Kaleidoscope: Part One

A group of men appeared and took us through a dense jungle to a palace at the top of a great mountain.

The Soldiers of the Sun, made of light so bright it hurt to look at them, were relentless as the war raged on.

The King of the Moon, exhausted from the fight, asked James to take his place on the throne of the Moon. James said yes, as I knew he would, and vowed to be a good king. On the morning of his coronation, he grabbed my hand, and without saying a word, we had an entire conversation.

I wondered how much the world had changed in the five hundred years I'd been gone...and was utterly shocked when I saw my father, alive and well, waiting for me at the dock when the ship returned.

One by one the boy pulled out soaking, ruined books. They dissolved in his hands and he collapsed on the floor in tears.

Inside, books were strewn around the floor. At first, I thought the boy, wanting some kind of revenge on me, had simply thrown them around the room, but when I looked closer, I realized what he was doing.

I had to climb down a steep cliff to get there.

Now, I am a very rational person. I love science. I subscribe to Mechanical Monthly.

I heaved myself up, and with a little bit of maneuvering, I managed to get through the opening.

Spiders had spun vast shimmering webs that flourished with the absence of human hands.

The metal weights had fallen, and the rusted chains that once held them in place were nearly indistinguishable from the wild tendrils that grew upward out of the floor.

The metal weights had fallen, and the rusted chains that once held them in place were nearly indistinguishable from the wild tendrils that grew upward out of the floor.

Most people think time is a machine that needs to be oiled and wound with a key. They think it's something you control and maintain.

To our surprise, a hundred blue butterflies burst all at once from the cabinet, their damp broken chrysalises still dangling upside down from the undersides of the uneven shelves.

The machine sat on your dining room table, intricate and gleaming.

Each piece had been made by hand with great care一the brass, the wood, the silver, the spun copper wires, the ornate glass knobs.

There was a kind of hum that seemed to emanate from the machine, and the room felt alive and full of potential, though all of that energy may have been coming from you.

You'd been working on the Spirit Machine for months, hammering and tinkering in your workshop, adding new parts, adjusting the wires, and touching up the paint.

You thought it would galvanize the electricity in the air like a kind of battery, causing a reaction that would break down the barrier between the living and the dead.

Even though you kept the door and windows locked, the constant vibrations of the tools had loosened some of the nails holding the slats of wood onto the walls, and those same children soon were trying to look through the gaps.

No one knew what you were making in that little shack in the back of your property, but you'd burn piles of paper and scraps of wood beneath the stars, and the smoke and the sparks and the fire made the adults in town wonder if you were doing something sinister.

You cut down trees from the woods behind your home and carefully carved and joined each piece, using knives and lathes and drills.

You blew the glass, hammered the copper, fashioned the ceramic spools, and meticulously painted the entire thing with sable-hair brushes you made yourself.

You blew the glass, hammered the copper, fashioned the ceramic spools, and meticulously painted the entire thing with sable-hair brushes you made yourself.

Later that evening, sitting by his fire, he told me stories about the lush green forests that once filled my kingdom, but I didn't believe him.

I ruled over a dead kingdom from a broken palace at the top of an eroding hill.

Together, the knight and I planted the tree, and then we planted more. We hand-watered the saplings and cared for them like children.

The sounds of my kingdom were transformed from the hollow ache of wind to the mysterious songs of nightingales and the endless rustle of the leaves.

There was the dark tang of mushrooms and wet soil.

The light turned emerald green and a thousand species of multicolored butterflies flitted from branch to branch like a shattered rainbow.