Pay Attention, Part Eight

[froodle]

The sea serpent's eyeball is about the size of a beach-ball, and it bobs maddeningly out of reach in the muddy growth of rushes near the edge of Lake Eerie's northern shore.

The raven is quaking with hoarse avian laughter when Harley falls face-first in the muck trying to reach it with a long branch. Sara Sue makes it within an arms-length, moving quickly on bare feet across the marshy surface, until she slips and finds herself up to her shoulders in the sucking ooze. There might have been screaming, would almost certainly have been swearing, if she hadn't inhaled a decent lungful of freezing lake-water at the moment of impact. Dash threatens to set fire to the bird's flight-feathers if it doesn't shut up, but Harley, wiping algae from his stinging eyes with the hem of a faded Unkind Ones sweatshirt borrowed earlier that evening, tells him to knock it off. Smart-mouthed animal sidekicks are a staple of kid's adventure stories, and if Harley can warp his own narrative enough to fit those parameters, maybe he's got a better chance at a happy ending.

When he explains this, Dash gives him a long look and asks if he's ever heard of Hans Christian Anderson.

"How have you heard of him?" Sara Sue wants to know, from her seat practically on top of a small campfire, trying to pull waterlogged weeds from her hair in the flickering light of the flames. Dash shrugs. Like the grey hair, like the marks, like being used as a power source for a municipal building made of flesh and bone, Hans Christian Anderson is just another unanswered question for him, and not even one of the important ones.

In the end, a brontosaurus hastily scrawled on the back of a World o' Stuff receipt reaches over the water and nudges the eyeball to shore with it's broad, flattened, snake-like nose, which begins crinkling and dissolving in the damp air at the first touch of the wet reeds. Sara Sue's lost her eraser at some point, so she tears off the corner of the drawing with her name on it, and eats it. The brontosaurus disappears with a sound of tearing paper.

"Why didn't you keep that one?" Dash asks. "Two dinosaurs are better than one, right?"

Sara Sue shrugs.

"I don't like long-necked herbivores," she says. "They're common."

The boys stare. Even the raven stops tearing at the membrane of the enormous eye long enough to cock it's head and squint along it's heavy grey beak at her.

"Now that's a story that needs to be told," it says.

Sara Sue waves a hand, dismissing the comment and, by implication, all the dislikably common long-necked herbivores of the world as unworthy of her attention.

"That's not the story we're here for," she says, fixing the raven with her gaze.

The raven ruffles it's neck feathers, a remarkable imitation of a human shrugging.

"Fine," it says, and begins to tell them about the Lost Light.