It's Happening Again
nce upon a time -- and you can tell this is going to be a good story because it starts out �once upon a time� which is the proper way to do it -- Jack and Laura were reading in the playroom.
If you do not already know who Jack and Laura are, then you have obviously missed out on a great many stories of adventure because Laura, age 10, and her brother, Jack, age 8, are the sort of children you sometimes read about who can hardly tie their shoes or pour themselves a glass of milk without somehow falling into some magical adventure in which they slay dragons and ride flying unicorns and always get back to their bedrooms just in time before anyone realizes they�ve been gone. You know the sort.
But by the time this particular story begins, Jack and Laura had not been on an adventure in quite some time and though she did not speak it out loud, Laura was beginning to worry that she�d grown too old to have them anymore -- or even that perhaps it was true that there had never been any adventures in the first place, that she and her brother had just imagined them. This was what everyone always said on those few occasions when the children had tried to tell someone what had happened. Like the time they�d opened the music box with the little plastic unicorn spinning in a circle as the wind-up music played, and the inside of the box was so intricately painted with miniature scenes of a magic world. Laura�s best friends, Hannah and Cleo, only laughed when she�d told them how she and Jack and seen the unicorn fly out of the music box and grow as big as a real horse right there in the playroom, and they stopped listening before she could explain that the unicorn -- whose name was Kenna -- had taken them both down inside the music box for an entire afternoon. Laura never liked Hannah and Cleo quite so much after that.
And another time, when she had earnestly explained to her parents all of the details about the space trip to Pluto, they had only felt her forehead and told her that fevers can give you strange dreams. It was true that their adventures often took place when they were home sick, as they were on the day that you are meeting them.
Jack and Laura both had the flu and were propped up together in the big red fold-out sofa in the playroom. The playroom was a large, open room on the third floor of the grand old Victorian house that their mother had insisted on buying and which their father was continually busy repairing. The children�s bedrooms were also on the third floor, on opposite sides of the playroom. Normally at night they each slept in their own rooms and the giant red sofa was folded up. But whenever they were sick -- and being siblings who spent a great deal of time together they tended to share their sicknesses -- the sofa was unfolded into a bed and the children were given crackers and ginger ale and new books to occupy themselves.
Laura�s book was about the fossils of long-extinct animals, with drawings of how the animals might have looked just based on the bones.
Jack�s book was a story about an inventor who made a time machine and went into the future but then couldn�t talk to anyone he met because language had changed too much by then. But the book had no pictures and he was bored by it, so he lay back on the pillows and stared at the ceiling, which their father had painted to look like clouds during the daytime, but when the room was dark there were thousands of dabs of glow-in-the-dark paint made from stensils to match the actual constellations. They sometimes wondered if their father needed a better hobby.
"Don't you like your book?" Laura asked, not looking up from her own.
"It's okay, I guess," Jack said. "It's kinda boring and besides my eyes burn."
"Well my book is really interesting," Laura said. "Look at these pictures." She held the book for Jack to see a series of drawings of some kind of horse. "These are all of the different fossils they've found of ancient horses," Laura said. "See, they used to have five toes like other animals, but over time their middle toe got larger and larger and the other toes disappeared."
"So that's the hoof?" Jack asked.
"Yeah, and guess what the hoof is made out of? Finger nail!"
"Cool," Jack said. He reached over to his nightstand, turned out his lamp and picked up the little bamboo flute that he�d been given by his music teacher. Jack was not quite as interested in books as Laura was, but he was naturally talented in music and was soon picking out a pretty little song as he lay back on the pillows. Laura's lamp was still on but otherwise the room was dark. On the ceiling there was a patch of blue sky and clouds above Laura's side of the bed, but elsewhere it was dark and the painted stars could be seen. Jack had hit upon a melody he liked and he played it over and over again as Laura turned the pages of her book.
"Oh look!" Laura exclaimed. "Don't stop playing; I love your song, but look" -- she held the book out for him again -- "These drawings show how dolphins evolved," she explained as Jack continued to play. "They used to be land animals, and of course they're still mammals breathing air and being warm-blooded and so on, but here's what they probably looked like 50 million years ago."
Jack looked at the strange drawings of pig-like creatures and played his song for them as Laura turned the pages.
When she had shown him all of the pictures she went back to her reading, but Jack was tired. He stopped playing and just held the bamboo flute in his hands against his chest and looked at the ceiling, some of it daylit sky and and some of it starlight, and he fell asleep.
And in the middle of the night he woke. Laura must have turned out her light because all was dark and all he saw above him were the stars. Dad had done an amazing job of this, Jack was thinking, as he looked at the star-filled sky, amazed that some of them seemed to twinkle even though they were just painted on.
And then he gradually became aware of the fact that the bed was moving. There was a motion up and down as if someone were underneath pushing the mattress up and down with some rhythm. And there was sound to the rhythm, a creaking and bumping sound like the wheels of a cart. For several seconds Jack assumed he was dreaming this sense of movement and sound. He tried opening his eyes, but they were already open. He felt at his side for Laura and there she was, but something else was different. Instead of a smooth sheet beneath them Jack felt something rough, like straw. And where were the blankets? He was cold and there was definitely a draft from and open window. He sat up and looked around. Low on the horizon he saw a sliver of the moon, much smaller than usual but particularly unusual because of the fact that Father had not painted any moons on the ceiling of the playroom.
He looked down at Laura and it was her, but in the faint light he could see that they were no longer in the red sofa bed in the playroom, but on a bed of straw in some kind of open cart, probably pulled by horses from the movement. He pushed Laura's shoulder roughly and she jumped awake, angry at him for a moment until she began looking around, taking it all in. And then after a long moment she looked at him and smiled. "It's happening again," she whispered.
. . . .sorry, but the other chapters of this story have been removed from the site.