A pair of tiny bare feet pitter pattered their way across the cold kitchen floor. The room was dark and deathly quiet, save the soft ticking of the towering clock, which stood in the hall as a monument to the untouchable nature of time itself.
Using light invading through windows in other rooms, Josh found his first target. A pair of dish towels hung from a bar under the window facing the main room. These he examined with great care.
One of the towels had a strawberry pattern, matching those on the dishes they commonly used. The corners were not matched perfectly, but they were close. With instinctual precision he drew the corners together and resettled the towels in their places. Perfect.
He turned his attention to the first cupboard to his right. With care, he touched the door handles.
In the hall, the chains of the clock startled him. The weights shifted, making a grinding sound. One slid, another lifted, followed by the familiar and dreadful, “Bing, bong, bong, bing!” In the still house, the racket could certainly have woken everyone.
At full tilt, Josh charged back to his assigned room, dancing first left and then right to avoid slamming into the deadly metal frame of his hide-a-bed. Gingerly, so as not to disturb his bed mate, he slid under the covers and peered back out through the open door.
There he waited, with his heart racing, the echoes of the clock reverberating through the house.
Everyone referred to this room simply as “the den”. It was an appropriate name, since it was where his parents placed their cubs at night. On a couple of occasions Josh’s sister Becky had taken this to an extreme, emerging from the den with a wadded paper tail sticking out of her pants, growling and meowing at anyone close enough to rub her face against.
For the moment she was asleep only two feet from him, her drooling face pressed against her pillow.
Josh waited.
And waited.
The clock continued to tick its cadence, but neither his parents, nor his grandparents, nor his brothers or older sister had emerged from their designated rooms.
Josh buckled up his courage and returned his feet to the floor and to the task at hand. He stepped carefully from the room, rechecking the doors immediately to his left to ensure they were, indeed, still closed. Not only so, he could hear the familiar snoring of several ancient persons.
For the second time that morning, he snuck through the open hall to his right and peered into the Christmas room at the sleeping bags of his siblings. They were easy to see, as they were lit by streetlamp through large open windows. Still and quiet.
Satisfied, Josh next addressed the clock. Looking up he read the hands in the dark, a trick he had mastered during the previous year. Six seventeen, it claimed. This information was meaningless to him, but it was interesting.
Bypassing the kitchen, Josh walked the long tight hall to the main room. During the day this hall was shorter and not all that unpleasant. At night, it was longer somehow, and dreadful.
Entering the main room, he passed the organ, the hand vacuum, and grandma’s chair on his left. Grandpa’s chair, a rather impressive item, was ahead and to the right. There, in front of him was the fireplace, which was not lit, and its implements.
Beside the fireplace and the open pan of split wood hung the mysterious poker. Pokers always reminded Josh of Murder She Wrote, since that was possibly the second most popular weapon murderers used, after the revolver of course. He thought about picking it up and holding it, but declined. The possibility of being caught greatly increased with the number of rules, or the enormity of those rules, that he broke.
He strolled across the room to the double-pane, glass, sliding door. Outside, the morning was merely at its beginning. In the enclosed backyard, just beyond the large, wood-slat deck, he could see hints of sunlight striking the tree.
With care, Josh unlocked the door and pulled. It budged, but only barely. Slipping his fingers in the crack he had made between the door and the sill, he wedged it open several inches further, just enough to slide through his deflated lungs and Dumbo ears.
The porch slats were comfortable to his feet, and the crisp air kissed his skin. A mild breeze brought to his nose the wonderful smells of paradise and freedom. It was intoxicating, rejuvenating, and joyous.
Josh stepped to the end of the porch, passing the forbidden stationary bicycle on his left, and took a seat.
In the mystique of the morning, he allowed his mind to wander, not that he was ever known to prevent it. Soon his thoughts were filled with images of kings and battles, dragons and towers, heroes and villains. His lips incoherently mimicked the orders of generals, servants, and warriors. His fingers outlined explosions, the fists of dictators, and aircraft diving on their targets.
Days grew to years, years to lifetimes, lifetimes to eras. No moment of history was left unexploited.
As his mind spun, the growing light continued to stir up life around him — first in tiny, nearly unnoticeable ways, and then more substantially. Ants picked up their trails from the day before. Beetles set out from hiding to adventures in the great unknown. Tiny shadows lifted, revealing hidden secrets of the life underneath the porch. The world of the miniature was animating rapidly and cheerfully.
As the first insect lazily buzzed past him, he caught the call of morning birds, tossing their lovely melodies into the air.
His imagination merged with this miniature world. Now rather than utterly fiction, his explorers were riding the backs of the creatures Josh studied on the ground. They were searching for gold or for princesses. And then, as the real dissolved away the imagined, the tiny millipede became its own hero, strolling across the pavement, its legs moving in waves down the length of its body.
The wonderment of this beautiful and fascinating creation stirred Josh’s mind. He wondered if they knew anything of the God who gave them life. As if to draw them together, Josh began humming a hymn, the words to which he was utterly unacquainted.
As the notes grew less and less familiar, he switched again to a song he knew, joyfully glorifying his God on this tremendous morning. As if in response, the sun spilled light across the yard, bringing life to the remainder of creatures that inhabited the outside world. Josh drew deeper of his own breath and glorified his Father for the blessings they had this morning.
As he sang, with his head hanging upside-down to get a better view under the porch, he spied a tiny, grey spider strolling on the underside of a plank. As he watched, it walked up the ledge, and then continued down the length of the plank back toward the house. Josh flipped his legs into action to crawl behind it, being careful to avoid crushing the other life he had been observing.
Stopping and starting, no doubt curious at the mountain following him, the spider continued along his predatory way. Oblivious to the world but six inches in any direction, Josh followed like a lost puppy.
At the end of his journey, the spider slipped under a crack at the base of the sliding door. Josh puckered his lips in disappointment. At the very least, the spider could have attacked one of the ants along of way, or something.
Perhaps he wasn’t hungry. Perhaps he had been frightened. Perhaps that huge human foot in the frame of the sliding door had scarred him.
The blood drained from Josh’s face. His eyes picked up slightly to notice the hideous, thin pink fabric hanging above the feet. In his mind, Josh panicked, deeply worried about the near future of his backside.
Without even pulling his hands from the floor, he looked up at his mother, towering over him, strange contraptions hanging from her head. Her eyes were devoid of appreciation and respect for the wonderful world Josh had found on this beautiful morning.
Without a word, she stepped backward inside and out of the way. Josh obeyed the implied command. He stood, entered the house dejected, and walked back to his room — across the living room, down the tunnel hallway, and finally to his abode. His mother trailed him closely.
She simply pointed at his bed, and he returned promptly, laying down again next to his sister, who had missed on everything and was now fortunately facing the other direction. The door latched, leaving him in the quiet nothingness.
The earliest morning light was spilling into his room now, even as his own light began to fade, down the path and around the corner — regressing back into the world of imagination, where all children go when they have nowhere else to be. Even with his body not tired, his mind was at ease. In minutes, he returned to the dreamscape of heroes and villains.
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