House of Blues

reality. But how to go about that? The
thought of it made his stomach flop. Writing was important, it was
necessary, it was his obsession.
    It scared him to death.
    When he really thought about it, writing was like a
vampire. It caressed you, it wrapped its treacherous arms around you,
and it sucked you dry.
    No, no, no, it isn't like that. A vampire would
suck your blood and cast you aside. Writing ensnares you; it keeps
you; it won't let you go.
    Like Sugar would if anyone would let her.
    But writing is the good mother.
    Right.
    So do it.
    An idea came to him, simply to do a writing exercise
rather than a finished, publishable product. just to let his mind go
wild and see what happened.
    He started writing what
appeared to be a children's story:
    * * *
    Once upon a time, there was a little boy named Bill.
Bill lived on a strange planet with some people he wasn't too sure
about, but it wasn't all that bad a life.
    Children were allowed to do anything they wanted,
especially climb as many trees as they liked, and keep lions as pets.
Or tigers, if they chose, but Bill preferred a nice lion because you
could get a good grip on its mane when you rode it.
    They ate nothing but fruit and spaghetti and
sometimes pizza, so no one had to cook very much and no animals had
to die. The spaghetti hung from certain trees that grew in a grove,
like Spanish moss hangs from certain trees here. Sometimes the people
asked the neighborhood giraffes to reach up and get it or, when it
grew low, they sent the children out on their lions for it.
    Sauce for the spaghetti came down from a mountain, in
a sort of waterfall, and the people caught it in barrels. That
happened once a week, and every week the sauce was
different—sometimes you got tomato, sometimes pesto, sometimes
Alfredo or primavera.
    Flying saucers made out of pizza dough blew through
now and then. The people caught them in nets they put in the tallest
trees and plants. You could put the sauce from the waterfall on the
saucers and make a very fine pizza if you didn't mind not having any
cheese. Which no one did because they never heard of it.
    It would have been a very good life if it hadn't been
for the Evil One.
    Bill found out about the Other Side when he was sent
out to pick spaghetti and couldn't reach it—someone had come along
and trimmed each strand an inch or two, maybe three, just enough so a
boy standing on a lion couldn't reach it. He was flabbergasted—so
flabbergasted he squeaked in amazement, causing his pet lion to bolt,
which caused Bill, in turn, to fall off him, onto the jungle floor.
The ground was usually soft with vegetation, so he wouldn't normally
have been hurt, but there was a hard root right under him, from the
spaghetti tree he'd been trying to pick. Bill hit his knee on the
root and knocked some of the skin off. He'd never in his life had an
injury. Such things were very rare on his planet and he didn't know
what to think.
    He was terrified—so terrified he set up a howl that
sent all the elders of the town flying to his aid.
    Then he was embarrassed—so embarrassed it made him
feel a way he'd never felt before—a nasty, red, jagged kind of way
that made his throat close and his cheeks hot.
    He learned later that he was angry—so angry he made
his hands into fists and started hitting people; and kicking people.
In turn, that made some of the elders angry and they hit him and
kicked him back.
    A buzzing began among them. He heard words he didn't
know. "Evil, evil. The Evil One. Evil One."
    Finally, one of the oldest women, the one they called
the Wise Woman, held him and patted his back and soothed him until he
felt better.
    When he got home, he told the people he lived with
what had happened to him, and they said the same words he had heard
in the spaghetti grove. "Evil. The Evil One," they said.
"She planned it that way," they said. "She cut the
spaghetti short so that no one could harvest it, and she is
devilishly clever. Do you see what she did? She made sure that
whoever tried to harvest the spaghetti would be standing right over a
root, so that he would fall down and knock the skin off his knee. She
must be punished."
    Bill didn't understand at all. "I don't see how
anyone could do that," he said. "There are thirty spaghetti
trees in the grove and every one of them had short spaghetti. How
could she know I would be under the one with the exposed root? And
how could she know my lion would bolt? And how could she know that if
it did, I