December 8

It was a bright, sunny day.  Brittany ran across the grassy sports field in front of the school flats.  She received the ball from her friend Renee, but a defender in a purple shirt was bearing down on her.  It was the girl with the long braids from the Kowloon team.  Brittany looked around.  No yellow shirts.  Where were her teammates?  She nudged the ball backwards with her heel, pivoted, caught it again, and dribbled it away from the purple shirt.  There was Renee, to the left.  She thought about passing, but no.  Brittany had a clear shot at the goal.  The world slowed down.  She concentrated on the ball – on the goal – she stretched back her foot, swung it forward, and made contact.  The ball went soaring towards the net. 

Something small and black floated in the air in front of the goal.  A marble?  That made no sense.  Marbles didn’t float in midair.  Not on soccer fields.

The goalie dove for the ball, but would she be fast enough?

Brittany bounced on her toes, ready to go for the rebound if her goal was denied.

The small black blob was getting bigger.  Its edges were jagged.  It wasn’t a marble. 

The ball went through it – and disappeared with a dull whoosh. 

Into blackness. 

The goalie was sucked into the blackness next, disappearing after the ball – stomach first, then her head and legs at the same time.

The blackness was growing.  Like a rip.  A tear.  Growing.  It was as big as the goal.  The grass, the watching families, the other players, they were all being sucked into it.  She could feel the pull.  Enormous.  She tried to run from it.  She couldn’t run.  She tried to scream, but the scream was ripped out of her throat, to become part of the rush of sucking air. 

She was being pulled. 

Wrenched. 

Torn. 

She was part of the tear. 

Part of the black. 

She wasn’t Brittany any more. 

Little pieces. 

Billions of little pieces.  Pieces of little pieces.  Rushing into the void of blackness.

She sat up, covered with sweat, her heart beating fast.

It had been a dream.

Only a dream.

She still heard the rushing air, but it was only the wind.  A storm outside.  She got up to shut her window.  Fresh air was nice, but not if it caused nightmares.

The glowing red numbers on her alarm clock said it was 4:07.  Three hours before she had to wake up for church.  She should go back to sleep.  She curled up on her side.  That didn’t feel right.  She tried the other side.  She rolled onto her stomach, and hugged her extra pillow.  She knew she was being stupid, but the wiener dog story was all of a sudden starting to bother her.  

Not the fact that it just appeared, as if it was writing itself in the notebook.  Not that, exactly.  No, she told herself.  That was exciting and mysterious.  She still liked that.  In fact, a mysteriously appearing story was like taking baby steps into a world where things really happened.  Into a world where people really lived, like the kids in books and movies. 

No, it wasn’t the mystery of it; it was the story itself.  OK, the talking animals were all cute and everything, but she didn’t like what Fred the Wiener Dog had said about the fabric of the universe being threatened.  And, the fact that it wasn’t just some book she had gotten out of the library made an imperiled universe seem tangible, feasible, true – especially after that dream.  If the universe was tearing, could things be popping through from one world to another?  Were there really different worlds?  Had C.S. Lewis really been to Narnia?  Could the story be popping through to her world the same way Fawn and Chloe had popped through to the wiener dogs’ world?

Something had gone wrong in Fawn and Chloe’s universe.  The deer had gone to the weiner dogs’ universe, looking for help, and Fred said that this action somehow threatened the fabric of their universe – the sort-of-fairytale universe where the Wiener Dogs Gruff lived. 

So, now the story was here in her bedroom – her sanctuary, decorated with fairies, and unicorns, and her poster of Hope Solo.  In her universe.  Written in fancy calligraphy in the pretty notebook that she had been saving to do something special with.  Was her universe being threatened now too?  That would have sounded ridiculous in the daytime, but at 4:12 in the morning, with the storm raging outside, sounding just like the gaping black void in her dream, it actually seemed like it could be pretty plausible.  What was the fabric of the universe, anyway?   What did that even mean?  Fabric was cloth.  You could use it to make clothing, or to upholster furniture.  What did you use to make the universe?  Atoms?  Molecules?  She understood stuff in school.  She felt like she should understand this – or at least have a pretty good hypothesis.  But she didn’t.  She didn’t know anything.  Couldn’t even make an educated guess.

OK.  She could still think. 

She would prove it. 

She would think. 

Christmas wasn’t going to happen in Fawn and Chloe’s universe.  What did that mean?  Forget for a minute that she had no idea what, or where Fawn and Chloe’s universe might be.  Christmas wasn’t going to happen. 

What was Christmas?  A holiday.  Maybe the most important holiday, if you look at how many people celebrate it, and how much time and effort people put into it.  Four weeks of advent, lighting the candles every night at dinner, and that was just for religious people.  She knew that stores did more selling in the month leading up to Christmas than any other time of the year.  Not just Christmas presents, but decorations, and party supplies, and wrapping paper.  Even boxes, and packing peanuts, because of all the stuff people ordered online, or mailed to distant friends and relatives.

Christmas was also the celebration the birth of the Christ Child.  The Savior.  As the pig (she couldn’t remember which one) put it:  the King that the Jews are still waiting for.  If Christmas went away, did that mean that there would be no baby Jesus?  That there had never been any baby Jesus? 

Wow. 

Brittany couldn’t get her head around that. 

Jesus had been born in Jerusalem, a Roman colony in the year – what – the year zero?

And now, two thousand and eleven years later, how many churches and cathedrals had been dedicated to Him? How many works of art had been inspired by Him?  How many wars had been fought in His name?  How many technological advances had come out of those wars? 

She had just written a persuasive essay about the Crusades – were they a mistake?  Her thesis had been that the advances gained by the West during the Crusades had such a lasting effect, that the end result had been positive, despite the loss of life, and the unpleasantness of the whole undertaking. 

The opening of trade routes had brought spices to the West, which had assisted in preserving food.  Algebra came from the Middle East, and she wasn’t quite sure why that was such a good thing, but she knew she was glad they didn’t have to record everything in Roman numerals.  And paper.  Paper was huge.  When people had stopped having to record everything on vellum, which was really animal skin, not paper at all, not only was it easier to record and preserve books, but also the whole financial system had changed.  This had been the bulk of her essay.  Suddenly, people in the middle ages had the idea of not carrying around gold and silver, or even goods to barter with, but paper, which represented precious metals.  Somebody from the middle ages could carry huge amounts of money around just by writing it down on a piece of paper, like a modern check, except that checks were kind of retro nowadays, she realized, since most people used online banking, or credit cards.  Still, it had been innovative in the eleven hundreds, and paper had probably been an important step on the way to plastic. 

She had only needed three points of consideration for the essay, so she hadn’t even gone into advances in medicine that had come out of the Middle East, but she knew that had been big too. 

If Jesus had never been born, Europe would never have fought the Crusades.  They would never have brought all these ideas to the West.  But the ideas would still be around, right?  Would civilization have centered in the East?  Would we all be Muslim right now?  Would Saudi Arabia be the big first world power, and the United States, an animistic, rich, but slightly backward nation of nomadic tribes like the Sioux, and the Apache, all excited about our oil in Texas? 

Or would there even be a United States, because the Pilgrims wouldn’t have had to leave England, because there would have been no Puritans, and no Church of England for them to separate from?

She was starting to see.  You could take something that seemed simple – like a holiday.  When she had first thought about the idea of no Christmas, she had thought about no pictures with Santa, nobody singing about “All I want for Christmas is My Two Front Teeth,” no decorated tree, and no presents on Christmas morning.  When she thought a little more, she thought about no advent wreath, and no pink and purple candles. 

But if you really thought about it, and thought about how much of our culture had happened because of that little baby being born in that manger, and then if you thought about the God part, and the idea that Jesus had grown up to die on the cross.  If there was no Christmas, was there no Jesus?  If there was no Jesus, was there no resurrection?  If there was no resurrection, was there no heaven? 

Wow. 

If you wanted to tear apart the fabric of a universe, and if the fabric meant the way people lived, and the way people thought, what a great place to make your first little rip.

And that brought Brittany back to her first question.  Could the problem jump from one universe to another?  Could it spread from Fawn and Chloe’s universe to the Weiner dogs’ universe, to her own – just because the idea of it was spreading?  

What was a universe, anyway, in this context?  The whole thing had seemed quite plausible, and pretty terrifying in the middle of the night when she had woken up from the dream, and the wind was pounding so loudly against her windows. 

Now that she had lain in bed worrying until the sun was starting to shine through the muggy rain that had slowed down considerably since the middle of the night, making tendrils of mist rise from the warming pavement in front of her apartment, imminent catastrophe didn’t seem quite so plausible. 

After all, Chloe and Fawn didn’t have a real universe, did they?  It was just a story.

*  *  *

 The man stood at the entrance to the kitchen.  The boy was kneeling on the floor, surrounded by broken ceramic pieces, and sugar.  The sugar canister – the one with the monkeys on it that the boy’s mother had made – was smashed to pieces. The man had never liked that sugar canister anyway.  The monkeys popped out from the surface, and so did the jungle trees they climbed on.  Monkeys and trees, popping out all over.  Now that it was gone, however, he realized that he had grown used to it.  Didn’t mind it at all, really. 

And now there was sugar everywhere.  The boy had a bowl of water, and a sponge, and he was liberally splashing, risking laceration, and spreading sugar water.  The boy looked up when he heard his father's sigh.

“I didn’t do it on purpose.”

“No, I’m sure you didn’t.”  The man struggled to keep his voice under control.  “Nevertheless, it is still smashed, and your mother will never make another one, and we can never get it back, and now we have sugar everywhere, and it’s going to stick to everything, and we’re never going to get it up.”

The boy cried.

So did the man.

They held each other, in the middle of the mess.

*  *  *

Pete sat down next to George on the beach.  The air was warm, and moist, but not hot.  The rough sand had mostly dried from last night’s storm, but it was still just damp enough to glisten where the sun struck the tiny granules of quartz.  Their families had decided to stop at the beach after church.  Brittany was at the water’s edge, helping Joey throw balls of sand into the calm, sparkling bay.  The grown-ups were off walking.  Pete was sure his mom was looking for opium vials.  They didn’t really wash up on shore any more.  There hadn’t been any official opium trade, the kind that had used the quaint little glass vials, for over a hundred years.  But once upon a time, they used to wash up on the shore here, so his mom still looked.  She called it having a sense of history.

Mrs. Weaver, George and Brittany’s mom, had taken her shoes off and was walking away from them through the quiet waters where the sand met the ocean.  Pete smiled.  George hated it when she did that, because of all the pollution that was supposed to be in the ocean on that side of the island.  The water may be a beautiful, deep, mysterious blue, but it was most assuredly full of industrial contaminants, and refuse dumped from boats, and normally, George would go on and on about how stupid his mother was, but not today.   Today, George just sat.

Pete looked beyond George’s impassive face, at the distant green hillside that ringed the bay – the lush hillside being encroached upon more and more all the time by cement.  A sea wall, crenulated and layered like a castle, protected the shore from the ocean at the far side of the bay.  Behind the wall, stark rectangles of luxury flats interrupted the dense, vibrant green of the opposing hillside.  They built more every year.

The two families weren’t alone on the beach, but it wasn’t crowded either.  A man walked his dog.  A couple held hands.  Some little children ran in circles.  But they were separate.  Other lives, that had nothing to do with his own.  Did they live in flats here in Repulse Bay?  Did they live in one of the squatters’ villages?  What did they worry about?  What were their lives like?  He would never know.  He brought his attention back to George, who he didn’t feel like he really knew either – not anymore.

“So, you went to the orphanage yesterday?”  Pete asked.

“Yeah.”

“How was it?”

“OK.”

“What did you do?”

George mumbled something short and incoherent.  They were talking, but George wasn’t really listening.  They were sitting next to each other on the same beach they had visited together a week ago, but they might as well be in completely different worlds.  As if to prove it, George got up, and walked down to the edge of the water.  He removed his shoes and socks, and rolled his pants up as high as they could go.  Exposing his legs from the knees down, he sat at the edge of the water, letting the gentle surf cover them.  Unfortunately, he had miscalculated, and his pants got very wet, but he just sat there. 

For a whimsical moment, Pete wondered if there were talking animals, and magical water troughs in whatever world George was currently inhabiting, but decided that if this were the case, his friend would be in a better mood.

Pete shook his head sadly, and went to join Brittany and Joey, who had given up sand bombing the ocean, and turned to digging tunnels.  His mom came to join them too, and Brittany asked her what exactly had gone wrong with the economy in the nineties.  It was just the kind of question his mom loved.

She asked them if they could imagine a modern world without the Internet.

They couldn’t, not really.  Their imaginations could take them only partway. 

People would have had to write letters on paper, and go to the library to research essays.

Pete’s dad wouldn’t have been able to say “Google it” whenever someone asked him a question.  People probably hadn't taken the time to just sit down and research fleeting interests.   Brittany wouldn’t have been able to hand him pages of printout on wiener dogs and demitasse, and he wouldn’t have been able to stay up half the night battling aliens on the computer.

It was easy to imagine genuine olden days with no Internet, like the American frontier, and Ancient Rome, but the 1980’s were a little harder.

“It was more than information and communication.  It was even more than on line games.”  His mom explained.  “It was also commerce.  If you wanted to go shopping, before the Internet, you went to a store.  If you wanted music, you got in the car and drove to the music store and bought a CD – all twelve tracks, whether you liked every song or not.  

“It was also social: if you wanted to meet someone, you had to get to know people at work, or school, or you could go to a nightclub, and take a chance on meeting a drunken stranger.  There was no eBay, no i-Tunes, and no eHarmony.com.

“Then all of a sudden, it seemed like everything changed overnight.  We were all connected by the World Wide Web, and there were so many possibilities.  Things that you take for granted today only got their start about twenty years ago.  Did you know, for example, that Yahoo was started by two grad students, not all that much older than you are now?  And eBay started out as the online equivalent of a garage sale.  But it wasn’t just those.  The web, which is what we called the Internet then, clearly had enormous economic potential.  I can’t remember figures right now, because I don’t have my lecture notes with me, but stock prices for successful ventures more than just doubled overnight.  They doubled, and then doubled again, and just kept on going.  Fortunes were made, on paper anyway.  Everybody wanted to be part of it.  People were starting new dot com businesses left and right.”

“Dot com?”  Brittany repeated, questioning.

“Look at the URLs next time you Google something.   All URL’S end in dot something.  Dot com used to mean commercial.  It used to mean that the site was a serious business, so the new start-ups were called dot coms.

“So everybody wanted a piece of this.  If you didn’t have a business idea yourself, you wanted to make money by investing in a new business.  There was so much money being made, it seemed like you couldn’t lose.”

“So what happened?”  Now Pete was curious.

“Well, it wasn’t any more sustainable than these sand tunnels we’re digging.  If you invested, and then got your money out quickly, you made a fortune.  If you founded Amazon.com, you made a fortune.  Otherwise, most of the new start-ups didn’t last.  The NASDAQ plummeted, the same way these tunnels are going to fill up with sand when the tide comes in.  That plummet actually started right here in Asia, by the way.   It started here, and spread around the world.  People who thought they were billionaires, discovered that practically overnight they had lost most of what they had invested.  The stock market had been doing so well since World War Two, that people had forgotten that investing in stocks is a risk.”

Pete smiled, “Just like Joey always thinks his sand castle is going to survive overnight, and wants to come back and see it.”

His mom agreed.  “A lot like that, except that they didn’t even think they needed to look to see.  They just trusted.  A really strong sand castle might last the first two or three little waves, but nothing will last forever without constant re-fortification, and the water will always come.  Every time, Joey thinks this time it’s going to be strong enough.  The problem is that anything that can make money quickly can lose money just as quickly.  Any building as easy to build as a sand castle is just as easy to destroy.  And if a business goes under, it doesn’t pay back its investors.”

“And things are even worse now?”

His mother nodded.  “For different surface reasons, but for the same fundamental reason.  Too many people don’t understand that investing is a risk.  The real estate market kept going up, so people just kept buying houses, no matter how expensive they got, thinking that the market would keep going up, and that they would sell again for a profit.  It’s fine to buy an expensive house if you love the house, and you want to live in it, but if you plan to sell it again, thinking you’re going to make a profit, well you’ve got to realize that the bubble is going to burst sometime.  The question is, will it burst before you get your money out of the market?  Too many people forgot that, and got caught.  In the nineties, it was the dot com bubble.  Our decade is the housing bubble.  I don’t know what’s coming next.”

“Maybe a tear in the fabric of our universe.”

They all stopped digging, and looked at Brittany.  Pete knew where she had gotten that, but his mom didn’t.  He went back to digging, wondering how his mom would handle the odd comment.

     “Well, that sounds like it would go beyond the financial markets.  You would probably want to talk to a science teacher.”  She gazed out to sea, her forehead scrunched into a concentrating expression.  “I remember some concern, a few years back, over an experiment with the Hadron Collider in Switzerland, where some people thought, or at least some journalists claimed to think, that irresponsible scientists might create a dangerous black hole – but they did the experiment, and we’re still here.”

Pete might have known his mom wouldn’t make fun of anybody, or make them feel stupid.   She was pretty cool that way.

“Really?”  Brittany looked genuinely concerned.  “It might be possible to tear the fabric of the universe?”

“Some postulate that a black hole is just such a tear.  Why do you ask, Dear?”  His mom obviously sensed the tension in Brittany’s question, but Brittany didn’t get a chance to answer, because Pete’s hole had connected with Joey’s hole, and they were touching fingers underground, and this was cause for general celebration.

That was about when somebody decided that the wet, sandy state of George’s church pants was a problem, and they all climbed back up to the road, piled into their cars, and headed home.

*  *  *

Brittany brought Pete the notebook, and they sat on the bench by the sports field.  This time, Pete read aloud.

December 8, 2004

"Well, getting to the North Pole is easy.  It was getting here that was difficult.  And, oh, dear, dear.  I understand now that we missed.  We missed, Fawn.  We are at least one over.  And now I'm afraid Christmas will be ruined here, too.  This Christ fellow.  Perhaps his reindeer will get sick too!  Oh, I'm so sorry.  Oh, dear, dear."  Chloe began to sob again.

"What do you mean, Chloe, getting there is easy?"  Fred was too task-oriented to pay any mind to her histrionics.  Histrionics is a word that refers to an out of control display of emotion, as you may have noticed Chloe being prone to.

"You just wish yourself home, silly.  Home is easy, if you love it," said Fawn, rolling her eyes.  "It's hard to wish to places you don't like, or don't know -- I guess Mom and me messed up because of that.  I mean, you guys are very nice and all," Fawn glanced at Malchisedech, “and kinda cute.  But, Mom's right.  We're like, one over or something.  It's...different, here.  We were just looking for help.  We didn't know where to go.  We're desperate."

"I know we can help, Fawn.  In fact, we have to," said Fred.  "But, right now we need your help.  Can you get us to -- to your home?"

"Well, I know I can wish myself home, and so can Mom, but I don't know about the rest of you.  Maybe if we held hands or something."

"Worth a try."  Deck, Akey, get our packs." 

If you have ever seen a Swiss St. Bernard rescue dog, with a first aid kit, or a barrel of brandy attached under his neck, you will have a reasonable picture of what Fred was referring to.  When the wiener dogs went on adventures, they packed supplies in these neck pouches.  They had learned to keep them packed and ready, as adventure and mystery often presented itself unexpectedly.

"May I accompany you?" asked Martin, who seemed very excited about the whole business.  Martin was very intelligent, and often helped Fred solve intellectual puzzles, but was usually somewhat of a homebody.  Besides, his very successful animal dentistry practice kept him busy.

"Well, Marty you are welcome, but I can't guarantee your safety.  And I can't say when we'll be back," said Fred.  “Assuming this works."

"I'm in," said Martin.

Akelmeyer handed Fred a neck-pack, which he attached to his collar.  The six held hands.  Paws and hooves actually, but we shall not split hairs.

"Okay, here goes," said Fawn.  She closed her eyes, and her brow furled slightly in concentration.

Had the two younger pigs been in the laboratory watching, instead of upstairs, eating berries and rolls, they would have seen the circle of six fade to nothingness, as they had seen happen to the trough earlier.  It probably would have been more than they could bear.

"Whoah, that was freakin' freaky!  It felt like, like I was turning to liquid," said Akelmeyer.

"I believe in Christmas, and in Oz, and maybe even the Tooth Fairy, now," said Malchisedech.

"Oy, vey," said Martin.

"Oops," said Fawn.

"Where are we?" asked Fred.

"Oh, dear, dear," said Chloe.

"And just what kind of a mess are you dear children trying to make?" asked a small fox with what seemed to be a mild Austrian accent.  He was sitting at a white desk, in a white room.  The six adventurers found that they were sitting on white chairs, in two rows of three, facing the fox.  He spoke gently, with love and amusement in his voice.

"Who are you?  Where are we?" asked Fred.

"I should better ask you, what are you doing here, Fred?"  The fox sounded more stern, but not unkind.

"How do you know my name?"

"Chloe, my dear, why have you gone to this other world, and brought these children out of it?  They should not leave their own world.  Theirs is in an epoch with no magic.”

"We wished them out," said Fawn.  "We were just looking for help.  The reindeer can't fly!"

"Oh dear," said Chloe.

"Never mind.  We shall sort things out.  Messrs. Gruff, and Mr. Littel, I am not sure how you have arrived here at all.  Perhaps you have minds open enough to believe that which seems impossible.  Still, that should not be enough.  Hmm. Yes, well.  And Chloe and Fawn, how did you stray from your own Place, simply by wishing?  Something is amiss.  Probably the Raven's claws are in this.

"Fred you are quite correct.  Your action is imperative, and the fate of the two Places lies in the balance.  I will try to answer the questions on your mind, briefly, but then you must continue.  You are intuitively wise, my dear child."  He looked at a small window on the top of his desk.  "The trough, yes.  You were right.  It is an important piece.

"You wonder who I am.  I cannot explain fully, but suffice it to say I am a keeper of gates.  You have wandered into a Place you do not belong."

"Not on purpose," said Akelmeyer.

"There is Purpose in all that happens, my child.  There was no accusation in my statement.  Please, listen and do not speak.  Our time is short.

"In a moment, you will be sent to Chloe and Fawn's Place--the magnetic north pole in an imaginary storybook land, where Santa Claus, elves and reindeer are real, from your point of reference.  Akelmeyer, you enjoy pondering your thinker you call Einstein.  Consider what he said about the relativity--"what is real depends upon the observer."  Please, all of you, understand that what has happened, and what is about to happen, is real.  Perhaps in a different way than you are used to understanding, but it is real.  Your actions have grave consequence.

"Fred, you must find the trough.  It will, I hope, give you the direction you need.   And together you six must restore Christmas to Fawn and Chloe's world.

"Malchisedech, you must not doubt.  Look into Fawn's eyes, and ask yourself if she is real.  You must all be strong, physically and mentally.  You must believe."

"But, what--" began Akelmeyer.

"I am sorry, I can say nothing more.  You must go."  The room and the fox seemed to vanish.  The white remained; now it was a dull white sky and a frozen blanket of snow.  It was cold.

TO BE CONTINUED...

         “Don’t you hate it when a character says, ‘I can say nothing more’?”  Pete asked.  “Doesn’t it really just mean that the author hasn’t figured it out yet?”

         But Brittany wasn’t listening.  “I think you should keep the notebook tonight,” was the first thing out of her mouth when Pete stopped reading.

         He gave his head a little shake.  It helped him shift gears. “I can do that, but why?”

         Brittany was quiet for a moment.  She didn’t want to talk about the nightmare, and she didn’t want to look like she was scared.  She knew what happened when she showed weakness around her brother and his friends.  Pete was already shaking his head.  The next step would be for him to all of a sudden remember that she was only twelve years old, and then she wouldn’t be part of things any more.

But the whole thing was starting to freak her out a little bit, and she hadn’t liked the dream last night at all, and she didn’t want another one.  Maybe the notebook had brought the nightmare along with the story.  The impossible story that was just writing itself.  She liked the story.  It was a good story.  She wanted to know what was going to happen next, but what if it was more than a story, and what if what happened next was really bad?  “Your actions have grave consequence,” the fox had said.  He was talking to the wiener dogs, but what if he meant Brittany and Pete too? 

No.  Of course he didn’t.  He didn’t know anything about Brittany and Pete.  He was a fictional character.  Brittany just needed to be away from the notebook for a while.  She had always wanted something interesting to happen, and maybe now it was finally happening. 

She just found it more frightening than she had imagined, now that the risks might be real rather than fictional.  She wasn’t going to Narnia, like the Pevensies, or tessering somewhere like Meg in A Wrinkle in Time, or riding through a flume like D.J. McCale’s Bobby Pendragon.  She was staying right here in her own stable, if boring reality – but the dream last night had made her realize that this adventure could have cosmic implications, except that that was stupid.  She lived in a real world, governed by the laws of physics, as Pete would be oh so quick to point out, not by the laws of fiction.  She had had a nightmare – nothing more than that.  Her overactive imagination was getting away from her – playing tricks on her.  She needed perspective.  She needed a little time away from the notebook.  That was all.

But what could she say to Pete? 

She had an idea.

         “I think you should draw pictures in it.  A picture of the dogs with their travel packs.  I think it would look cute.”

         “I can’t draw.”

         “You say that, but look at the picture of the lab, and of the houses in the bubbles.  I think you should keep it awhile, and draw them with the travel packs, or maybe the fox, and the animals sitting in the white chairs, or something.  It would have to look pretty funny, right?  Weiner dogs, and two deer and a pig, all trying to sit in the same size chairs?”

*   *   *

Pete brought the notebook inside, and reread the latest installment. 

“What is real depends on the observer.” 

That was trippy.  He had heard of Einstein.  Einstein was famous.  People learned about him in school.  Had he really said something as mysterious as that? 

“What is real depends on the observer?” 

So he and Brittany could see the same thing, but it could be different because he and Brittany were different? 

But it wouldn’t really be different, would it?  Because it would still the same.  It would just seem different to two different observers.  Maybe they would see different angles, or different perspectives.  The thing would stay the same, right?

He found a box of art supplies in the cupboard, and when he stopped drawing, the notebook contained pictures not only of the dogs in their travel pouches, but of the fox at his desk, and of cartoon globes with the North Pole, and the magnetic north pole labeled.  At the North Pole a big pole popped out, and, floating above it, was a drawing of Admiral Peary with his dogsled.  On the other globe the Magnetic North Pole was labeled, with a castle that looked a little like a sand castle.  The walkway leading to the castle was lined with candy canes, and the banner waving from the turret proclaimed it to be Santa’s Workshop.