies fear in these situations.

Little Jimmy looked up after a devastating sobbing session to find a pair of legs tripping and rushing toward him. He looked further up and the resemblance was uncanny, it was mother approaching and he mentally prepared himself to be grabbed by the ear and given the scolding of a lifetime. She grabbed him yes, but gave him only a really tight hug and a kiss on the forehead. Jimmy was relieved yes, but he guessed it was against regulation to hit children (at least in public), and a certain level of bad parenting was due when they would go home. He decided he would be ok with it, after all to some extent he believed he deserved it. He and his mom elated at his being found got in the car and off they went to go home and possibly vent their day to their other family members. On reaching home Jimmy couldn’t help but feels alien. He knew his father wasn’t exactly an avid fan of any sport, so his yelling at the TV because some poor sportsperson had mankaded his favorite batsmen was as many would put it ‘out of character’. He went upstairs to find his sister, his forever enemy and simultaneous immovable pillar. And he saw her studying? He asked her why she was studying and she replied that she had a test tomorrow she had every intention of acing. After 6 dot balls and observing a maiden over, another startling shriek came from father, another uncharacteristic behavior of his, as his voice was never audible even in the same room sometimes. The trigger of being betrayed by his favorite team was enough for Mr. Greenwood to smash a glass bowl full of fruits right in the center of the living room. He had failed to withhold his frustration. “Who are these people?”, thought Jimmy to himself. But he immediately put that thought away assuming father must’ve had a hard day and his sister might genuinely want to suddenly do good in school. Suddenly, mother popped out from behind the pillar and pulled out 4 tickets to Morocco and excited held them up as she showed them to little Jimmy telling him all about how it has been her dream to visit such a beautiful country.

The officials at the visitor center were very elated to inform Mrs. Greenwood that her son had finally been found. Mother couldn’t stop her tears from coming out when she saw little Jimmy being accompanied by 4 rangers and brought toward her. She dapped at her eyes with a handkerchief that was too damp to absorb anything form her face. The trauma of a missing child was going to be very evident on her face for the next few hours. It could also be said however, that the trickles on her face were also obscuring her view, as on closer examination she found in front of her a ginger kid with eyes the size of a rat’s.

Little Jimmy’s ‘sister’ was still memorizing the impact of jhuming when she was called down below for a family discussion on this newly proposed trip to Morocco. Jimmy could find no flaw in the physical appearance of each of his family members, but couldn’t put his finger on why none of them were behaving the way they normally did. On the contrary, Mrs. Greenwood was still left sobbing in the lobby of the visitor center surrounded by people consoling her and reassuring her that her son would be found and returned very soon as she would see for herself ‘soon’. Little Jimmy saw his ‘father’ reading a newspaper and found that the date mentioned was a whole year before what it should’ve been. Now that was definitely peculiar. Whether he realized that that was the first day he and his mom established the ritual of going for park walks is unclear considering little Jimmy’s intelligence. But Jimmy wasn’t stupid and so he made one last ditch to try to understand what was going on. He took his chances and ran up to his parent’s bedroom on the first floor and nervously approached the door. It didn’t make sense why he was nervous. Every alternate night Jimmy had a bad dream and never thought twice about opening his parent’s door to sleep in their bed but a that moment as certain smell made it feel like it was holding him back. He eventually mustered the courage to open the door and take a peak and what he saw made no sense but it justified a lot of the smells. He saw dark room lit only by red lights and saw that the bed was moved all the way to the wall. In the center lied a big star inscribed in a circle with candles on the points where the star intersected with the circle. The smell was of tender smoke and dripping wax. Before he could get a closer and better look, he heard a voice from behind him. His ‘mother’ asked, “Looking for something?”. Jimmy replied “No”, and gradually walked away. What transpired in his head after that is unclear, but as we stand right now, Mrs. Greenwood is crying in a lobby full of environmentalists and little Jimmy has found his way back home, kinda.

 

Goldie:

As he stood by the bar with a glass of wine in his hands, Shane let his eyes wander across the crowded hall. Most of those in attendance seemed to be having a good time, as did his cricketing colleagues. He could practically feel the excitement of the youngsters in the room; their joy upon meeting their idols was palpable. Laughs appeared to be being exchanged in equal measure with “valuable” career advice. Shane couldn’t help but roll his eyes at the spectacle. If three decades of experience had taught him anything, it was that everything about this party was a meaningless scam. These young up-and-coming cricketers were probably under the impression that they’d hit the jackpot by being in this room, and that their careers had nowhere to go but up. Little did they know that the very dignitaries who had invited them tonight had other plans for them. Some of the selectors were eyeing potential star players so incessantly, it was almost eerie. Shane could tell that these selectors already knew exactly how they were going to treat each of the new players- Vijay, the smart looking one, would be the “star” of the team, whose praises would be sung for generations to come, much like Shane himself; The shy chap, Dinesh, would be the fan favourite who would begin with a promising career and face a tragic downfall in the next five years; Shashwat was definitely the charming one, so the officials would make him the media horse of the team. Oh, gossip columns would adore Shashwat. Although Shane felt bad for the kid, he held back his laughter at that thought. He wondered which of these boys would go on to write the “tell-all” book of their generation, or if he’d still be alive to read it. The idea wasn’t far-fetched, the bureaucracy and politics of the cricket world turned every player that went through the system into a cynic. It was just a matter of who hid their cynicism best. Shane for one tried his best to stay positive about things when he was still a player. He did what his seniors told him to do, he worked out regularly, he ate his asparagus and meat, and most importantly, he absorbed every bit of advice that was given to him like a sponge. As much as he wanted to deny it, he knew his positive mindset helped him stay ahead in his career. He was a damned good player, and he’d been determined not to let losers with important links in the system take his opportunities away from him. It wasn’t easy for Shane to make his way up to captain of the team amidst all the internal politics, but he endured the pain that came his way and kept moving forward. But his stint was a long time ago, and the man who was standing by himself at the party tonight, with a glass of wine in his hand, was merely someone with a striking resemblance to the man Shane used to be. The party was nothing but one big charade and he wanted nothing to do with any of it. Unfortunately, he was still under a contract, and regulation demanded that he attend such parties without fail, with a smile plastered on his face if possible. To pass time, and reduce the urge to strangle half the people in the room, he imagined that the head of the committee was a batsman on strike with the chief selector on the other end. He pretended that he was the bowler, and relished the look of shock on the chief selector’s face as he hit him with the Mankad that he hated so much. For the rest of the over, Shane only bowled dot balls. Then, he did everything in his power to trigger the batsmen who lined up in front of him as wickets fell. Sure, he was obliterating these bureaucratic batsmen only in his imagination, but he didn’t let those semantics withhold his satisfaction. Just as the match in his head was coming to an end, someone approached him. Shane couldn’t even place this mystery person, but they seemed to have no trouble speaking to Shane like the two of them were old friends. Definitely one of the committee members then, he thought to himself. He smiled and nodded along as the mystery committee man spoke of his recent vacation in Morrocco and how he was able to absorb the rich culture of the Moroccan people. Shane knew that if he continued to listen to these stories any longer, he was going to leave with unspeakable trauma. Gingerly, he walked away from Mystery Committee Man and his current anecdote about jhuming in his ancestral village, and pretended to mingle with the few people he could tolerate. Mystery Committee Man appeared to be undeterred. Good for him. All Shane had to do now was flash a couple more smiles, impart pieces of wisdom to the youngins, shake a few hands, and get the hell out of that party. He gave himself a short pep talk, and walked into the pitch.