The Everlasting Peep

In the town of Sugarditch there once lived a candy tycoon so greedy that he weighed his own happiness only in coins, and his name was Bartholomew Sopp. He owned a factory the size of three churches stitched together, where machines groaned from dawn to dusk producing sweets of every sort, and where sugar dust settled on the roofs like a strange snow that refused to melt. Sopp had inherited the business from his father, who had inherited it from his father before him, and the family recipe book held one treasure above every other, a small yellow marshmallow bird, sold only each spring since the year nineteen fifty-three, when the children of Sugarditch waited all winter merely to bite the head off one on Easter morning.

For sixty-one years the bird, everyone called it a Peep, on account of the small sound it seemed to make when squeezed, obeyed the turning of the seasons with the same reliability as the tides. It appeared each spring, sold by the crate, and vanished again until the following year, leaving children to dream of it through Halloween pumpkins and stockings hung for Christmas and long, dull months of February. Sopp found this dreadful. A treat that behaved itself for only one season a year was, to his mind, a treat leaking money the other eleven months, and greedy men despise a leak more than they despise almost anything else on this earth.

So in the year two thousand fourteen, Sopp did what he believed to be a stroke of genius. He ordered his chemists to shrink the bird down into a tiny, bite sized version, small enough for a child to swallow six in a single gulp, and he sold these little morsels in every month of the year under a cheerful new name. Sales climbed, and Sopp grew richer than he had ever been, though even he had to admit that Easter still claimed the greater share of the profit, for out of every ten bags sold, seven were bought in that one glorious week before the holiday, however hard he tried to spread the trade elsewhere.

Yet riches enough to fill a countinghouse twice over failed to satisfy a man like Sopp, and one December, the coldest, darkest December Sugarditch had ever known, with the whole town buried in drifts and children pressing their noses to shop doors dreaming of sleighs rather than sugar birds, Sopp unveiled his most terrible invention. He had bred, in a locked room behind the factory, a single yellow bird engineered to multiply itself every hour, doubling and doubling again, molded from a formula so potent that one became two, two became four, and four became more than anyone cared to count before the church clock struck midnight.

He called it the Everlasting Peep, and he released it upon Sugarditch on the twenty third of December, reasoning that a town already gorging on chocolate reindeer and candy canes would surely gorge on yellow birds too, season be hanged. It proved, almost at once, to be the worst decision of his greedy life, for the Everlasting Peep cared nothing for the fact that Easter lay four cold months away, cared nothing for holidays nor seasons nor the good sense of waiting one's turn. By the break of dawn on Christmas Eve, Sugarditch held more marshmallow birds upon its rooftops and hedges than there were flakes of snow falling, each one sugary and yellow, glowing faintly under the winter moon, unlike anything a bush had ever borne before.

By breakfast the birds had covered the door of the bakery, clogged the well, and dangled from every hedge like sugary ornaments meant for a season that had never once wanted them. The town crier tried to announce the strange news and found his own boots stuck fast to the ground, encased to the ankle in a soft yellow crust. Dogs barked at birds twice their own size lumbering down the lane, sniffing at doorsteps, and old Widow Trumble fainted clean away upon discovering forty of them roosting in her wash tub, cooing in a sound like squeezed rubber toys.

Now, in every Sugarditch household there lived children who had grown fat on sugar and fatter still on their own selfishness, and it is a fact well known among those who study such matters that a plague of self multiplying candy finds spoiled children the way a lightning bolt finds the tallest steeple. The first to fall under its spell was a boy named Wilbur Custard, whose stomach had never in his short life refused a second helping, nor a third, nor a fourth. Upon seeing the birds cover his own lawn like an obscene yellow blanket, Wilbur let loose a cry of delight and began stuffing them into his mouth by the fistful, ignoring his mother's cries entirely.

He ate through breakfast, through the noon bells, and clean through supper, and by the time the moon rose again over Sugarditch, Wilbur's own skin had taken on a curious yellow shine and his voice had shrunk to a small, squeaking peep of its own. His mother discovered him the following dawn sitting upon the lawn among his conquered army of birds, himself now indistinguishable from them save for his size, blinking two small black eyes and unable to say a single word beyond the sound that had swallowed him. Sopp, when he heard the tale, only chuckled and remarked that the boy made rather a fine advertisement, which tells you everything worth knowing about the state of his own soul.

The second child to meet her comeuppance was a girl named Prunella Vane, who hoarded everything she owned, dolls, ribbons, secrets, and now birds, behind a locked door in her bedroom, refusing to share so much as a crumb with her younger brother. She gathered every Everlasting Peep she could carry into her room and barred the door, gloating that she alone in Sugarditch would own a fortune in candy while the rest of the town scrambled about in the snow. She failed to reckon, however, on a fact well established among students of self multiplying sweets. A bird locked in a small room with none to eat it, and none to slow its doubling, simply keeps on doubling regardless of who watches.

By midnight her door bulged outward like a bellows drawing breath, and by the second midnight it burst clean off its hinges, spilling a torrent of yellow birds down the staircase and out into the lane, carrying poor Prunella along in the tide, buried to her chin and shrieking for rescue that, given her habits, few neighbors hurried to provide. Those who did come merely fished her out by the collar, brushed the sugar from her hair, and left the great pile of birds to melt where it lay, since nobody in Sugarditch felt much urge to rescue a fortune that had never once been shared.

By the fourth day the birds numbered so many that Sugarditch itself seemed built of sugar rather than brick, its lanes drifted knee deep in yellow, its rooftops sagging beneath a burden roofs were never built to bear. The mayor, a sensible woman named Constance Pye, marched straight to Sopp's own factory and pounded upon his door until he answered, informing him in language rather stronger than these pages care to print that his invention would need undoing before the whole town suffocated beneath its own sweetness.

Sopp, cornered at last, confessed that he had, in his haste for profit, forgotten to build any means of stopping the thing once it started, for stopping had never once occurred to a man who dreamed only of more. Mayor Pye reminded him, quite correctly, that some treats belong to their season for good reason, that a bird meant for the joy of a single spring morning turns monstrous the instant it forgets how to rest, and that greed dressed up as invention remains greed all the same, however clever the machine behind it.

It took the whole remaining stretch of winter, three defeated chemists, and a bitter cold snap strong enough to finally slow the doubling, to solve what Sopp had unleashed. Even then the solution proved rather simple in the end. The birds, it turned out, obeyed a hunger for warmth and sunlight buried deep in their sugary little souls, a hunger left over from the days when they belonged strictly to spring, and as the true season crept nearer they began, all on their own, to grow drowsy and settle, piling themselves into soft yellow drifts along the hedges and going, at long last, to sleep.

By the time real Easter came around again, the town had shoveled away the worst of the excess, sold what birds still made sense to sell, and watched the rest simply melt into the soil come the first warm rain, feeding the buds of the following season with a curious tint that gardeners noticed yet never quite explained. Even the smallest children agreed that the fields looked oddly cheerful come summer, though nobody among them cared to explain precisely why.

Wilbur Custard, mercifully, unmolded himself back into a boy over the course of that spring, though he emerged rather thinner and considerably more careful about second helpings, and Prunella Vane emerged from her flood a touch humbler, having learned that hoarding a good thing only guarantees you will one day drown in it. As for Sopp, the town stripped him of his factory and handed it over to Mayor Pye's own nephew, a boy with a gentler head for business, who kept the tiny bite sized birds selling nicely across every month of the year, while making certain, always, that the great, glorious bulk of them still waited patiently for Easter morning where they belonged, exactly as such birds always ought to.

And so, if ever a marshmallow bird turns up on your own lawn in the dead of December, glowing yellow beneath a winter moon, remember poor Wilbur and poorer Prunella, and remember above all that some sweets, like some children, behave far better when they learn to wait their turn. For sugar, like mischief, multiplies fastest in children who have never once been told to slow down, and the turning of the seasons, however slow and old fashioned it seems, generally knows a good deal better than greedy men and greedy children put together.