The discarded star

Eli sighed and kicked the can at his feet. The sound tinkered down the trash mountain and echoed through the rubbish tip. Collecting was boring. He glanced at his father’s hunched frame making it’s way down the refuse, his trench coat pulled from the weight of a thousand nick-nacks and bits-and-bobs, but still, he stooped to pick another treasure. He turned the item over in his hands then discarded it in favour for another. He did the same thing over and over again, he had for the last two endless hours.

Perhaps if Eli could sneak off down the other side of the mountain, he’d find something more this side of entertaining. A dragon to fight or perhaps a princess to save. In his haste to rescue the damsel, he tripped and slid down the bumpy slope, fingers scraping painfully on exposed sharp things. He rolled to the bottom with a thud, dirt flicking in his eyes and stink wafting everywhere. He squinted. There was something to his right.

A twinkle of light in the darkness.

A discarded star in the waste.

He dug the tattered blue rectangle out of the rubble and wiped his grimy hand swiftly over the cover. A cloud of dust entered the already murky air and he coughed. He opened the rectangle, and found many leaflets of paper with strange black squiggles on them. His breath caught in his throat.

‘What are these black squiggles father?’ He called out, voice trembling with excitement.

‘Words son, they are called words.’ The treasure hunt brought Eli’s father back to his side.

‘The things we say every day? But why are there so many of them on in one place?’

‘Put the right bunch of words together, and they can tell a story. Write them down and the story becomes a book. To be read over and over again. For experience, you see. For feelings. Put a bunch of books together, and you have a library.’ He looked inwards for a moment, clear blue eyes focusing on some distant memory in his mind. He shook his head, then clicked his tongue at Eli and continued in a gruff voice. ‘Now, we have no patience for the written word. Reading takes too long. There is work to do.’

Eli rubbed his thumb slowly over the silver embossed ‘words’.
He rotated the object in his hands.
A ‘book’.

An ache spread from his chest and down to his arms. He longed to understand the squiggles so they could make him feel more than this ache. He longed to experience the story in the book so he could go somewhere other than this tip. He must have stared too long, or huffed too loudly because his father stopped his searching and leaned over.

‘Show me that book. Now, let me see’ He pulls out a pair of bent, wired frames and balanced them on his equally bent nose, blinking to focus through the chipped lens. ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.’ He lowers the book with heavy arms and looks down his nose at Eli. ‘See son? Nothing but fancies, and fancies will give you a good dream, but they won’t pay the bills.’

Eli stopped listening to his father after the word ‘adventure’. He was taken. The little blue rectangle with its battered silvered trim, and torn yellowed pages called to him as though a siren to a sailor. He relieved his father of the book, lifted it to his nose and breathed in deeply. It smelled mildly of mould, but underneath that something much more exciting. Opportunity.

His eyes lit up. Yes. A book. He would like to read this book and then he would like to see this library.

‘Throw the book away, it has no value. Ahh.’ His father picked up a thin, long, orange strand. ‘This copper wire on the other hand, this has value. We will sell it to the network and pay for your feelings if that is what you wish.’ He said, put the wire in his mouth and tasted it’s metal for reassurance. An emotion flickered over his face, too hard to decipher in the day’s dying light, then he turned to Eli, jaw set tight. ‘Come, there is work to do.’

Eli waited until his father’s back was turned, slipped the book into his inside jacket pocket and patted the comforting bulge. He followed his fathers hunkering shadow and wondered where this Wonderland was and what this Alice was like. Perhaps she fought pirates.