The important thing to know about Theodore is that he’s the Main Character, even if he doesn’t know it and even if the world really doesn’t seem to know it. He lives in Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth, etc. He is the central gear in the large constantly churning machine of the universe and if he breaks, if he’s removed or even if he just doesn’t really feel like turning anymore, the entire universe is going to come to a halt. You might not notice it. You might have a family and friends and the connections you have with those loved ones are still going to seem important. They’re still going to matter to you, but in the big grand scheme of things they aren’t going to matter much at all, especially if Theo isn’t involved. They are just side stories and if the Main Character cancels the whole show then who cares about the little B and C plots.
Theo has built a self-contained ecosystem in a terrarium in his bedroom. He stares into it every day when he gets home from school. He runs across the lawn of his parents’ two-story house in suburban Omaha and lets himself in the front door and carrrumphs up the stairs to his bedroom which looks out over a lovely backyard with a trampoline and a treehouse and a porch that his dad didn’t stain properly. He throws his backpack on his bed and runs over to his desk where the giant bottle-shaped glass terrarium sits, the top of which is foggy and clouded.
He watched YouTube videos on how to make the terrarium, a channel called PollysLilPlants which gave recommendations on the best container to use, the best soil, which tropical plants to buy, how many tropical plants to buy, how to make sure life develops, how to make sure that you get kind of a primordial soup going in the little tiny lake you’ve built in the middle of the terrarium, how to make sure that the teeny tiny fish-like creatures that evolve in the primordial soup eventually begin to explore the land, what tropical genetic lines to buy to make sure that there is a nice mix of carnivores and herbivores once land species evolve, how to avoid excessive mold. PollysLilPlants covered it all.
In the cafeteria at school, eating Valley View High School’s Vegetarian Pizza which tastes like rubber, and the Otis Spunkmeyer Chocolate Chip Cookie which just tastes, overall, gooey, he tells his best friend Charlie about the civilization that is developing on the edges of the lake within his terrarium.
“They’ve moved on from stick huts and are now experimenting with fire-hardened mud bricks,” Theo tells his friend who is licking chocolate from the grooves between his fingers. “It’s really impressive. Just last week they developed what I think is a writing system, but I don’t have enough samples yet to begin trying to translate.”
Charlie looks bored and Theo can tell he isn’t really listening. Charlie has pulled out his phone and is flicking through pornographic pictures while Theo talks.
“Cool,” his friend says. “I had something like that once as a kid. My mom got me a sea monkey kit and I dumped all these little eggs or dehydrated bodies or something into a big tank with a castle at the bottom. They all came to life and swam around like crazy for about a day and then all died and sank to the bottom. Apparently you can’t just use regular tap water, at least in Nebraska.”
"It’s not like that,” Theo says, growing frustrated. He stands up to throw away most of his pizza. “It’s not like that at all.”
Theo’s therapist Claudette asks him if he likes her.
Theo’s dentist also criticizes him but he feels that the proof is in the cavity-filled pudding there.
The terrarium is built to be entirely self-sustaining. The water evaporates and cools and rains and recycles itself all on its own although sometimes Theo will take the cork stopper off the top of the bottle and quickly spray some mist into the ecosystem he’s created. Other times he will let some of the moisture escape through the top if the little citizens of the world within the bottle seem to be a bit too wet for too much of the time. It’s really a careful balance. One time he and his family went on vacation and he left the terrarium too close to a window and the sun, reflected through two different layers of glass, basically acted like a laser beam cutting through the midst of the tiny rainforest.
When Theo returned he saw that the small villages that had been developing within the tank were decimated and there were now a hundred or so tiny little gravestones placed along the shores of the minuscule lake. The survivors in the villages were all wearing highly-reflective clothing covered in lots of little geodesic baubles which seemed to create a constant shadow surrounding the wearer. It was really a significant technological advance for the tiny civilization, although the end result was that all the small people walking around looked like misshapen disco balls. Theo felt awful about the whole situation.
At school there is a girl named Sophia that Theo is in love with. Theo is a decent artist and he draws her over and over, alone in his bedroom, from memory. Or rather, he draws her face from memory. Sometimes he draws her clothes from memory too but other times he draws her without clothes and that is purely imagination. He draws what he imagines she would look like naked and he masturbates to his own drawings and then feels disgusted with himself. He feels ashamed and tears up the drawings into tiny pieces to flush down the toilet with the tissue paper containing his semen, or he balls them up into wads and throws them away or sometimes he just turns to the next page in his notebook so that the image is covered with a new fresh sheet. Sometimes he peeks back at the drawings he left intact.
He writes poems about her too. He thinks his poems are actually really good and thinks that if Sophia were to read his poems that maybe she would view him as a romantic option, maybe she would view him as someone worth paying special attention to, and so he puts one on Facebook but of course changes the name in the poem from Sophia to Olivia so that no one could tell that it was about a real person, there wasn’t even an Olivia at his school.
Sophia reads the poem and leaves a comment on his Facebook post saying that the poem is actually really good and at school, in chemistry class, at a lab table which is like a regular table but very high off the ground and made of black laminate, she leans close to him, leans over with her elbow on the table and is almost falling off the silver metal stools they all have to sit on, and asks him, “So, who’s this Olivia?” And the way she says Olivia is almost taunting, really hitting the VEE and the YA. And the LIV for that matter. She wiggles her eyebrows at him and he looks down at her elbow which is wrinkled up on the tabletop. He thinks she has a really beautiful elbow. “Someone I met last summer,” he replies. “You wouldn’t know her. She lives in Lincoln.” Sophia moves back so that she is sitting up straight on her stool again and winks at him.
There is a tiny villager in the terrarium who has begun to stand at the edges of the lake and to stare up out of the bottle at Theo whenever he peers in at the progress of nature and culture within. This boy, a teenager, doesn’t wear the protective clothing like the other micro-villagers. Theo bought a giant magnifying glass from a scientific equipment supply website and periodically uses it to get a closer look at the goings on in the tank. One day after school, a few days into October, he looks down at this figure near the lake and the little guy looks up and Theo realizes with a shock that the villager looks just like him. The tiny boy’s hair is shaggier, and he is wearing clothing woven from the odd cross between sheep and turtles that evolved within the bottle and of course Theo is not wearing a turtle-sheep sweater he is wearing a Dri-Fit Nike shirt and Dungarees, but the features and hair color and even general proportions all seem dead on.
Theo stares down at the small person who looks just like him and the small person stares up at the large obscure eye in the sky above him and the other villagers go on about their day, herding turtle-sheep or swimming in the lake, or building new houses or sneaking off to have sex in odd corners of the rainforest (sometimes up against the side of the bottle, and when that happens Theo tries not to look but then sometimes he does look, he creeps closer and watches from the floor as the two tiny beings thrust and bounce and make strange faces and he thinks about Sophia, about sneaking out of school with her into the forested area just beyond the football field and in this imagining there is never the awkwardness of undressing or really particular details they are just naked suddenly and then fucking equally suddenly), or sewing new clothes or writing tiny books but never really looking up or wondering about the world beyond the bottle. The other villagers all think the boy who stares up at the sky is a bit off. They’ve seen his little paintings and find them quite odd. His mother died when the great sky beam tore through their community but his father survived mostly intact and thinks the son should be worrying about things that matter, like getting a good education and dating one of the other small villagers and hopefully one day starting a little family of his own.
They often walk together, father and son, down to the gravestone that marks where the charred ashes of the boy’s mother are buried in a wooden box carved from a stalk harvested from the bamboo forest that surrounds their village. When they visit the grave the father puts his one good arm around his son’s shoulder and the son is quiet because he’s worried that he hasn’t been able to cry yet about his mom’s horrible beam-related death. He wonders why he hasn’t been able to grieve like the other villagers, to cry and shout and mourn. He worries that he’s bottling it up. That it’s going to build and build and erupt into something horrible. He also worries that maybe it’s not there at all. That he just can’t grieve the same as the other villagers because something is missing or broken inside him. The father and the son go on their weekly walk to the grave site and each thinks about things they could do better and ways they could love each other better but neither talks about it they just go back to their little brick hut and eat bread made from bamboo seed grain.
The little villager wonders why no one else seems to care about the large eye in the sky that occasionally looks down on them.
Theo looks down at the little villager who is staring up at him and who, he is convinced, looks exactly like him. He sees the little villager bend down and pick up a stone and chuck it as hard as he can at the spot in the sky where Theo is staring through the magnifying glass into the terrarium. Theo jerks back and then feels foolish. There is no tink or clink of the stone hitting the side of the glass. The stone never even makes it close, it only really goes a few millimeters into the air, which is still a relatively impressive throw by the villager all things considered. When Theo peers back into the terrarium there are tiny ripples in the lake near where the tiny boy stands, circles emanating out from where the stone fell into the water with a small, noiseless plop.
Theo also has a pet tree frog. He doesn't think about the tree frog as often as he thinks about his terrarium and often goes several days without feeding it. The tree frog doesn't mind that sometimes Theo forgets to feed it. Whenever it gets hungry it unlocks the cage and sits on Theo’s head while he sleeps. The tree frog will drink Theo’s brain fluids through his ears and then go back to its cage. The next morning, after this happens, Theo just assumes he slept poorly or had too much caffeine the day before.
When Theo bought the tree frog he asked the pet store owner what the frog’s name was and the owner said Abernathy. Theo is always surprised to find Abernathy alive when he drops larvae and pupae into its cage. He’ll often feel bad and apologize to Abernathy and promise that next time he’ll bring crickets or a moth or something fat and gross and juicy but Abernathy just sits and nudges the larvae with its suckered foot and tries to make it clear that it really doesn’t mind. Theo shouldn’t blame himself, Abernathy thinks, he has a lot going on.
Valley View High School is like most high schools in Midwest Suburbia in that their approach to dances is highly influenced by television and pop culture generally. They hold a Homecoming dance the Saturday after the big football game against their rival high school and the dance often has themes like Disco Daydream or Night Among the Stars or Roman Romance. Alliteration is often preferred in dance themes though not required. The students all feel that they have to pull off elaborate stunts in order to ask someone to the dance and every year the Valley View school administration wonders if they need to ask the students to maybe scale back, tone it down. Mostly when students ask each other it involves elaborate music performances in the hallway or signs put up all over Mission Ave which leads to the school or baked goods arranged into letters. But last year a student built a ramp on the school football field during the night and tried to flip a four-wheeler off of it while carrying a roman candle.
The plan was that, as the four-wheeler tumbled through the air, the student astride the ATV would aim the roman candle at the field where he had used gasoline to spell out the letters “Jane HC?” He had originally planned to write a longer message with a more thorough explanation of what he was asking Jane but found it actually pretty difficult to write with gasoline.
So the morning comes and the students all began to gather around the field because they’d seen the ramp and they’d seen this guy wearing a ridiculous outfit and finally Jane arrived and the guy pointed at her and pumped his fist in the air and started revving the engine and the crowd cheered and Jane blushed but felt excited, she felt chosen and special and felt something in her stomach jiggle a bit. Later she would say she felt concerned, of course, she’ll say that she yelled for him to stop, but that’s a lie. Every rev of the engine made her more and more excited. She wanted the boy to jump for her.
This guy did a donut on his four-wheeler in the end zone and then lit a roman candle he was holding in his hand. The wick began to spark and burn and he took off at full speed for the ramp he built, roman candle outstretched like a lance. The crowd went nuts and started chanting his name. He hit the base of the ramp and he felt like this was the moment where his life was going to really begin. He was going to launch off the ramp and into glory and from there life would be gravy. He’ll take Jane to Homecoming, they’ll graduate and go to the same college, they’ll be in love but maybe will break up for a year or two in order to gain more life experience and make sure that they were really meant for each other but of course it’s true love so they’ll be pulled back, inexorably, together and right after graduation he will propose in the middle of the quad at their college and Jane will say yes and they’ll have a huge wedding paid for by her father who owns a large agricultural chemical business and they’ll have three kids and a dog and live in a penthouse in Chicago and have a private jet. Sure he’ll have affairs, he’s rich, but he’ll never not love Jane. And they’ll hold lavish parties where they’ll tell the story of how they got together, how he flipped on an ATV for her and set a whole field on fire for her and how after he landed he rode right up to her and she hopped on the back of his four-wheeler and they drove off into the brilliant Nebraska heat, the two of them against the world.
He thought all of that when the wheels of the four-wheeler hit the ramp and began to ascend. But a millisecond later, as the back wheels also made it onto the ramp, the whole thing buckled. Some small synapse in his brain fired with the realization that he had meant to attach a support beam, a crucial component of the ramp according to the RalphsRamps YouTube instructional video he had watched, but he had forgotten to do so after the gasoline writing proved to be such an arduous task. So as the entire crowd of students from Valley View High watched, the ramp collapsed and the four-wheeler did indeed go tumbling but not in the air, just on the ground, crushing the boy riding it twice as it completed a full seven hundred and twenty degrees of flipping. There were screams and gasps from the crowd and then silence. The boy was just lying there in the middle of the field near the shattered ramp and then there was a small pop as the roman candle went off and the turf around him erupted into flame.
Jane tried to see if she could tell what was written while the boy who loved her writhed and people rushed to try to drag him out of the fire although no one wanted to actually go in the fire to rescue him so they just sort of stood around on the edges. Jane tried to make out letters in the flames but unfortunately for Jane and the boy the gasoline had spread to all of the turf in the area, merging into a puddle instead of any discernible shape. The whole field smelled like burning rubber and gas and plastic and barbecue.
That put a real damper on the festivities that year. There is now a memorial out by the football field and the school administration is hoping that the memory and the statue of the boy will serve as warning enough to the students not to try anything crazy and keep things in the realm of the reasonable vis a vis asking each other to a school dance. They hope they won’t have to be the party poopers in that regard.
And now Jane is in her first year of college but since she was elected homecoming queen last year (the student population agreed it was only fair after the tragedy) she has to come back to crown the new winner at a halftime ceremony during the football game. Hours before the game starts, she will walk to the middle of the field, a big patch with fresh turf a slightly different color than the rest. She will lie down in the center, lie right on the spot where a message should have been written, and she will think of her future, wide open, arcing ahead of her, bright and unending.
This year the Homecoming Dance theme is Palm Tree Paradise and much of the marketing around it is beach-themed and therefore many of the asks this year involve sand. One student turned the entire band room into a beach, sneaking in during the night and filling it with GardenBright All Purpose Sand. It was clear from the water running down the hallway he had also attempted to create a small pool of some sort but things had clearly gone awry. Theo walks towards his chemistry class and tries to avoid the rivulets running through the hallway. His friend Charlie runs up and says he heard that some of the seniors are going to just wear swimming suits to Homecoming since it’s “on theme” and he asks Theo to bet whether or not the administrators will let them in. Despite not yet asking Sophia to the dance Theo has spent much of the week imagining dancing with Sophia at said dance, and kissing Sophia after the dance, and admitting to Sophia that he hadn’t done more than kiss anyone before and then admit that actually he hadn’t kissed anyone either and maybe she could give him some pointers, and now he imagines dancing with Sophia while she wears a bikini although in his imagining he is still in a full suit. Theo doesn’t love the way he looks in a swimsuit. He thinks his middle is too pudgy, his chest concave. But he has seen Sophia in a bikini before, last summer, at Charlie’s house, and he just transplants that memory into his daydream, there in the hallway. His penis gets a bit hard and he shoves his hand into his pocket to try to tuck it between his boxers and his stomach so that it won’t be obvious that he has a boner. He can tell that Charlie notices and waits for his friend to point at him and say something dumb but Charlie blessedly stays silent.
The issue doesn’t go away once he makes it to chemistry, and as he sits on the stool next to Sophia he constantly checks to make sure that his shirt is bunching in a way that obscures any protrusions around his crotch. He wonders if it’s possible that the issue will never go away, that he’ll just be hard forever. He heard that happened to someone’s cousin at another school, the guy took too many Viagra and now he has a boner forever according to rumor. Theo is pretty sure that won’t happen but he keeps thinking about Sophia and is sitting next to Sophia and keeps sneaking looks at Sophia while the teacher lectures about covalent bonds and every time he looks at her a new daydream forces its way to the front of his mind. He shakes his head and tries to focus in on what the teacher is saying, how chlorine bonds with chlorine by sharing electrons, each atom sharing their surplus to form outer shells, shutting out the dangers of the microscopic world by bonding together. He draws out the chemical diagrams that cover the whiteboard, a bunch of lines in various directions and patterns connecting to letters. He lets the lines extend out, away from the atoms and out towards the margins and then those spiral out into doodles of palm trees and bamboo stalks and a tiny figure in a tuxedo holding a spear and then he notices that everyone else is packing up and Sophia is staring at him.
“I said do you want to study together?” Sophia asks him, glancing at his drawings as she shoves her notebook in her backpack. “For the test.”
“Test?” Theo asks.
The tiny villager has begun to spend most of his days standing at the outer edges of the world, his face right up against the glass with a notebook and pencil in his hand. The little guy’s name is Garf, short for Garfaniel, which in the language of the terrarium dwellers means something like “calm within the storm.” His father has begun to worry more seriously about Garf, worrying about the hours he spends off alone in the forest. He worries that Garf won’t grow up to be a contributing member of their small society if he doesn’t learn a skill, if he doesn’t interact with the other villagers. There are rumors of a stronger, more advanced village developing on the other side of the lake, although they have yet to see any proof. Several villagers went out on a scouting trip a week or two back but never returned. Of course there are greater dangers in the forest than people from other villages.
They had argued, father and son, a week or so before. An argument without resolution. Garf has become convinced that the image in the sky, the giant shape outside the bottle, is more than fluctuations of color and light but is a force with will, a malevolent being. There have been others like Garf before, his father told him, and yet despite all of their worries, the world goes on unchanging. Generations live and die, new creatures emerge from the lake. Water falls and fogs up the sky and falls again. There is no point in wondering what the shapes beyond the world mean, because how will worrying about those shapes keep the turtle-sheep fed, how will staring at the sky keep the bamboo forest healthy, why choose to dwell on a fantasy when reality is such a precious thing.
“But the world does change,” Garf yelled. And he didn’t need to say more. The absence was felt between them, around them. They merely needed to look out the window to see the line of stones a short walk from their hut.
“These things happen,” his father said, “no matter what we do we can’t stop them from happening. But there is still so much, here in this little village. There is so much.”
Garf had stormed out, had run off and taken a boat out on the water and paddled and paddled until he was in the center of the lake and then dove into the dark still water and pushed with all his might against the pressure trying to drag him to the surface. He swam down and down and saw tentacled creatures moving around him, uncaring.
When he paddled back to his village, the house was dark. His father was out with the other villagers, celebrating a birthday or dancing to the music of small bamboo reed instruments or maybe talking with the baker, who he’s been growing close with. Garf had packed his bag for the first time that night and headed out into the forest.
He returns home to restock, occasionally, but he’s been able to forage moss and tubers from the forest around him with enough nutrients to sustain him, and the bamboo often collects water within its stalk that he can tap and drink. Most of his time is spent staring out into the world beyond his world, and the longer he looks, the more he is able to see, to interpret, to understand.
Though everything beyond the world he lives in is blurry and distorted, he has noticed that there is a pattern to when and how the shape outside moves. He begins to see that the light of the sun is controlled by the figure outside. He begins to track these patterns although sometimes he gets distracted by the smell of the forest, by the damp softness of the soil he sits in. He feels his hair sticking to his forehead with sweat. He hears birdsong and the prowling of larger beasts and feels the vibration of large grubs moving in the dirt beneath him. He stops thinking of the large figure beyond the world. He stops thinking of anything but the life around him and him within it.
Theo can tell that the small villager is watching him. He noticed the small figure at the edge of the bottle while doing homework and now every time he looks over, the small teenager is there, just staring out of the bottle.
One night, after he’s shut off the lights, he crawls over to the terrarium and tries to get a closer look, but it’s too dark to see anything among the plant life. When he stands up though, he can see the lights of very small fires around the lake and within the huts. From his vantage point it looks like starlight, small and distant, a constellation of community. For the first time he feels left out of his own creation. As he falls asleep he wonders why the pace of change within the terrarium is slowing down. He makes a mental note to check out PollysLilPlants’ channel to see if she has any tips.
Theo makes a plan with Sophia to study at his house two days before the chemistry exam and four days before Homecoming, a night when he knows his parents will be gone. Theo is aware that no one has asked Sophia to the dance yet and he makes a secondary, solitary plan to use this opportunity to ask her himself. He orders everything he needs for a new terrarium:
He puts it all on his parent's credit card and hopes they won't notice.
He stays up working on it the whole night before Sophia comes to his house, crafting an ocean and a small island in the center covered in palm plants. He dumps packets of EternaGro into the water to help encourage the microbial life inside to ramp up its evolutionary cycles. On the whole, he finds that the second terrarium is far easier to construct than the first.
Outside of the world, what once appeared to be opaque and shapeless now has form. Garf squints and the longer he keeps his eyes open the clearer the image beyond becomes. He has his forehead pressed to the glass and can see the giant being working on another world, one smaller than his own. Who's to say his world wasn’t once that small? Perhaps it only grew to accommodate those within. He watches the being pour things into the new world and then sits back in a squat. He is sweating from the effort of concentrating.
An idea crystallizes in Garf’s mind, one that has been steadily emerging from the foggy recesses. He had suspected that the being beyond affected the world he lived in, but perhaps it was responsible for everything. For creation and destruction. A pressure begins to build in his head. He looks at the mammoth bamboo stalks around him, which reach all the way into the clouds, towards the top of the world.
Theo sits on his bed for an entire hour before Sophia arrives, doing nothing. The terrarium he has made for her is in a box at the foot of his bed, wrapped poorly in wrapping paper left over from last Christmas. He is on edge, anxious, so much so that when the doorbell rings he falls in his haste to spring for the door. He slips on his carpet and falls down the short flight of stairs to the landing below but he doesn’t care. His adrenaline has spiked, bruises mean nothing. Pain means nothing. He is alive.
Sophia is standing there on the porch with her backpack over one shoulder and Theo stammers a bit inviting her in. He asks if she wants anything, coffee, soda? and she says coffee would be great. He feels glad to have a task, something to do before he asks her to the dance. He points the way to his bedroom and goes to the kitchen to start a pot. “How do you like it,” he calls up the stairs to Sophia, feeling suddenly adult, feeling like this question is something adults ask each other. “With cream if you have any,” she calls down. “And sugar.”
Abernathy the tree frog watches as a girl walks into Theo’s room. The frantic preparations and hurried cleaning Theo had done earlier that day make more sense to Abernathy now. He lets out a small ribbit as the girl walks over to his cage, as she peers at him where he sits on the fake tree Theo had bought for him. The girl smiles and moves on to the terrarium, squinting down into the tank trying to see what’s inside.
Abernathy watches as she walks over to Theo’s desk where a notebook sits. She opens it up an begins flipping through the pages. The tree frog watches as she stops on one page. He sees her face grow dark, concerned. He sees her bend down, close to the page, so close that her eyes are mere inches from whatever is drawn there.
One cup in each hand, he walks carefully up the stairs to make sure he doesn’t spill a drop. He tries to think of something clever to say, some pun on cream or cafe maybe, but by the time he reaches his room all he manages to get out is a very midwestern “alrighty then.”
He sets the coffee down on his bedside table but Sophia doesn’t move from where she stands at his desk. Theo sees what she is looking at and feels his entire body go ice cold. Sweat pours from the glands in his armpits.
Sophia asks him. She holds up a drawing. Theo says nothing.
She turns the notebook back towards her. For a moment Theo has a flicker of hope that she is impressed, that she is flattered, frankly, by the proportions on the naked body he has chosen to give the drawing of her.
She pulls out her phone and takes a picture of the page and then grabs her backpack and walks to the bedroom door.
Theo lunges for the present on his bed. He tears off the wrapping paper and pulls open the box. He lifts the small terrarium out. On the small beach within, the word “Homecoming?” is spelled out with seashells. He turns around and lifts the terrarium like an offering towards the vacant space where Sophia had stood moments before. He hears the front door slam.
Sweating from exertion and the humidity, here at the top of the bottle, Garf swings his axe again and again at the soft wood circle he has found which marks the ceiling of his existence. He has been at it for hours, his clothes soaked through, his eyes stinging. He has seen the shapes outside, two of them, two distinct beings. He has heard the vibrations, stronger up here at the top of the world, of them speaking with each other. He has a singular focus, break through to the world beyond, to meet this giant being face to face. The being he is so certain is the cause of everything. To find out. To find out what?
Garf pauses. He sets the axe down and then he sits down. He feels foolish. The plan had seemed so clear when he began climbing. But now it’s formless, shapeless. What is he expecting to happen. From within him, somewhere near his gut, a mass begins to writhe. It pushes up into his chest, into his throat so that he chokes and coughs. It is dark and heavy and fills him entirely. He begins to cry, there at the top of everything he has ever known. Even from here amongst the clouds he can see the dark scar of burned forest and homes that marks the moment his life went from one thing to another. From when he was defined as son, as villager, as nothing more than a blip in a long path of blips, to now. What is he now. He picks up his axe again and with a yell strikes the side of the world, swinging as hard as he can against the hard, clear surface. There is a thunderous crash as his axe connects, reverberating and echoing throughout the entire world so that his father, down below, wrapped in the baker’s arms, looks up and wonders what is going on in the heavens. He wonders if his son is safe.
Garf can see a crack begin to form where he struck the edge. His ears ring from the cacophony, his tears fall endless into the lake far below.
Theo sits and stares at the door to his room in silence. He wonders how that went so poorly. He sits with the new terrarium he had built for Sophia in between his legs. The two coffee cups still sit on his desk. It should have been perfect, he thinks. Why did she have to go poking around at private things, he thinks. He gets up and picks up the notebook from where Sophia chucked it. He opens it to the drawings she had seen. He doesn’t feel shame, just anger. He tears out the page. And then another. And then all of the pages full of drawings of Sophia, of him, of monsters and pirates and skulls and tears out the blank pages after that and then chucks the now empty shell of a notebook at his wall. He turns around and kicks the small terrarium, Sophia’s terrarium. The glass tank shatters and small plants and pebbles and chunks of dirt go flying. Saltwater pools on the floor, mixing with the sand into a slurry. Abernathy the tree frog hides in the corner of his cage.
Theo flings himself onto his bed and screams into his pillow. He lays there and breathes deeply, counting to ten, trying to calm himself. His ears are ringing but it is otherwise silent not just in his room but in his whole house, possibly in all of Nebraska. And it’s at that moment he hears a small clink.
He sits up and looks around, unsure of where the sound came from. He does however, notice a small crack at the top of his original terrarium. Theo stands up and walks over to it, running his finger over the fishing-line thin crack. The top of the terrarium is cloudy from the thick fog that tends to form during the condensation phase of its self-maintenance cycle, but he thinks he can see some movement amongst the leaves at the top of the bottle. He frowns, the small birds that have evolved within the terrarium usually don’t fly that high. He decides to remove the cork stopper at the bottle’s top to allow some of the fog to evaporate out.
Garf sees the sky outside darken as the large shape moves closer. He sees the huge soft circle of wood begin to rise. He stands up on the huge bamboo leaf beneath him and waits.
Framed by the circle of the bottle’s neck, standing in the light now that the cork is gone, Theo can see the small villager. The villager is taking deep breaths. He seems to be quite wet.
“Hi,” Theo whispers. He gives a small wave. “I’m Theodore.”
Garf hears the being roar as its giant eyes meet Garf’s. The being roars again, a different noise this time. It lifts its giant hand and makes a signal in the sky. Garf feels fear deep within his bones and yet remains standing. Some pee trickles down his leg but otherwise he holds his ground.
He yells back at the giant being. He wants to know if he is right, if the being really is responsible for everything that’s gone wrong. He wants the giant being to fix things. To put things back. He wants it to explain itself, to give him a reason, not just for the giant sky beam but for all of it. For the beam but also for the times that small villager children were eaten by the beasts of the forest, or for earthquakes, for floods. For the silence that exists between his father and him. For creating something and not making it perfect, for allowing for chance and tragedy and change. He wants to know everything. He wants to know how to let out whatever large formless thing is growing within him.
When he’s done yelling, when he still has more to say but his voice has grown so hoarse that he can’t get anything else out, the giant being in the sky leans down closer to him. It sticks a large pink appenage, connected to what Garf assumes are limbs, down into the bottle. It waits for Garf to climb on and lifts Garf out, out into the world beyond. The small villager clutches its axe tightly.
Theo stares at Garf, sitting there in the middle of his palm.
And then Theo laughs at himself. And on his palm the small villager looks terrified at this new sound, at whatever is coming out of Theo’s mouth and too late Theo sees the little guy raise what looks like a very small axe and bring it down onto the soft skin of Theo’s palm.
“Fuck!” Theo yells, all of the anger that had been flowing out of him racing back at the sight of the very, very small droplet of blood blooming out on his palm. He moves his hand back to the terrarium and dumps the villager back in, slamming the cork back onto the bottle and walking out of his room to go find a bandaid. Theo has bigger things to worry about than a dumb terrarium. He vows to throw it all out. Or sell it.
The other villagers hear Garf screaming before they see him. They see him when he is still just a speck, far off up in the sky, falling towards the surface of the lake. His father watches the speck fall, unsure of what he is seeing.
The villagers watch as Garfaniel falls from the heavens, plummeting. They watch as he plunges into the water with a thunderclap. Watch as ripples still and no one resurfaces. They watch in silence, staring at the unchanging surface of the pond, wondering who it was that had fallen, and how.