The First Story

By Craig B Owens

Matt and John live to write stories. After an attack by school bullies, those stories might be the only thing keeping John alive. At the side of John's hospital bed, Matt weaves together tales in the hopes of waking him from his coma before it's too late...

Storytelling itself comes to life in the world of Creativity. When unex

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brad Made Art
• Release date: Jul 4, 2023
• ISBN: 9781088122419

Book preview

1

Out of the mists of a dreary night, Toy Peddler came to sell his wares. His long, slender legs, affixed with large paddle-like feet, shuffled over the cobblestones and carried him through the early morning mist. His burden, a large sack filled to overflowing with toys of every description, perched atop his bony shoulders and was much lighter than it should have been.

Toys for sale or trade! Come to me, children! His cry rang out, and the children came.

They came from their homes, streaming into the night, hoping for that perfect toy, and they were not disappointed. Toy Peddler’s stockpile of toys flowed freely from the sack, and the children gave up their money happily in exchange.

One child received the perfect doll; another got the perfect truck, or stuffed animal, or puzzle box. The selection was impressively targeted; each child got just what he or she desired. Toy Peddler smiled in response to all the satisfied customers, but he was waiting for something in particular to happen.

On and on they came, but the sack full of toys never diminished, not even by one single, solitary bouncing ball.

I want a doll! one young girl demanded suddenly from behind him. Her fine nightgown, adorned with silk ribbons that matched perfectly the ones tying up her yellow hair in equal length pigtails, revealed her high station in life. The fistful of paper money confirmed her standing.

He turned and looked down at the little girl holding the bills out in his direction. It was far too much for any regular doll. He thrust his hand into the toy bag and rifled through his stock until he found what he wanted. He held the doll in front of the girl; she reached for the toy. The delicately painted porcelain face, the exquisitely tailored gown, the bows, the hair; it was the perfect doll for such a wealthy patron.

What do you have to trade? He asked, holding the doll just out of reach.

I have money, the girl said, confusion behind her eyes.

He looked at her with his own transactional eyes until he found what he was looking for.

How about a dream? Toy Peddler suggested, his skeletal finger touching the girl’s forehead.

A dream? What good is that?

Then, you won’t miss it. Just one. A dream for a doll. What do you say?

The girl thought for a brief moment as Toy Peddler held the doll closer to her. She nodded slowly. How would she miss one dream? Toy Peddler’s finger touched the girl’s forehead, tracing a line just above her eyebrows until he found what he wanted. He held the dream in his palm, handing the doll to the girl.

She smiled, but there was now a question behind her eyes. What dream did you take? she asked.

Ah, now that would be cheating, he said and thrust his dream-filled hand into the pouch at his side. Toys for sale or trade! Come to me, children! his cry rang out through the haze and the gloom.

Excuse me, sir, the little boy said. Do you have what I want? He held up his favorite toy, a well-used model fire truck, for Toy Peddler to inspect.

Toy Peddler looked the boy over and nodded. He reached into the pouch at his side and held out a bony finger to the boy’s forehead; then he spoke a secret word.

It’s warm, the boy said, rubbing his temple, a smile slowly growing. Toy Peddler took the truck and flung it into his pack. The boy shut his eyes, and his smile became nearly too big to be contained. Toy Peddler walked on into the night.

I got a doll, the young girl said, her head held high.

The boy continued to smile and did not care to look at the toy.

Toys for sale or trade! Come to me, children! Toy Peddler disappeared into the mists of the dreary night, looking for some new place to sell his wares.

***

Matt sat cross-legged atop the picnic table, facing his best friend, John. The park in the center of town was always deserted at this time of day, after three o’clock but before four thirty. They came every day, when the forces in their lives allowed, and shared their stories.

Well? Matt asked, his eyes wide with expectation.

Is he evil? John was sitting cross-legged, like Matt, his arms folded like his legs, his mouth shifted to the left and pursed, and his brow furrowed in thought.

No, well, not really, no. Matt looked down at his laptop and the words he had written there. He’s more like justice, y’know?

John, his mouth still screwed left, his brow still furrowed, began to nod slowly, hesitantly.

Matt continued, Like, he takes from people who don’t appreciate what they have.

He took a dream from a little girl.

Right! Matt was too excited. He wanted John to like this new story. Because she didn’t appreciate having the luxury of any dream she wanted.

And the little boy was poor…

So, he doesn’t have that luxury. The Toy Peddler tries to correct that.

Toy Peddler. No article. Like his name, remember?

Right, right, Matt bowed his head. This was going wrong. His story wasn’t good enough.

So, he’s equity, parity, John said, his face taking on a calm, thoughtful look that made Matt’s heart a little lighter. He’s like the Robin Hood trope, taking from the rich to give to the poor, but with dreams.

Exactly! Matt clapped his hands together too loudly, which made John laugh out loud. You said we needed something different. The Growl in the Night, uh, Growl in the Night, Chittering Underground, even Slashing Hero, you said were too stereotypical.

Yeah, so Toy Peddler is like Santa Claus but—

With a fresh new take.

Is that why you set the story in a village right out of Grimms’ fairy tales?

Yeah, it’s that juxsty, uh…

Juxtaposition.

Right, juxtaposition of the traditional but in a fresh, new way.

John nodded more animatedly, his mouth smiling, his brow raised pleasantly. I like it, he pronounced. Of course, the repetition of a dreary night might need some work. It’s like that old cliche, you know, a dark and stormy night.

Matt sighed, nodded, a broad, satisfied smile filling his face. But you like it, right?

John said, Yeah, it’s really good.

What about you? Matt put his laptop into his backpack. You got anything new?

John shook his head. I’ve got some ideas, but I haven’t written any down yet. I like this direction. Old fairy tales characters with new spins. This could work. He glanced down at his phone, checking the time. But I got this thing, a family thing, I have to go to.

Okay. Matt couldn’t hide his disappointment. It was Friday. Usually, on Fridays, they could work for hours, uninterrupted, until the people going out for the evening started showing up.

I should go, John said as he slid off the table top and plopped onto the ground. He dusted off the back of his black jeans, fiddled a bit with his black t-shirt, and ran his fingers through his dyed black hair. Matt remembered when John had first begun to wear nothing but black, about the time they had both turned fourteen. It had been a type of rebellion, Matt supposed, especially when he had first dyed his hair, but now, a year and a half later, it had become his personal style. It meant something to him—that was obvious—and Matt accepted that implicitly.

Matt watched John shift from foot to foot, his black sneakers drumming up miniature dust clouds. Is it still bad?

John nodded. I’ll just go the long way ‘round, he said, rubbing his shoulder, the one where the bruise was just visible above the neckline of his shirt.

We could go to the police.

And say what? John was shaking his head and rubbing his sore shoulder.

It’s assault. This ain’t the 1950s. Nobody has to put up with bullies anymore.

John continued to shake his head. Dad said to man up. John’s voice was colorless as he reminded Matt of the one time he had tried to get help before, and pointing out, in a subtly figurative way, that the police were men very much like his father.

You want me to walk with you? Matt offered, his back just a bit straighter than usual, hoping the added posture made up for the complete lack of musculature.

John smiled, his lips turned inward, trying to be respectful. It’s a nice thought, but no reason you should get beat up too. I’ll take the long way ‘round.

Okay, but be careful.

The two shook hands, awkwardly. They never quite knew how to say goodbye. They used to pat each other’s arms in a decidedly rhythmless staccato, but that had gotten old quickly. John had offered a fist bump once, only once. It had felt so inauthentic that they both had grimaced. So, they graduated to handshakes, which was better, marginally, than the waving to each other from less than two feet away.

Matt took his time rearranging his backpack. The laptop had mashed the handouts from school, but he didn’t care much about that. There was a nagging, a thought, dark and sinister, forming in his head. He started to walk toward his house, the exact opposite direction from John, but felt the need to turn. He watched John walk directly down Main Street.

What’s he doing? Matt asked no one. The long way around would have been to cross over two streets, go through the pharmacy, pretending to shop but buying nothing and exiting through the back door, then around the hotel by the river. Main Street would take him directly toward the group of seniors who always hung out in front of the convenience store on main, the very group that always bullied him.

Matt stood still, watching his friend walk toward danger. He was too far away to call to. Maybe he had forgotten what awaited on Main? That didn’t seem likely. Maybe he was going to try to face them, to fight them, to… Matt sighed as John disappeared around the corner and was firmly on Main Street.

Damn it, John! Matt exclaimed and walked briskly, following John’s trail, trying not to run; running would mean there was absolutely something bad about to happen. He had no reason to expect the worst. Maybe the seniors would just call him names, those truly creative names that no bully ever had thought of. He laughed at his own sarcasm and thought about creating a character who was a bully and just as original as every other bully, a walking stereotype, a caricature of humanity, a twisted, desiccated view of humanity.

He smiled at his use of language. John had taught him the definition of desiccated in reference to a character he had created with vampiric qualities. John would be proud of the relative elevation of the verbiage of his thought process right now. But that was not the pressing issue at the moment.

Matt walked faster, which became a half-walk, half-jog, which made his backpack jump and jar against his back. He could feel the hard case of his laptop slapping the bone at the top of his shoulder, and then he thought about how much worse a fist would feel. He began to jog.

It took a moment for him to register the sight in front of him. The group of seniors, that ever-present mob of delinquents, had pulled John just inside the alley between the convenience store and the bank. He could just see John’s black hair between the dirt-colored heads of the bullies. Then he saw something hard, wooden, in the hands of the main bully, a truly disgusting example of humanity whom everyone called Little Bill because he was named after his father.

Matt stopped walking, the sight so jarring that it literally stopped him. It wasn’t until he recognized the wooden thing as a baseball bat that he started walking again. He took a step as he watched Little Bill hold the bat, one hand on the handle, the other on the barrel, and press it against John’s nose. There was laughter coming from the others, sick, demented, disgusting laughter. Matt took another step.

Little Bill pulled the bat close to his own face; then he thrust it forward, forcefully. Matt gasped at the sound it made as it connected with his friend’s forehead. It was a thud, which was expected, but underneath the thud was a sickening, wet sound, like a large stone dropped onto a rain-soaked lawn. Matt watched John’s head fling back and connect to the brick wall behind him. Another thud, more like a smack, shot out of the alley.

No! Matt shouted and began an earnest run for the alley. He watched the group turn and saw their expressions were not sinister, not anymore. Each of them had the wide-eyed expression of a child who had just been unknowingly cruel, realizing they had just made an unbearable mistake. They ran as Matt approached.

Blood had begun to pool around John’s head, which lay in a puddle of murky water. That was unacceptable, but the angry redness of the entire scene gave him pause. He wanted to lift John’s head out of the dirtiness; he wanted to pick his friend up and carry him to safety; he wanted… But he didn’t know what to do, what he could do, what could be done.

2

The Eternal Gloaming blinked. It was slight, quick, and barely noticeable, but Chittering Underground’s eyes turned toward the disturbance; Growl in the Night felt a chill, and Keeper of Ways made an errant mark on a map.

Go, check the Caves, Chittering Underground instructed her subjects, her children, and thousands upon thousands of spindly legs scurried to do her bidding.

I should investigate, Growl in the Night whispered through the twilight as he rose and bounded away into the shadows of the trees.

Keeper of Ways stared at the flawed map. He squinted at the wrongly placed line and concentrated. There was a path in the error; the line marked it. There was a purpose to the mistake; the line revealed it. There was urgency hidden in the ink; the mark symbolized it. He rolled up the parchment, placed it with the hundreds of other maps lining his walls, and he sat to ponder the potentiality of future roads. I need a new map, he whispered. I need a new path.

Growl in the Night followed his nose, whiskers flitting too and fro. His heavy paws trundled over forest carpet, through dense undergrowth, around barriers his powerful claws could not dispatch. Nothing seemed out of place, amiss. A guttural noise, raw and primal, rumbled around his stomach, through his chest, and squeezed from between his fangs.

Thousands upon thousands of spindly legs returned to Chittering Underground. They pooled around her massive legs, all of them, and they lingered in the enormous shadow of her body. Chittering Underground turned all of her bulbous eyes to the ground, surveying her children. The thousands and thousands of spindly legs fluttered in unison, tense and anxious. Eight of those legs scurried forward, whispering the cause of concern.

Is it true? she asked, and a thousand mandibles clicked affirmation.

In bounded Growl in the Night. What have you discovered?

You saw it too?

Felt it more like. Growl in the Night paced back and forth at the mouth of Chittering Underground’s cave; he carefully and splendidly avoided crushing any of her children. Pads and paws swept around the forest floor with grace that should have been impossible, and a tail, like banded steel, swished from side to side, balancing and testing as it went.

It is as bad as it felt. Chittering Underground lifted one of her own legs that were thousands and thousands of times bigger than her children’s. She pointed toward the Caves. The First Story has been stolen.

The roar that erupted from Growl in the Night shook the leaves from the trees, caused the ground to rumble, and frightened the wind away. I will find the thief! I will punish the thief!

I’m afraid it isn’t as simple as that. Chittering Underground watched the flashing eyes move closer, heard the roiling sound of fear, but she never wavered in her defiance. We need to inform the Council of Aspects.

The Council? Growl in the Night spat out the words. Useless! We are the oldest beings in existence; we should lead Creativity!

The Council was duly elected. You know that as well as I. Chittering Underground shifted her enormous bulk and pushed forward. The mammoth beast in front of her, dwarfed by her own body and cowed by her clacking mandibles, was forced to step back into the peat-scented air, snarling in retreat. And there is more to this theft than is readily apparent.

What does it matter? If the First Story is used…? Growl in the Night bowed his furry head in deference.

I am aware of the danger. Chittering Underground flicked one of her legs, and Growl in the Night turned and leaped into the shadows. I am very aware of the dangers, but we follow the laws.

The laws! Another wave of vicious sound forced its way into the air from underneath the cover of darkness. Are we supposed to just sit in our caves and do nothing?

That was the long-ago agreement. You signed in blood.

The Eternal Gloaming settled into the treetops, spilled onto the forest floor, twisted around the rocks and pathways, and dipped into the rivers and streams; all of Creativity sighed at the comfort of the Never-Ending Day. Growl in the Night huffed his final protest before shifting back on his haunches. He rested and forced his breath to flow normally. The night grew intensely quiet.

Chittering Underground turned all of her eyes to the sky. The light, dim but strong, was soft and reassuring. For now, we send a message. She whispered to her anxious children. And we wait. Her children scurried away, back to the forest floor, the trunks of trees, and the bushes filled with food. Chittering Underground stifled a shiver as the Eternal Gloaming seemed to dip toward darkness once more. She trained her eyes on the Gloaming Woods, and the half day around her pulsed, almost imperceptibly, with anticipation of the potential new day just over the horizon, always over the horizon.

Keeper of Ways stepped from his house and pointed his feet toward a new path, a new possibility, a new world.

3

Matt didn’t have the same response to hospitals that so many people had. He had heard people describe the smells, the sounds, and the wall colors as disturbing, frightening, or gross. He knew there were a lot of people who hated hospitals. He hadn’t been one of them. He had always seen hospitals as hope. They represented help, caring, safety. He had always liked hospitals until today.

He watched his friend roll into the hospital on a gurney stained with blood, and all of the hope drained from him. The hospital was now a place of terror, of dread.

You’ll have to wait out here, sweetie, a nurse said. A strange tone he didn’t quite recognize dripped from her words, and she pointed to a room full of chairs off to the side.

Matt waited until the gurney disappeared through two large metal doors that opened with a hiss. He waited a moment more until the hissing doors closed. He waited again, standing in the middle of a pale, cold corridor, suddenly understanding the term industrial white as a description of a wall color. The nurses' station, off to the right, was encased in shiny, reddish wood like someone had tried to inject nature into this unnaturally white setting. He didn’t appreciate the attempt. He turned and faced the waiting room. The chairs were made from the same truly fake-looking wood. He continued to wait, even as he sat in one of the chairs closest to the hissing doors.

A clock he couldn’t quite see—a free-standing hand sanitizer station blocked half of it—behind the nurses' desk was ticking loudly, too loudly. The rest was silence, too much silence. Matt took inventory of his memory, in order to recount to parents, and tried to organize the events that were swirling now. The police had arrived first after the convenience store clerk had made the call, and one of them had asked so many questions, and Matt had answered. At least, he thought he had answered. He remembered other officers tending to John.

He remembered them taking his pulse, further checking his neck, tentatively pressing his skin, lifting his shirt, taking note of the old bruises and the new wounds. A fresh tear fell down his face. He had been crying this entire time but not continuously. Tears would flow freely, then stop, then trickle, then flow, then stop. At times, he felt he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think. A roar filled his ears, his mind, his consciousness.

Emotions that he hadn’t known before bubbled behind the roar in his head, the throbbing pain around his eyes, the tremble of his hands. Complex, confusing, irritating emotions, full of familiar things but different from anything that had come before. There was fear, but it was more pronounced, more scratching, like claws in his flesh. There was sadness, encroaching, invasive, like thousands of insects beneath his skin. There was anger. So much anger flooded through him as if a wall, a border, some boundary had been breached.

He sat and waited. He listened to the obscured clock tick, he stared at the shiny wood, he glared at the sterile walls, and he felt the emotions.

4

She walked into the forest, the little girl. It was nearly dark but not yet. It was no longer day but still yet. She made good time, traveling over fallen logs and boulders until she came to the place where she could no longer see the lights of the town behind her.

We’re almost there, she whispered to the fine porcelain doll, her traveling companion and a gift from Toy Peddler, long ago, when she had been part of one of his stories. Her pigtails, the color of sunlight, fluttered in the cooling breeze, not yet cold but no longer warm. She walked on, past the fields of wildflowers that were so beautiful in the sunlight and so fragrant under the moon. In the time before night and after day, they were both and neither. She passed the Caves of Shadows where she believed the tiger lived.

It was a story she told herself when she needed to be brave, the story of the tiger who was courageous and cowardly at the same time. The tiger who fought against all odds to protect his family but faltered while trying to protect himself. It was a story of the in-between, the kind she always loved to tell and to hear. She had been part of so many stories in the past, so often as the victim, like Toy Peddler’s story, the little girl everyone worried and fretted about or despised or both.

Further caves appeared through the trees. These were the Caves of Fire. The flames inside the deep, dark caverns flickered and shot inky silhouettes into the forest. The inky-black mixed with the light so splendidly, so nearly completely, as they danced among the woody audience. Tonight, before the Eternal Gloaming dipped, as it was wont to do, the flames were especially vibrant, too vibrant. The light was overtaking the shadow far more than it had before. It made her uneasy, so she hastened her pace past the Caves of Fire.

Something is wrong, she said, and the spindly legs in the trees seemed to chitter their agreement. They spoke often as she continued her journey. Chittering Underground awaits, they said, and she smiled at the pleasant invitation they offered.

Chittering Underground is always so polite, she whispered to her doll and hugged it close to her chest then made a mental note to return it to Toy Peddler sometime soon. She sensed that she would not need it for much longer. Her story seemed to be changing, finally, after so very, very long.

The caves came faster then, one series after another: the Caves of Time, the Caves of Destiny, the Caves of Wonder, dug into the giant cliff so long ago, they stood forever as sentries over the Gloaming Woods. She walked on, past the Caves of Enlightenment, the Caves of Fear, and the Caverns of Corruption until she came to stand in the Twilight Clearing, where the Eternal Gloaming began to waver, or it should have wavered. It should have dipped into the night just a bit, but still, the light was too strong even here. It should have been nearly night. Always. Nearly night. But the clearing looked like the dawn of a new day. She hurried among the tall grass, giggling without intention as the spindly weeds tickled her from ankles to chin until she came to