The Raging Elitist

Sometimes when you get everything that you want, the things that you have become boring, and rather than enjoy them, you’re always thinking about what to get next. Maybe it’s a new toy you want, or maybe a game, or maybe it’s an outfit or a costume; however, once you have it, it isn’t quite as you’d expected. Maybe there are things that your parents have gotten rid of, old toys that you’d stopped playing with, and you think that it would be wonderful to have them back again, forgetting how disappointing and boring you found them before they were thrown out. Sometimes, you open up your toy bin and search all the way to the bottom of it, throwing all the toys that are heaped up inside about the room so that they scatter and cover the floor, and then when you find whatever it was you were looking for, you play with it for just a minute before that feeling starts to creep in, and you toss the toy aside and begin the search anew. I bet it makes your parents angry. I bet they yell at you to pick up your things and put them away, and I bet you complain and that they sometimes threaten to throw all your toys away. It sounds mean, but I wonder, would it be so bad if they actually did?

Once there was a little boy like this, a boy who had lots of toys and who hated cleaning up. After Christmas when people asked him if he got everything he wanted, he had to say yes, but it didn’t feel like it was true. It felt disappointing, so much so that he asked his mother, “Why are my Christmas presents boring?” The boy’s name was Tom, and he was 6-years-old, and the one thing he knew better than anything in the world was that being 6 was hard. He had to go to school all day and learn reading and math and eat lunch there in a big crowded room that was full of noise and teachers walking around telling him to hurry up. At home his parents were always asking him to do chores like help with the dishes or the laundry or to pick up the toys from the floor with his little brother Randall. They would get mad at him when he rolled his eyes and said things like “I don’t want to do this,” or “awwwww, come one.” His parents were always bossing him around, he thought. They expected him to be big and to do big kid things, and he wanted to please them. He wanted to feel big, but the truth was that sometimes it seemed impossible. It seemed to him like he was doomed to be a little kid forever and that he would never be a grown up and get to do what he wanted. Yes, being 6 was difficult. This much he knew. All the baby toys in the house were too boring, school was boring and scary at the same time, his parents seemed to be always getting mad at him, and the grown up stuff he wanted to do seemed impossible.

One of the big kid things that Tom wanted to do was play basketball. Lots of the boys at his school talked about it. Some played it at recess. Some of them were pretty good. But it was hard. The ball seemed too big, and the goal seemed too high. When his mommy and daddy got him a new goal to practice on in the driveway, he was excited. Two men came to the house to set it up, and once it was ready, Tom was eager to practice and get better, but getting better was harder than he thought. Even when his daddy lowered the goal for him, it still seemed high up, and the ball hardly ever went through the hoop for him. When Randall, who was 4, came out and started practicing and getting better, it made Tom a little mad. Randall had a smaller ball, and he shot it underhand, “granny style” is what his dad called it. One day, Randall came out and started shooting at the same time as Tom. Every time he made a basket, he would yell out how many he’d made: “That’s four! . . . that’s five! . . . Tom, I have 6 now!” As his brother yelled and bragged about his shot-making, Tom wanted more and more to see his ball go in. He kept waiting for it to happen. He thought if he shot faster and faster, that eventually, the magic would happen, and he would start making them, but instead, he kept missing and missing by more and more, all the while his brother counting “that’s seven! . . . Eight!” until Tom started yelling.

“It doesn’t count, Randy!” he yelled. “We’re not playing for points!”

“Nine!” Randall yelled as another Granny shot swished through the hoop.

“Randyyyyyy!!!!!!!!!”

“Ten!”

Finally, Tom threw his ball against the fence as hard as he could, ran inside, and slammed the door. His daddy was in the kitchen helping his mommy make dinner, and Tom looked at him and squished up his nose and said “I’m never playing basketball again.” Then, he went to his room where he quickly became bored with all the stupid baby toys, which ended up scattered all about the floor.

Sitting around the dinner table a little later, Randall apologized. Tom’s daddy was saying a bunch of words about how to play and get better and how to act when you’re mad and how he wanted to help, and Randall said simply “Tom, we’re sorry, and we forgive you.” Tom knew that Randall was sincere. He meant what he was saying, but the fact that the apology was real didn’t make him feel any better. He was still mad, mad that his little baby brother had made more baskets than he had, mad that he had been so braggy about it, mad that it made him so mad, and mad that Randall said he forgave him! What did he need to be forgiven for? Randall was the one who was mean! It wasn’t fair that he had to sit there and listen to Randall act like he was the big one. Randall was basically a little baby still! He even asked for help wiping his butt sometimes! And his daddy was looking at Randall and nodding like Randall was the one being a big boy and acting right, but if Tom said anything about it, then his daddy would probably just get mad! It wasn’t fair! So, he sat there and looked at his plate of boring chicken and boring rice and boring broccoli and stirred it around with his fork and barely ate any of it. All he said was “Can I be done?”

That night Tom was scared about going to bed. He didn’t want to go in the dark scary hallway by himself to turn the light on. He didn’t want to go in the shower and be by himself behind the curtain and not be able to see what was on the other side. He didn’t want to go into his room and go into the dark closet and get out his pajamas and get dressed alone. And he really didn’t want his daddy to turn the light off and say goodnight and leave him lying under the covers, because to Tom, even though growing up and being able to do grown up things seemed impossible, all the bad kinds of magic still felt very real. He didn’t think that he would ever see a talking dog or a flying reindeer; he didn’t even think that he would ever be able to drive a car; but he was very worried that zombie monkeys would sneak into his room while he was sleeping and hit him with a stick and turn him into dust and that then he’d never see his mommy and daddy or his baby brother Randall again. It’s just another hard thing about being 6 that it seems like all the good kinds of magic fade and all the bad kinds stick around, so when Tom’s daddy turned out the light and said goodnight that night, Tom hid under his blankets and tried to make himself invisible to all the bad things that might try to get him in the night. After a few minutes, when nothing had come to get him, he fell asleep. Now, it might sound strange or terrifying to you if you’re like Tom and think that only bad magic is real, but I’m telling you that what happened next is as real as all the boring old toys and boring old chores and mean-headed brothers in the whole world. It might not seem so, but just as surely as little girls and boys grow up and become mommies and daddies, all kinds of magic do happen. So you must believe me when I tell you that as Tom lay there in his bed dreaming that night, an owl came in through his window, tied a rope around his bed, and carried it away. Where did the owl get the rope? How did the owl carry the heavy bed? How did it fit through the window? I don’t know. Just like I don’t know how or why little children grow into adults. I only know that it happens. Little children do grow up, and on this night, an owl did lift up Tom’s bed, carry it out the window, and fly it far far away to a place that doesn’t exist on any map, a place known to all who live there as “The Real World.”

When Tom woke up, it was morning time, and he had that exhilarating feeling of the early morning light softly falling onto his covers and of not being able to remember where he was, like on the first day of vacation. Sitting up and looking around, he realized that he didn’t just not remember where he was; he actually didn’t know where he was. It looked like the inside of an old barn. It was somewhat dark and hard to see, but the sunlight was shining through the gaps in the siding boards and through a window high up in a loft, illuminating all the little specks of dust floating in the air and making a little pool of light where his bed rested in the middle of a patch of dirt. Before Tom had time to feel afraid, there was a loud thud of boot against wood, and a big door flung open letting all the light in. Tom was aware of a rustle of animal noises coming from all around him and saw the silhouette of a broad figure standing in the doorway. It looked like a very wide person with two heads, and it was stomping towards him. Tom pulled the covers up to just below his eyes, watching the heads bob around like they had just popped out of a jack in the box. As the monster approached, it changed from a shadow into an overalls-wearing overgrown man boy, each of its two identical heads chewing on a piece of straw. As the creature reached the foot of the bed, it bent down and trained its two pairs of beady eyes on Tom.

“Well, hello, good morning there, how did you get out of your pen?” said the right side.

“What do you mean how did he get out of his pen?” said the left, and the two heads turned and looked at each other. “He’s not got one. Can’t you see he’s in bed?”

“Well, he’s in the barn, isn’t he? He shouldn’t be in a bed. He should be in one of the pens.”

“He’s in bed. He doesn’t belong here.”

“Well then why is he here?”

“He is here!”

“I didn’t ask if he’s here. I said why?!”

“Well he is!”

“I know he is!”

“Well, what will we do with him?”

“Well, let’s put him in one of the pens!”

“But he’s in bed.”

Tom had been expecting the monster to jump on top of him and eat him. He was surprised by the outbreak of this silly argument, and he was beginning to think that he was not on the breakfast menu after all. As such, Tom lowered his blanket and sat up to watch the proceedings. Now the heads started to call each other names: “butt-brain,” and “baby dumb dumb” and the sort, and they started to fight over a strange appendage coming out of the middle of their chest, an arm that started off as one but branched off into two separate hands, one for each head. It was like watching a sort of violent ping pong match, the right side hitting forehands, causing the left side to whack itself with its knuckles, the left side swinging backhand, causing the right side to smack itself with an open palm. Then, as the right side swung, the left side stepped back and instead of resisting, pulled hard at the shared arm. If you’ve ever played tug of war, you know what happens when one side lets go of the rope. This is like what happened now, only since the two sides remained attached, they both tumbled to the ground. Tom watched as this strange heap rolled around in the dirt, hitting and kicking and biting and shouting and eventually rolling right out the door through which it had come, yelling, “Mommy!” and “Daddy!” and “Help!”

“They’ll be gone for a while, now” came a voice off to Tom’s right. “Mommy and Daddy usually let them fight until they get really annoyed.” The voice sounded like that of a little boy about his age, and when Tom saw the face just a few feet away from him with its blond hair and blue eyes and mouth full of missing baby teeth, he thought that’s just what it was, a little boy, but then he noticed the odd illusion of the face kind of hovering in midair. And then he realized it wasn’t hovering. It was attached to a long neck coated with brown hair arching out over the top of a fence. Through the fence boards, Tom could see that the neck was attached to a horse body with a horse tail. This was of course very strange, but even stranger was that the horse body didn’t have horse legs and horse hooves; it had boy legs, and instead of feet at the bottom, the legs had hands. Tom did his best not to stare at the creature, but he could not stop his gaze from lingering just a second too long on the curious sight of the legs with hands for feet.

“What?” came the voice again.

“What? Nothing,” said Tom, looking up with wide eyes.

“Where did you come from? What are you?” the horse boy wanted to know.

Tom was finally beginning to recover from that feeling of waking up lost. Here in this strange place, it had lingered much longer than usual so that as the two heads had put on their idiotic display, he had remained stupefied by that almost pleasant feeling of falling that happens between dreaming and waking up. Now, with this horse boy that looked to be no older than he was staring at him and asking questions as if it were he, Tom, who was the strange one, he was fully awake, and the bit of fear that had been pulling at him to realize where he was or wasn’t was replaced by anger at the fact that he simply didn’t know.

“I’m Tom!” he said. “This is my bed! What are you doing here? What are you? What’s happening?”

“Mommy! Daddy! Help!” came the cries from outside the barn.

Then off to Tom’s left, another voice, this one younger, “This is the Real World, dummy. Don’t you know anything?”

Tom immediately thought of his younger brother Randall, and he felt an impulse to leap on top of the insulting offender and hit him and call him names; however, this urge was silenced by the sight of another strange creature, this one in a smaller pen than the horse boy. It was a little pig with a boy face, this one still with all its baby teeth. It did not have boy legs and hands. It had regular pig legs and hooves and a little curly tail, and whereas the horse boy had boy ears and a boy nose, this little pig boy had pig ears and a little pig snout. It smiled at him and trotted about in little circles, its head tilted up proudly as it said, “I’m the Scott Hog, and that’s the Cartter Horse. He doesn’t know anything either.”

“Mommy! Daddy! Help!” came the cries from outside, and then the sound of an angry woman’s voice shouting from up above, “Be quiet!”

“They’ll be coming down soon, now” said the Scott Hog.

“You don’t know anything. You’re just a stupid baby,” said the Cartter Horse.

“I know Mommy and Daddy love me,” said the Scott Hog. “I’m their favorite, and soon they’ll come down and feed me my slops and pet my pretty head, because I’m the baby, and you’re just a big ugly Cartter Horse.”

“Well, one day I’m going to move out of the barn and sleep inside the house,” said the Cartter Horse proudly.

“Nuh uh,” said the Scott Hog, “Mommy and Daddy won’t let you, cuz you’re too scared to sleep in your own room, and it’s annoying, and you’d just poop in the bed.”

At that the Cartter Horse picked up what looked like a piece of manure with his front, right foot-hand and hurled it at the Scott Hog. It splatted on his side, and the Scott Hog squealed and laughed and jumped around on his hooves and rolled in the dirt in his filthy pen. The Cartter Horse laughed and threw another piece of manure at him.

Watching this little pig boy run around and squeal in delight as he was pelted with manure, Tom was about to forget about feeling lost and angry; the hint of a smile was starting on one side of his mouth, and he let go a little secret chuckle under his breath, but just then a big chunk of Cartter Horse manure smacked him in the face, part of it sticking to his cheek, and the anger returned.

“Mommy! Daddy! Help!” came the cries outside the barn.

“What is that thing?” Tom asked the little boy animals, who were now both rolling on the ground gasping for air laughing at the sight of him angrily wiping Cartter Horse droppings from his face.

“Those are the twins,” said the Cartter Horse recovering himself and sniffing, awkwardly wiping away tears of laughter with his dirty foot-hand. “They’re dumb. They do the chores like clean up the barn and feed the little baby Scott Hog.”

“Mommy and Daddy feed me!” protested the Scott Hog.

“This isn’t the Real World,” said Tom. “I need to get back to the real Real World where my mommy and daddy are. How do I get out of here?”

“This is the Real World, dummy,” said the Cartter Horse. “One day I’m going to sleep in the house.”

“Nuh uh,” said the Scott Hog again.

“Yes huh, little boo boo baby,” said the Cartter Horse.

“Nuh uh, you’re a big ugly poop horse,” said the Scott Hog.

“Well, you’re a big fat baby, and mommy and daddy are gonna cut you up and feed you to Sister Dog,” said the Cartter Horse.

“Heyyyyyyy, I’m not fat!” yelled the Scott Hog, starting to cry.

“Sometimes, when he’s being a fat little pig with his face in the trough, Sister Dog sneaks in and steals some of his slops, and he doesn’t even know,” the Cartter Horse said to Tom now.

“Sister Dog sleeps in the house! Mommy and Daddy love her more than you!” said the Scott Hog.

“No they don’t!” yelled the Cartter Horse.

Now both the creature boys were whipped into an angry frenzy, the Scott Hog running around in circles squealing, and the Cartter Horse violently kicking his back leg hands against the side of the barn and making a sound almost like a donkey.

“Mommy! Daddy! Help!” screamed the twins.

A door slammed somewhere outside. Tom noticed for the first time that there was a house out there on the other side of a little lawn, and there was somebody coming out of it, or rather someone just had come out of it and was coming their way. He could see a large shadow on the stoop where the door had just slammed. In an instant it was gone.

“Weeeeee!!!! Weeeeeee!!!!!!” the Scott Hog squealed.

“Heeehaw! Heeehaw!”

“Heeeeellllllppppp!”

“Enough!” came the shadow’s booming voice, a roar that cut through all the creatures’ squabbling cries and shook the barn and then hung there in the air.

Tom took that for his cue. No sense waiting around to see what monstrous beast presided over this house. He shot up out of bed, went out the open door, and without taking even a split second to look back at where the voice had come from, he ran. He was certain that whatever had yelled back at the barn would have seen him and that it would be chasing him. He ran straight ahead as fast as he could for as long as he could. He ran through a field first. It was full of a plant that was about as tall as he was, stalks with little white balls growing from them; they were soft, cotton. On the other side of the field, he reached a pine forest. The trees were far apart enough so that the light shone through, and the earth was covered in tall grass. It seemed to never end. He ran and ran, always certain that if he stopped, the angry beast that had yelled at the barn, the monster who was “Daddy” to the twins and the barn animals would catch him. Finally, he collapsed in the middle of a little clearing, with no idea how to get back where he started, even more lost than he was before if that was possible. Even worse, he was alone now too, and hungry. He thought of his mommy smiling at him in his seat at the kitchen table at home, handing him a plate with a sandwich on it, bacon egg and cheese. Her face flashed clearly in his mind so that he could see it perfectly, and then it disappeared, and when he tried to see it again, he couldn’t, and he sat there on the forest floor, covered his eyes with his hands and cried. He’d forgotten about the beast with the scary voice now. Now, he just missed his mommy, and he sobbed loudly and terribly, so that he could have been heard for miles around if anyone had been there to hear. He cried so long and so hard that it scared him. He thought that he might never be able to stop, that all the crying would take his breath away and he would die, but instead of dying, he fell asleep.

When he woke up, the bright yellow midday light had given way to the bluish grey hue of late afternoon, and the sight of it made Tom want to close his eyes and stay asleep, but something wet was prodding and sniffing in his ear. Jumping to his feet, Tom backpedaled away from the wet sniffer before falling back down on his butt. A short-legged, saggy-skinned, brown and white coated dog with long ears that hung almost to the ground stood in front of him, staring droopily. “Found you,” it said.

“What do you want?” Tom said, wondering if the dog could see that he’d been crying.

“For you to feel better,” the dog said, approaching again and sniffing. “It smells like you’ve been crying,” and it licked him with its sticky, wet tongue right on the cheek where the Cartter Horse manure had stuck before.

“Yuck!” Tom said, feigning disgust, but he did not push the dog away. Instead, he put both his hands around the dogs head and stroked it, digging his fingers into its soft, furry coat and pulling it closer, all the while the dog sniffing and licking his face.

“You taste like Cartter Horse manure,” it said, and then Tom remembered he was lost. He remembered the twins and the Cartter Horse and the Scott Hog and all their terrible arguing and loud noise and the big shadow coming out of the house and its big, scary voice that shook the barn before he ran away. He was afraid again, and he buried his face in his hands and started crying. “It’s ok. I’ll lick it all off you. I like it,” the dog said.

“No!” Tom cried, standing up.

“No?” the dog said backing up cautiously, lowering its head in shame. “I’m sorry. You can keep the Cartter Horse manure. I didn’t know you liked it.”

“No! I’m lost! I don’t know where I am, and I want to go home!” Tom said.

“Oh,” said the dog, apparently considering this bit of information. “Well, you’re in the Real World. Everyone stays here on their way home.”

“Ugh! This isn’t the Real World!” Tom said, clenching his fists, his eyes looking upward at nothing in particular, as if they wanted to roll all the way back and look inside, but as quickly as Tom had lost his temper, his attention quickly snapped back to the dog. “Wait, are you Sister Dog? The one that steals the Scott Hog’s slops?” he asked.

The dog made a sad face and lowered its head again. “I’m always so hungry, and he never eats all his slops, and they’re so good,” it said.

“But, you don’t sound like a girl,” Tom said.

“Well, I’m a dog.”

“But you don’t sound like a girl dog!” Tom explained.

“Oh. What does a girl dog sound like?” asked Sister Dog.

Tom made a show of sighing and rolling his eyes. He was looking up at the sky now, thinking of how to explain to this creature the difference between a girl voice and a boy voice, forgetting to be scared or angry, forgetting for a moment that he was in the Real World, when suddenly he felt Sister Dog’s tongue on his face again. “Hey!” he yelled.

“Oh, sorry,” said the dog, backing off. “I have a hard time controlling myself sometimes when a smell takes hold. Anyway, you said you wanted to go home. I need to go for a walk, so maybe we can help each other out.”

Tom saw now that the dog was wearing a collar and dragging a leash. It was looking at him imploringly, eyes big, shifting around on its paws. “It’s almost dark,” Tom said.

“That’s ok,” said the dog. “I’m mostly blind anyway. It’s the smells I like.”

Tom again signaled his exasperation with the customary sigh, but secretly, he was very much enjoying this dog’s deference to his commands, and the approaching darkness had him feeling quite eager for companionship, so he bent down and picked the leash up out of the tall grass. As soon as he did, the dog started briskly off, its nose to the ground, pulling Tom further into the forest of pines as darkness set in and the green and brown colors became muted and finally everything looked like shadows in the dim moonlight. I wish I could say that Tom was perfectly nice and sweet to Sister Dog all through the night, but sadly that was not the case. The darkness and the night sounds all around scared Tom, and he wanted to know where they were going. For a while he asked lots of questions, “Where are we going? When will we be there? How much longer?” But Sister Dog’s nose stayed to the ground as if he were not speaking. “Hey! I’m talking to you! Why won’t you answer me?!” Tom demanded, jerking the leash and prompting a sad, questioning look from the dog. When still no answer came, Tom went into a screaming fit. He did this three or four times throughout the course of the night, but all the while, he dared not let go of the leash, lest he be left alone in the dark without the dog. Finally, they had walked all night. Tom’s legs felt like jelly, and his eyelids were like lead. He had given up asking questions and pitching screaming fits and was letting himself be led around by the dog at the other end of the leash, again starting to forget to be afraid, looking around at the pine trunks and noticing how each one’s bark pattern was just a bit different; they were all so nearly the same and yet no one was alike, and he thought how nice it would be to lie down in his bed and go to sleep, and just as he was about to close his eyes and fall down on the forest floor in the early dawn light, the dog stopped.

“Here it is,” it said, and Tom was jerked awake as if Sister Dog had given his collar a sharp tug. They were standing at the edge of the forest in front a huge hole in the earth. To the left and right it seemed to go on forever, and it was full of shiny plastic things of all different colors and sizes, some of them moving about and making all sorts of obnoxious noise that jumbled together to form a constant mechanized din. It was a massive pit of toys, some of which Tom recognized. On the other side of the pit, Tom could just make out his bed, a tiny speck separated from him by a sea of legos and dinosaurs and puzzle pieces and cars and trains and an infinite number of other castaways.

“How did they get here?” Tom asked.

“Where did you think they went?” the dog asked. “I don’t like them. You can’t chew them, and they hurt your paws to step on.”

“How do I get across?” Tom asked.

“I don’t know,” said the dog. “Crying won’t help though.” At that Sister Dog lifted his leg, peed on the toys closest the edge, turned and trotted back into the forest dragging his leash and calling over his shoulder “Thanks for the walk!”

Tom was about to cry out for him to stop and to chase after him, when a deep voice off to his left said, “Nice pajamas,” and then another said “I think you’re getting too big for them though.” Tom realized then for the first time in the Real World that he was wearing his blue pajamas with a robot and the words “powering down” on them. He looked in the direction of the voices and saw two men, maybe not quite men, but definitely not little boys, and they weren’t normal boys either. They had boy bodies, but they had horse bodies too. The horse bodies had horse legs and hooves and horse tails and shimmering brown coats, and the boy bodes came out of them where the horses’ necks should have been. They had human chests and arms and heads. One had straight pointy horns atop his head and the other had curly horns, and they were passing a basketball back and forth. One shot the ball up in the air, and Tom saw that there was a goal attached to a tree. The shot missed, and the other centaur ran and jumped, snatching the ball from the air and dunking it through the hoop. Then he stooped down, picked it up, and threw it to Tom, hitting him in the chest with it so that Tom couldn’t help but fold himself around it and catch it even through it hurt just a little. “Shoot, pajama boy,” said the centaur.

Tom looked up at the goal. It was far away and high. He thought of all the airballs he shot at home in the driveway. He remembered his little brother’s voice counting baskets. He wanted to heave the ball through the air and watch it make a magnificent arc and swish through the hoop, to show these creatures how big he was, that he was more than just scared and lost, but ultimately all he did was throw the ball back at the centaur’s feet and yell, “I’m not a pajama boy!”

The centaurs looked at each other and laughed. “Oh yeah?” said one. “Well what are you?”

“Yeah,” said the other, who picked up the ball and started dribbling, turning his back to Tom and taking a shot that bounced around the rim and fell in. “You’re some kind of boy. What kind of boy are you?”

Tom felt his heart beating fast. It was like he was glued to the ground, unable to move, a thousand clever things to say swirling all around him in an invisible blur. If just one of those clever things would reveal itself, then these centaurs would see that Tom wasn’t just a little pajama boy! He was important! But Tom’s heart beat faster, and the blur only got blurrier until finally Tom stood with clenched fists and eyes squinted shut and heard himself yell pathetically: “I’m a big boy!”

The centaurs were laughing again. “Oh,” said pointy horns, “A big boy, huh? But you’re so small?”

“Yeah,” said curly horns. “I guess you’re a little big boy. Or are you a big little boy?”

No,” said pointy horns. “I’m sure he’s a little big boy. Come on, little big boy, you can play with us.”

Tom, despite his best effort, had started to cry again, and for a second he saw himself sitting at the dinner table as his daddy fumbled over a bunch of words, and his brother apologized and forgave him at the same time. “But I’m not any good,” he said staring at the ground.

“Right, neither am I,” said the other centaur, hoisting up a shot that swished through the hoop. “Come on, pajama boy.”

Tom noticed a hint of something in the centaur’s voice, something at once patient and impatient. It was as if the centaur knew what was in Tom’s head, as if it knew that Tom wanted to play, as if it knew that Tom actually was big and that this babyish display that he was making was just that, a display. Tom winced at the sound of it, an apparent insult, but also an invitation. He sniffed and looked up wiping his tears, and the centaurs’ faces were looking at him expectantly. “Ok,” he said.

Tom quickly found that the centaurs didn’t keep score, and they didn’t take turns, not exactly anyway. One of them stood further from the basket and took shot after shot while the other caught the ball as it either came off the rim or went through the hoop. They called that centaur the rebounder. Sometimes, the rebounder would take one of the missed shots and dunk it through before it passed the ball back out to the shooter. After a while, the rebounder would dribble the ball out, and the two would switch places. Sometimes they would pass the ball to Tom. Sometimes, he would shoot. Other times, he would pass it to the other centaur. All the time, they talked, but not about basketball. They talked about all sorts of things, what they had for breakfast (it was oats), what they learned in centaur school (they were studying horse languages), what they wanted to do over the weekend (go looking for girl centaurs), but mostly they told stories: “Remember when the Cartter Horse came to play, and he kept falling because he couldn’t hold the ball in his front hands and stand up on his back hands?” one said. “Yeah, he cried and got manure all over our court,” said the other. “Hey, he got manure on me too!” said Tom, and they all laughed.

They must have played for hours, longer than Tom had ever played before, but it didn’t seem like a long time. It didn’t really seem like a short time either, though. It seemed like forever and no time at all while they played. Tom made more shots than he ever had, but he didn’t count them. Finally, each of them made one last shot, and it was time to stop. “I need to go home,” Tom said, almost as if he was reminding himself, and then he remembered the pit of toys. This whole time he’d been playing with the centaurs, he’d been so focused on the game that he forgot about the toys, and now he turned to look and was surprised to see that they were all gone, and in their stead was a great canyon with a river at the bottom. The sight was beautiful and also dizzying, and he could still just make out his bed on the other side.

“What happened to all the toys?” he asked.

“Toys?” said pointy horns. “I don’t know. I never noticed any. Peg can take you across, though if you need a lift.”

Just as Tom was about to ask, “Who’s Peg?” a great, white horse came clomping out of the forest. It was a huge beast, and Tom couldn’t stop himself taking a step back as it approached and stopped just a foot or two from him, snorting through its great, black nostrils. Just like all the creatures Tom had met in the Real World, Peg had its own peculiar features, namely it had the body of a car where its horse body should have been. It had a horse neck, and horse legs and a horse butt and tail, just a car body. Tom, who was beginning to learn to expect these sorts of things merely shook his head and said quietly to himself, “Of course.”

“Have you ever driven before?” asked the centaur.

“Uh, no,” Tom said.

“Oh, well, you’ll be fine. Just hold on to the steering wheel, and watch where you’re going. Peg’ll do all the work.”

Before Tom even had a chance to think he found himself inside the horse car sitting in the driver’s seat. The centaurs were bending down to look in either window. “Nice meeting you,” they said. “Have a nice trip,” and then he was off. Tom gripped the steering wheel hard at first, and his eyes grew wide, and he was jostled all about as Peg got up to speed. Just as he was trying to convince himself that he could get used to the rough ride and that it would only last a short while, he saw that they were heading straight for a cliff, the canyon that had once been full of toys. The drop to the river below must have been a thousand feet or more. Tom’s heart raced, and he gripped the wheel with all his strength, and braced. Was this the end? As Peg headed over the edge, Tom shut his eyes and expected his stomach to rise up into his throat, but just then, as was so often the case in the Real World, something odd happened. Tom’s stomach didn’t flip; he didn’t feel himself falling; the jostling stopped. Slowly, still afraid to look, Tom opened his eyes. He looked out the window and saw blue sky all around. He was flying, or rather Peg was flying. As he realized what was happening, he looked down below the horse car and saw the river snaking through the canyon floor, and he took his hands off the wheel. Then the drop started. Before he could fully panic, though, Tom grabbed the wheel again, and he and Peg resumed their floating state. That was really more what it was like, he thought, floating instead of flying. Somehow, it didn’t seem possible. It was like something he was doing without doing anything, like the only way for it to continue was for him to focus on doing nothing, like if he started trying to fly, then he and Peg would fall, so he took the centaur’s advice, held on to the wheel and simply looked where he was going, concentrating all his energy on not concentrating. Just like the centaur had promised, Peg did all the work.

After a while Tom got comfortable with this concentrating on not concentrating. He stopped being afraid that he and Peg were going to tumble out of the sky and fall to their deaths. As he looked to the other side of the canyon, he felt like he had everything under control and like maybe it would be nice to just stay right where he was suspended in midair and not worry about getting to the other side. That’s when something else unexpected caught his eye. It was the river, only it wasn’t a thin snake far below; it was rising. Looking across to the other side of the canyon, Tom could see the blue water coming up the side. He looked down, and instead of a thousand feet of air between him and the river, the water was 10 feet below Peg’s undercarriage, rising fast. Suddenly, concentrating on not concentrating was difficult again, very difficult, and Tom fought with all his power not to think of the horse car sinking out of the sky and into the river. “Come on, Peg,” he said under his breath, gripping the wheel and keeping his eyes trained on the other side of the canyon, the water rising almost to the top of the canyon wall. The nearer he got, the more certain it seemed that the water would spill over before he got there. His bed was getting nearer and nearer, and it was all Tom could do not to yell out in fear and excitement. He wanted so badly to get there, and then his feet were getting wet. The water was spilling inside of Peg’s car body. Just about the time Tom was starting to think that the inside of this car was going to be his watery grave, they reached the other side. Tom opened the door and waded out, the water almost to his knees and rushing past. He walked halfway to the bed. The water was about to reach the bottom of the mattress, and when it did, it would surely carry it away. Tom stopped and looked back at Peg, who stared back at him and stomped his front hoof as if to urge him forward. It didn’t make any sense, Tom realized. Why was this happening? Why was he here? Again, Peg stomped his hoof and snorted at Tom, and then he turned and started galloping back towards the edge of the canyon, splashing through the rising water before finally taking off into the air and flying away. Tom turned back to his bed, rushed over to it, and climbed in just before the water picked it up and carried it off.

Now Tom’s bed was a raft, floating down a roaring river, bouncing up and down on the little whitecaps with Tom on all fours in the middle of the mattress. Tom started to realize that the bed wasn’t going to sink. Maybe this was supposed to happen. Maybe this bed raft was going to take him where he needed to go, back home, but it was getting dark, fast, and then there was the sound of something far off, a dull roar, getting louder, and louder. Soon Tom was surrounded by perfect blackness, unable to see even his own hand in front of his face, and his ears were full of the unmistakable sound of an approaching waterfall. He wanted to cry out for help. He wanted his mommy and daddy. He wished that he was with his brother, and then he felt a wet snout in his hear and a wide tongue drag across his face. “Sister Dog?!” he shouted in disbelief.

“Sorry,” came the dog’s voice through the darkness. “You still have Cartter Horse manure on your face.”

“How did you get here? What is happening? Are we going to die? I’m scared!”

“Oh,” said Sister Dog. “Oh, well, I don’t know.”

Tom was crying again now. “I’m so scared!” he yelled grabbing the dog and pulling it close.

“Yes,” said Sister Dog. “I understand. I get scared too. It’s normal.” And just like that, Tom felt the bottom drop out. They’d gone over the falls, and he was hurtling through space, tumbling head over heels through the darkness. He was too terrified even to cry, and he heard the dog’s voice again. “It’s ok,” it said. “It’s normal.”

Suddenly, Tom landed with a thud and bounced. The light was shining through his open window. He was sitting on the floor in his bedroom, his blanket pulled down so that it was halfway on the bed and the rest of it wrapped around Tom. His toys were scattered about on the floor around him. The door opened, and his daddy walked in. “Tom?” he said, the hint of a smile in his eyes, “did you fall out of bed? Why is your window open? It’s cold outside. Are you ok?”

Tom looked around. Of all the strange things that had happened, somehow this seemed the strangest of all, impossible even, that he could have ended up here exactly where he meant to be all along. Had he dreamed the whole thing? Was he dreaming right now? He looked at his father smiling at him, and all he could say was “Daddy, is this the Real World?”

Tom’s father laughed a quiet laugh, and said, “Yes, Tom, it’s the Real World.”

“But is it the real Real World?” Tom asked.

Tom’s father was still smiling. It was a smile that made Tom take a deep breath and feel his heart slow down. “Yes, Tom,” he said again. “This is the Real World. Good morning as they say.”

“Good morning! Good morning!” Tom said, as he stood up and started dancing and jumping about. “It’s the real Real World! I’m home!” he said shutting his eyes, and after a momentous leap of joy, his heel came down hard on a pointy lego brick, prompting him to hop around on one foot for a moment before sitting back down on his bottom and inspecting the booboo spot.

“Ouch,” said his daddy. “Tom, why don’t you pick up these toys so that nobody gets hurt in here. Your mommy is in the kitchen making pancakes for you and your brother.”

“Ok!” said Tom, and he ran to the kitchen and came back with a trash bag and stuffed his toys inside. “Daddy, I don’t need all these toys,” was all he said. At breakfast, Tom wolfed down his pancakes covered in syrup – his mommy had put chocolate chips in them – and when he was done, he ran back to his room, the floor of which was now clear of any and all toys and got dressed. It was Saturday. He remembered that. Not even a trip to the Real World could make him forget that. His room was cleaned, he was home, and he had all day to play. It felt better than flying in a horse car. He didn’t have to concentrate on not concentrating. He just was. He tied his own shoes, grabbed his basketball, and ran to his brother’s room next door. “Come on, pajama boy,” he said. “Let’s go play.”