Kate gave me the idea for the writing this week. She was joking, but it turned out to be a very nice story idea. “A badger who wants to go to the moon.” She even drew me a little sketch of the badger dreaming about space travel. I’ve included it below.
This week’s visual is the first of the favors I’m making for our wedding in two weeks.
Everything on this post is copyright me (Kathryn Walton) except the badger sketch (copyright Katherine Elliott). Please don’t steal anything to make money or claim it as your own. Thanks.
______________________________________________
Week 12 Written:
Most badgers were happy to stay near the ground. In fact, that was how they were designed: flat and, well, a bit like pieces of furry, scuttling ground.
Mertle, however, was not happy with the ground. For one thing, it was dark. It was also damp and scattered with the cast-offs nobody else wanted. Surely no one could live in such an environment and not get depressed. And yet, Mertle’s friends and family seemed perfectly happy, if gruff, about it.
Whenever Mertle tried to suggest to her friend, Carrie, that this ground-sniffing life might be less than ideal, she was given a look of such pity.
“Oh Mertle,” Carrie sighed, “Why can’t you see how lucky you are? Other people apparently have something called perspective that makes things ever so complicated. We have the best of life: simple and straightforward.”
Mertle didn’t ever say so, but she was pretty sure that somehow she had managed to gain some of this thing called “perspective”. She feared that if Carrie knew that then the looks of pity might possibly turn to looks of alarm. And then who knew what her dear narrow-minded friend might do.
Thoughts like these were unrelentingly tumbling about in Mertle’s head the night she decided to walk down to the local village for a change of scenery. Maybe seeing the dullness of concrete under her feet would help her realize how lucky she was to waddle around on soft brown earth most of the time.
On the way down the hill from the woods, Mertle stopped to rest on a particularly springy tuft of grass and gaze up at the inky blue sky. The moon was out. And what a moon it was! It was just rising and it seemed to be so big that it might have been a giant lid trying to cap the darkness beyond. Mertle looked at it for such a long time that when she finally lowered her head the landscape before her maintained a milky glow, an afterimage of light.
“Oh,” she thought aloud, “I wish I could go there. I might still be near the ground, but at least it would be a beautiful, bright ground.”
Mertle, of course, didn’t know that the moon does not actually glow, but instead reflects the light from the sun. She believed that anyone who might be fortunate enough to visit the moon would be surrounded by a luminous landscape. It appealed so much to her that she suddenly felt sick with desire for the ability to travel to the moon.
With this lovely, but torturous thought in her head, Mertle continued down to the village. It was very late at night and none of the human people were awake. A high wooden fence surrounded the first house she came to and she stopped to consider her options.
If she went along the fence she could eventually continue into the village proper. However, the fence was very long and her stubby little legs were already worn out from traveling down the hill. Snuffling along the bottom of the obstruction, Mertle soon realized that the earth was very loose and the fence stopped just short of the ground. It took no more than a few minutes for her to dig a shallow tunnel beneath the wooden boards and another few seconds to slide herself through.
The other side of the fence was not what she had expected.
Emerging from her tunnel, Mertle was confronted with piles upon mounds of shiny metal items. Springs, sheets, bars, tubes, wires, boxes, sticks… just about every type of metal object one might imagine.
“What a very odd garden,” she thought.
Carefully, she started weaving her way through the clutter. Everything reflected the moonlight, causing Mertle to find herself surrounded by a myriad of tiny little moons and beams of white light.
“This must be very much like the surface of the moon,” she mused, “though perhaps the moon would be a bit softer.”
Rounding a last corner, Mertle finally found the back of the house this strange garden belonged to. The house was no less bizarre, with multi-colored wires poking out everywhere and sheets of different material stuck in various places. However, Mertle quickly forgot about the house when she saw what was sitting just outside the back door.
“I must be dreaming,” she whispered to herself. She would have given herself a pinch, but her legs were so short that this would have taken a great deal of effort. Instead, she used her legs to hurry on over to what she was very sure was a spaceship.
Now, please don’t ask me how she knew it was a spaceship when she had never seen one before. Perhaps she had overheard a human describing one during a wander near the village. Perhaps she took in the design and worked out its purpose for herself. I really couldn’t tell you. All I know is that she was convinced that a spaceship it was and she was entirely correct.
Edging closer, Mertle noticed a small, round hatch near the bottom of the spaceship. It was ever so slightly ajar and without much thought or caution, she nudged the door open a bit more and disappeared inside.
Inside it was extremely dark. However, Mertle, being who and what she was, had very little trouble seeing that it was a close, round space with a collection of buttons, levers, and knobs at one end.
Shuffling towards these, Mertle also saw that there was a thick windscreen above the controls. Her heart began to jump a little. Her little badger feet began to prickle. Was this actually possible?
In front of the controls were two soft seats, webbed with bands of cloth. Mertle whumfed her front legs up onto one and then scrabbled the rest of her body up. Sitting there, she had the loftiest vantage point she could recall. In front of her, the buttons, levers, and knobs stretched to either side like the large tray of sweets in the village candy shop window.
_____________________________________________________
Week 12 Visual:
