“Dammit,
man, we need more power!” yelled Josh.
“I canna give
her anymore, Captain, she’ll blow!” shouted Stevie in
reply. “Besides, I can’t think of anything else more interesting.”
Josh sighed and sat back on his
heels against one of Daina’s many file cabinets. His
best friend might have actually been the world’s greatest spectral junior
warlock, but when it came to making mental images, Stevie
made “War and Peace” look like a Rainbow Brite
picture book.
“How can I make your mental images
real if all you can give me is words,
ya foolish!”
“Look, fairy breath, I can’t make
everything in my head that interesting...it’s old herbs and boring stuff.
Anyway, only little kids need color.”
Josh squinted at his friend, ready
to jump him. Being nearly six, however, he curbed his anger and tongue the way
any six year old boy does...with little success.
“Shut uuuup!” he snapped, shoving Stevie.
“You shut up!” Stevie replied in kind.
“No, you shut up!” Josh retorted.
“No, you shut up!”
“YOU!”
“YOU!”
“Man...!” They both jumped up, then paused as Josh remembered that being born with
one-quarter fairy blood in him hadn’t ever given him the height or weight
advantage. He faltered a moment, then said, “Fr’real,
though, man, we gotta get more stuff if we’re gonna make a crunch bigger than that tv
commercial.”
“I dunno,”
said Stevie, dropping the previous subject just as
quickly, “1000 75-watt light bulbs in a pink convertible dropping off a 15
story building is pretty good.”
“Yeah, but magic is better!” protested Josh. “We could make
the crunch of the century, man! Now
just try hard to think of stuff that blows up good and I’ll use my power to
make it real for us.”
Stevie
shrugged and frowned again in concentration. “Nitroglycerin,” he said aloud.
“Ooo, sounds cool! What’s it look like?” Josh asked.
“A lot better than a nuclear
reaction would, but worse than dynamite.”
“That’s just the effect, not the
stuff,” said Josh. “I need you to picture this stuff in your head so I can make
the image to work with.”
“Wait a second!” shouted Stevie. “We’re going about this all wrong, man! If I can
imagine the explosion, you can make it real!”
“Well, yeah, I guess...but then we’d
get hurt and the whole file room would get destroyed.”
“No, that’s the cool part! We just
imagine the noise, not the destruction. It’ll work!”
“Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure!”
Josh paused thoughtfully, but Stevie’s excitement was contagious. “Okay, let’s do it!”
“Okay, get ready...I’m thinking...”
Josh and Stevie
both began to concentrate, then slowly counted, “3...2...1...”
Sound
is an interesting concept. A sound is actually a series of vibrations in the
air that your eardrums catch and relay to the brain which, in turn, translates
the sound into a specific association for you. Some sounds translate to mean
“bird” or “car” or “book dropping” or even “loud bang--bomb variety”.
Some
sounds literally scramble the brain into alert relays, like “gunshot--duck!” or
“creaky floorboard--look behind you!”
A
select few sounds are never really classified by the brain and go into either
the “what was that” range or “what the HELL
was that” range. In my head, these either translate out to “oh, nothing” or ”mass-destruction--KILL
THE BOY”....