You’re snacking on In Different Color, a fairy tale.
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Time melted on…
Train track dust covered the formerly-ivory marble as it nestled in a field of tassels. Instead of a giant sea pearl, somehow mislaid far inland, the round train car took the aspect of a decaying hedgeapple. Packed mud painted the surface of the curved windows. The marble had landed such that its door, hidden behind the dirt varnish, faced skyward. It cracked slowly open with a squeal of tight metal and a parting of clumped earth, letting the light of day in on a dark and humid interior.
Passengers pushed through the door hatch; among them, Honeydew and Mr. Grey. They clawed at the metal brim, heaved themselves out, and stood swaying atop the muddy ball. The sun which looked on the scene shone with staggering brightness. The passengers’ first movements were unsure and dizzy. Mr. Grey and Honeydew managed only a few tottering footsteps before they slipped. One by one the passengers tumbled from the muddy marble.
Mr. Grey and Honeydew landed in the field of tall, soft chicktails; which are approximately like cattail plants, with the expected adjustments. When they stood, the fuzzy-tasseled grass came up to their waist. They swayed confusedly in the plants. Gradually the muscles in their legs woke. Their eyes blinked to accommodate the day, and its glare seemed far from harsh. Rather, the sun’s rays seemed to drop in syrupy folds of gold over the clearing. The air gathered heat from its creamy shine, and this air touched Mr. Grey and Honeydew’s skin like a sticky, pollenous stoveglow.
“Perhaps we got… got off track at a sharp rise.” Mr. Grey took a deep breath partway through the thought. Not from being winded; the openness of the air felt strange and unfamiliar in his smog-conditioned lungs.
“Of course we’d derail on my first trip,” said Honeydew. She chopped a sharp hand through the tops of a few chicktails and ground a heel in the soil. “Do you see where we came off?”
Mr. Grey did not see. The field in which they’d fallen carpeted the bottom of a canyon. A very rectangular canyon, with high, rough, stony cliffs on all four sides. The train marbles lay scattered across the field like regular-sized toy marbles discarded by a child. Mr. Grey thought the spheroid cars must have disconnected from each other after dropping over the cliff edge, though on further consideration, he hadn’t noticed any coupling between the cars back at the Starharbor station. He saw no tracks running through the chicktail field, nor dangling over the edges of the high cliff. He heard no shrill conductor’s whistle, no cry raised by any search party. He heard only the rustling of the field and the complaining of their fellow passengers.
Mr. Grey pulled his hands out of the field and scratched dryly at his knuckles. He glanced at the lucid sky. “I think we’re a few tocks shy of noon.” Mr. Grey still felt disoriented. He’d wildly guessed the time based on the sun’s place alone - without conferring with his pocket ticker.
Honeydew said, “If this is Wine Medo, it’s disappointing.” She sheared the tops off another swathe of chicktails and scowled sunward.
“It is a bit itchy.” Mr. Grey scratched the backs of his hands again. “Perhaps we’ve reached a rest stop?” He pointed across the field, where variously dizzy and variously dressed passengers had emerged from the other marbles. These others flocked toward one wall of the rectangular canyon.
Against the wall a long, bowing table of extremely natural-looking artificial wood stood, rising just above the waist high grass. A grand buffet sprawled across its top, seemingly set for the passengers. Silver bowls and cups glinted in the light of sun and overflowed with foods of varying texture and bright shine: lumpy butterscotch piles, and tangles of lipstick-twine, and liquid denim dripping from a plaster carafe. A barrel - again, of that same artificial wood, which Mr. Grey would almost have thought real, if a mundane barrel made of real wood weren’t such an absurd thought - towered next to the buffet, spigot-ready.
Mr. Grey and Honeydew stood too far from the table to see the specific dishes served, but the supply looked ample for the crowd of passengers gathering towards it. Mr. Grey said, “If everyone else is gathering…?”
“It’s rude to leave us stranded,” said Honeydew, with another halfhearted swat. “With no signs or directions.”
“If there’s a meal set out, this must be part of the trip. Maybe we change marbles? Anyway, I think we should go meet at the table with everyone else.”
Honeydew still wore a sour expression. After a moment she clicked in place of a sigh. “I’d risk a bite of anything right now.”
The two of them made narrow furrows through the chicktails as they set out for the buffet. Honeydew’s shoulders shed their aggressive hunch, and she let her hands drag through the fronds. Mr. Grey kept his dry ones clasped before his chest, rubbing and itching. His eyes made a last pass over the edge of the cliff. They saw no watchtowers, no signposts, not even the twisted ends of a set of marble tracks to hint at how they’d arrived in this canyon.
He turned to Honeydew. Even the fabric sunflowers of her robe seemed to bloom under the glowing lamp in the sky – a light so often hidden from view back in Starharbor. Mr. Grey said, “Do you recall falling asleep on the train?”
Honeydew tensed again. “I didn’t sleep. I saw all the mountains and all the strange fork-plants as we rolled.”
“Oh, I did too. But it felt like something forced my eyes shut. You didn’t have that?”
“It got dark after a while. Probably the mud.”
“I hadn’t thought of that.” Mr. Grey felt the effect had been more than simple darkness. It had felt like being forced into sleep. Honeydew seemed annoyed by the topic, however, so he dropped it.
Another thought came to Mr. Grey; perhaps their visa documents outlined this exact stop, and somehow he’d overlooked it in his previous readings. He pulled out and leafed through the novel sized, legal parchmentwork – he could find no section listing stops or stations between the Odormoats.
Honeydew tugged Mr. Grey’s sleeve. He looked up, and she pointed at the crowd gathering around the table. She said, “Whatever they’ve dealt us, I don’t think it’s beans.”
The passengers who’d made it to the table were walking back and forth along its length, touching none of the dishes, scratching their heads.
Mr. Grey scratched his own head. “Do you think it’s bread?” He wanted the question to come off as incredulous, but made the mistake of using his usual tone, pitch, and cadence.
Before Honeydew could answer the two heard a screech of wrenching metal. Both spun. Honeydew leapt into a 180-degree turn and crouched in the grass. Mr. Grey rotated the same amount, in the manner of a Lazy Susan.
The screeching metal noise came from one of the train marbles; not their own. An enormous hand - attached to a hairy, proportionally-enormous arm - had reached over the cliff edge and crumpled the marble into a compressed ball of metal. The hand, with a casual effort, chucked the crushed marble from the boxy canyon.
Mr. Grey and Honeydew watched the hand for a few tocks in stupefied silence. Every other passenger did the same. Awe, terror, and confusion held every traveler momentarily still. Mr. Grey didn’t think there had been anyone inside the marble, but he wasn’t 100-percent positive.
A matching hand and arm - the left set, presuming the behemoth had the standard issue pair - descended on one of the passengers the moment after. It plucked the screaming fellow and sent him soaring in another direction, out of the canyon.
This signaled the passengers to panic and scramble, which they did immediately.
This has been In Different Color, a fairy tale.
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