‘Goodnight,’ said Nory. She clicked her light on and read a tiny amount of a book she was reading for the Readathon, which was a competition at the Junior School that gave money to leukemia depending on how many books you read. She was reading a book she liked about a hen who went on different vehicles, and with each vehicle she went on there was some disaster, and then the disaster was solved. For instance, the hen got stuck in a new road of tar and was almost rolled over by one of machines that press it flat. And whenever a person rescued her, the hen politely laid an egg for them, to say thank you. One time she laid an egg in someone’s crash helmet. The book was called The Hen Who Wouldn’t Give Up.
Nory was so frazzledly tired that she didn’t want to read, even about this friendly hen, but she had to read, because she had to stay awake, since the thing was that if you wake up in the middle of an awful dream that is quite powerful and you go back to sleep too soon, the dream will heal over the cut you made in it and will finish itself. If you are very, very, very, very, very capable, and very determined, you’ll be able to stay awake, just twelve, thirteen more minutes, and the bad dream will melt away, and you will have somewhat of a good dream instead, because the brain forgets and says, ‘Hmm, that file is taking forever to finish, let’s go on to the next file, ah, yes, fake food, very interesting, let’s think about fake food.’
Nory struggled, but finally she couldn’t read for one more second — couldn’t read, and couldn’t go to sleep. So what she decided to herself was: ‘I won’t read, and I won’t go to sleep, I’ll just think, because in reading you think and in dreaming you think, so that’s exactly what I’ll do — I’ll think. And if the scary things come into my thoughts, fine, I’ll change them.’ What a bad dream does is turn something nice in your life, a simple plain event, like seeing some rabbits (including one dead one that was lying on the grass), or seeing a map of the Cathedral, into something dreadful. So all you have to do in going against the bad dream is turn it back into something nice again, since that’s what it began from anyway. So she started up with her thinking, and of course, presto, the dead person from the dream came into her mind, but she said to herself, ‘Stay calm, stay seated, let’s figure this out.’
She went back into the dream a little bit and looked around. Ah, yes, she saw her mistake. It turned out that the dead monk was not really dead — it was just sleeping deeply, wearing a frightening mask. Really the monk was a girl, a princess of some kind, with skin as white as cream and lips as bright as boysenberries and long flowing golden hair, and she had only worn the frightening mask and the awful raggedy rotten clothes so that everyone would be scared away while she slept — everyone, that is, except for Nory who was brave enough to come and help her take off her mask. Nory turned the mask over and saw that it was molded plastic. The black tongue was made of paper mâché and had a little spring that made it pop out. The princess had waited there all those centuries until Nory came down, so that together they could help sick animals. ‘I’m sorry for frightening you, my child,’ the princess said. ‘It was the only way.’ Out of the rabbits’ tunnel they climbed together, and over the next few months Nory learned many things about caring for animals from the princess. There was a dog with a broken leg, but they wrapped its leg in a special white cloth, and the next morning it was completely healed. There are three kinds of broken bones — simple, compound, and green stick. The princess knew all about them, because she was an expert in first aid. A green-stick fracture is when it bends like a flexible stick and makes a smuggled noise but doesn’t break apart. A simple break is when it breaks in two, so that you can see two ends of bone if you look on an X-ray. A compound fracture is when some of the bone tears out of the skin. Compound is really bad, and grotesque to look at even for a doctor, probably. Jason from Nory’s old school had gotten a simple fracture from jumping off one of the climbing structures. Flying squirels jump from the climbing structures, but Raccoon is more careful.
Somewhere along the way of these ideas, luckily, Nory’s thinking turned into good-dreaming.
29. Why Not Make a Quilt?
After that busy brainwash of a night you might think Nory would wake up terribly tired and alarmed, but no. Her eyes came easily open and she immediately wanted to work on a project in the Art Room — something like make a popup book of an airplane, which would have the little tables you could open and close, or make a teacup out of clay with the steam twirling up in spirals of rolled clay — since Littleguy squushed the last teacup she made — or tell a long story to her dolls while she changed their outfits, or draw a comic strip called ‘The Two Bacteria’ about the many adventures of two bacteria, French and Germ. She got the idea for the comic from a book about teeth which had a picture of some bacteria standing on a tooth. One of them says, ‘Hey, hey, this looks like a perfect spot to dig for dentin.’
She lay under the covers moving her fingers and thinking about the things she could do that day, drawings, inventions, projects. She could make a booklet for Littleguy full of puzzles using things he liked, for instance a maze that would say: ‘See if you can drive Solomon the Steam Shovel back through the mud to the construction site.’ With her cousin Irene in Burlington, Vermont, she was working on a book of projects for kids. One of the projects Nory had already written down was: ‘Make a Tree. Make a tree, every time you do something good hang a card on a branch saying what you did. It may make you happier.’ Nory had never made a tree like that and hung cards on it, but it seemed like a good sort of a project. Another project was to make a ruler.
Make a Ruler:
What you will need:
cardboard
a Ruler
A pen & pencil
A Pair of scissors (For thin cardbord)
for thick cardboard: knife (ASK FOR HELP)
A clear space
A piece of paper & Tape
An Adult who is willing to help you out.
1. Take a thin or thick piece of cardboard and cut it
so it is about 4.7 in. Long and about 1.1 in. wide
2. Trace your cardboard
out on the pice of paper with a pencil & cut
along the side in in. and/or cm. and/or
m. m and Make a mark each time you
come to another one. and number it.
DON’T FORGET TO SAY IF IT’S
M.M OR I.N OR C.M.
Nory hadn’t made a ruler herself, unless you count the one she had drawn on the paper to illustrate how to make a ruler in the project. Another project was a quilt: ‘If you have any rags, why not make a quilt? You could embroider it. It would be very hard but worth a try.’ Another project was:
WRITE A STORY!
Why NOT Write a story. It’s very satisfying.
Here’s some of mine: ‘It was a cold icy freezie day in Autumn. A poor girl dressed in rags shiverd, she was huddled bythe side-walk.’
The project book was going at a slug’s pace, though, because Irene was in Burlington, Vermont, and Nory hadn’t sent off any of the pages she had made so far. Irene had a wonderful dog named Simone.