The Author, the Observer and their son

This week, we feature another vignette from Lila’s life, written by our own Ted Ludzik!

Lila drew.

Her father tried to support her creativity. It felt like a good parenting thing to do. But Lila was always so far away when there was a pencil in her small hand.

“Hey, that’s the cottage,” he noticed one time.

“Kinda.” Her eyes were half-lidded. All the energy was in her hand. It skittered from the lollipop-grains of cedar shingles to the ridges of walk-way stepping stones.

“It’s… really good,” he offered.

“Thanks.”

“That’s not the lake though, is it?” His finger motioned to what looked like two giant rivers that crossed in a swirling X at the base of the rough-hewn cottage.

“No.”

Distantly, Lila thought she might make her father and other people feel excluded, lonely even, when she fell into her doodling. But she couldn’t help it. Dad would go back to his model train magazine. Her friends would give her a big “Coleslawyalater!” She always forgot to thank everybody for letting her go.

The crossed rivers on her page had gouged giant chasms in front of the cottage. They both started at their own huge springs of light that frothed like volcanoes, adding to the flow in the rivers. The rivers that created these Chross Chasms, she realized, were her fanciful take on the diagram from her Health and Activity Class. She hadn’t known that the optic nerves actually crossed over one another somewhere between her eyes and brain.

But who sat in the cottage at the crux of these rivers and watched everything that eddied by?

She flipped to a new page. Lila drew a family of three inside the cottage.

Oliver, the father, was bent backed and wizened. He sits on the porch all day long. The porch juts over the convergence of the rivers, precariously supported by randomly nailed struts and planks and even by stray roots of the nearby Family Trees.

Oliver has a pin-cushion’s worth of fishing poles hanging out off the porch: carbon fiber, bamboo, graphite, fiberglass, straightish tree-twigs. They all dangle one or more fishing lines into the rivers below. They jitter and shudder, reacting to every vision that flows over their lures. Oliver watches them all over his walrus-stache, though he never grabs for a single rod, no matter how hard the sights below are nibbling.

His hands are busy, she drew, whittling at cartoon-like speed. Lila’s hands buzzed as she drew the blur of his hands and knife. Sawdust and curly shavings bury his feet.

He whittles what his poles detect in the rivers below, what the rivers carry directly from Lila’s eyes: perfect replicas of iPods and truck tires, or shirt wrinkles and sitcoms on plasma TVs. Oliver could whittle anything: Godzilla breath or the sparkle from a sun showered raindrop. Like everyone, he made mistakes. But he can’t stop to check his work, because the next sight is already bumping against his lures and has to be recorded.

So, he tosses every whittled vision (or Whision) over his shoulder and in through the front door of the cottage…

…to his graceful three-armed wife, Arthura, who weighs and interprets each Whision to help her write her three massive books.

The Book of Nothings: using ink squeezed from the barely visible cobwebs of the silkwurms of southern Lucidon, Arthura records Lila’s failures in life.

The Book of Wishes holds Lila’s wants and desires as penned with a gossamer quill that was once the wing of a Halogenetic Bug.

And Arthura’s most muscular arm records in the largest book of all, The Book of Days. Only the hide of the Crunkled Megasaur is strong enough to bind together the results of all of Lila’s reality.

Of course, the confines of the cottage would soon be stuffed full of Whisions, if Arthura and Oliver’s adopted son Hermacles did not spend his days rapidly corralling huge arm-loads and whizzing them all about the Wurld. Most of his deliveries make it to the vast Libraries to be sorted and filed.

But so great are their number, it’s inevitable that many Whisions are accidentally dropped to become part of the cerebrostratum or given as tokens by Hermacles to his many tavern friends and lady-loves. Some are misunderstood by the Librarians, and flushed through the sewers into the abysses of the Underwurld, where they could merge and mutate or split and shatter, some even gaining a semblance of life.

Lila tired thinking about the activity of the three, momentarily guilt-ridden for seeing so much and making them work so hard every day. Fortunately, she realized, every night when she closed her eyes to sleep, the gushing rivers of vision must dry up completely. The family could rest. The canyons would be empty and dark.

Her hand cramping around her pencil, Lila decided to give the trio a little break and closed her eyes.