mental manifestations

“Why isn’t anyone doing palm trees?”

The teacher’s tone carried a tone of frustration through the air. She almost said it as if she was angry at them.

A bunch of New England second grade kids sat silently in a classroom. Most of them probably had never even seen a palm tree before. Their minds were confined to the likenesses of great oaks, sweet maples, and tall pines. Even better, these kids were inner-city Boston kids. Not many choices for trees when you don’t have that many to look at.

Their drawings decorated the room. Their trees were all the basic brown tree stump and cloudy green mass for leaves. Add a blue sky and green ground and that’s all there is. Almost no one drew any seasonal trees. No fall colors, no dead winters. They were all variations on spring.

However, one boy took his teacher’s words seriously. He secretly began drawing a palm tree planted on a sandy, hilly island. He drew a tan line and then colored the round shape in. He took up his brown crayon and began drawing the outline for the tree, coloring it in as he finished. He began to draw pointy leaves for the palm tree growing out in various directions and colored those in when he was done. He even drew some coconuts to add to the scene. However, he was disappointed. He felt empty on the inside, almost shameful that he made it just because his teacher complained about the lack of variety. He didn’t feel proud of it and didn’t want to show it to anyone.

With a green crayon in hand, the same color as the leaves, he began to color over the sand. He scribbled furiously over the ground, growing grass over the arid landscape, reshaping the land, adding vegetation where there was none. He took his brown crayon and thickened the tree stump, making it straighter than the curvy palm he once made, and also enveloping the coconuts he had drawn. With a darker green, the color of forests, he drew an enormous cloudy figure around the original palm trees and just covered everything up.

He still did not feel proud of what he had done, but he thought it looked better than the palm tree. And it was still hung on the wall in the forest of all the other kids’ drawings. The teacher never said anything else about the trees. Either she gave up on them or just let them be. Maybe both. Maybe neither. No one else ever saw that boy’s original drawing that day, but that didn’t matter. All he cared about was whether he made the right choice or not.

I wrote this piece in 10th grade when I was geometry homework. I stopped, took out a sheet of paper, and began writing. After some editing, I submitted it to my school’s literary magazine, and it ended up being published. The basis for this piece of fiction is based off the D’ni universe and the Art. It is a third-person account of a man linking to another age. I hope Cyan doesn’t get mad at me. I haven’t made any money off of this and I don’t intend to. This is merely a work of fiction from one of their fans.

Cosmic Memory

Peering over his desk at the book, the man sat quietly in thought. Then he drew up his pen, the implement of creation, and started writing furiously in his native tongue. Words began to pour forth from his mind to his hand, escaping their confinement, and spread themselves onto the page one after another. The ink that flowed onto the fine paper provided the blood the words would thrive on. He continued for several minutes endlessly writing, not emitting a single sound, with focus on nothing other than his writing. He was in a mesmerized state driven purely by instinct.

As quickly as his writing had started, it stopped. The man laid back in his chair satisfied with his work. It was completed. The last book he would ever write. An entire world that lay in front of him. The ink, the paper, the words. They were all brought to life by one man, one man who had the power to create entire worlds from nothing.

Flipping through the pages all the way back to the first, he decided to take one last look at his masterpiece. Arriving at the first page, he gazed upon the black image permanently set on the page that lay in front of him. The image came alive with faint dots of light that appeared out of nowhere. The dots grew and grew in number and the quantity soon became indeterminable. The image zoomed out and moved about in a way revealing a whole panaramic view of cosmos and heavens as far as the eye could see. It continued to move gradually through the void which contained it all, slowing down and speeding up, never going back to the same location. Exhaling a deep breath, the man slowly and gracefully put his arm forward toward the book laying his palm directly on the image. Within a matter of seconds, he disappeared, sucked into the gate of space and time.

The book was open flat on the desk, the image still moving in its constant sporadic movement. Slowly it faded and became pitch black. Not caring about what he left behind, the man fell into the night, cradled among an ocean of stars. He wondered where the winds of destiny would take him although he knew that such speculation would be useless. It didn’t matter. His completed masterpiece gave him all the satisfaction he needed. His creation, the work of a lifetime, an infinity of worlds where anything was bound to happen. It was bliss. He had reached his ultimate goal, dream, fantasy, and the final heaven he had always hoped of acheiving.