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WHEWM

The Marshmallow Book

By P. M. StarrPublished 2 years ago 12 min read
1
You can build a tunnel anywhere.

“Tell me about my godfather.”

“Well … you know. He’s kind of … eccentric.”

“Will we ever see him again?”

“Hard to say, honey. I don’t know.”

“Where is he now?”

Mom slowed her fingers in the pie dough. Turning and tumbling with her fingertips, sifting for unsmooth texture. Like my godfather might have dropped a tiny clue in the mixing bowl. Looking up from her work, she stared into the distance: through the cupboard doors. Past the mismatched dishes inside. Beyond the kitchen wall … scanning a horizon hidden from us both.

*****

She was right about me knowing; godfather was eccentric. But not just “kind of”. He was weirdness delivered from a whole other plane of existence.

That’s why I kept prompting her for more … asking these questions. When she baked. On long lonely bus rides in the early early morning. When the power went out for nonpayment and we stared at our reflection sitting in the dark tv screen’s mirror.

I already knew he was “eccentric”, but I kept fishing for more information of how. How he wore his weird clothes differently. How his hair grew in opposite directions on either half of his head. How he arrived in a room and lit up whatever he looked at. How I felt lit up when he listened to me, asking tiny specific questions nobody else cared I could answer.

My whole life, asking about my godfather. Looking for some kind of explanation. Like remembering a mystery my mom and I had once cracked, but I’d been too young to recall how.

*****

I only actually spent time with him twice, but now hoped especially hard he’d turn up for my graduation. Not for the ceremony in the high school gym, but after. I fantasized he’d bestow one of the jackets I’d admired him wearing on those visits. I saw myself sent forth onto my first journey of young adulthood wearing his silky grey corduroy blazer, armored in long walls of soft fog lined with silver shadows.

Or the other jacket made of material I couldn’t identify, like black oil tattooed dry into a thick synthetic skin, with more pockets inside than out. I knew about the inside pockets because he’d reached into one on the first visit to pull out a palm-sized sketchbook.

“Let me show you how to make a tunnel.”

I came hastily to his side, looking over his elbow at the little book in his hand, tentatively touching the not-oilskin jacket. He pulled a grey-bodied pen out of another pocket and uncapped it, revealing a black nib shaped like a small arrowhead. Like his jacket, made of a material I’d never seen, before or since.

Setting the book on his knee, holding it open with two fingers splayed, he brought the pen down until it almost touched the paper, but then paused.

“Actually … why don’t you hold the book open…”

He tossed the book onto the rickety piano bench we used as a coffee table. I went around to face him on the other side of it, little enough to stand behind the bench like a jeweler at a showroom counter ready to extract whatever treasure he requested to inspect, or a miniature dealer at a card table. My fingers stood steepled on either side of the little book.

“Go ahead and open it.”

I touched the book and hesitated, realizing I didn’t know how to find the page he’d opened to before. I could hear mom’s big spoon in the kitchen making gravelly rounds inside a metal bowl.

“Any page will do. ANY page. Front, back, middle … doesn’t matter -- we can build the tunnel anywhere.”

I opened the book near the front hoping to thumb through pages he’d already marked on, but it was upside down so I just wound up at blank pages near the back.

“Perfect. Now hold it steady.”

I placed my small hands on diagonals at the corners and rested the weight of my shoulders upon them. My godfather leaned in and began slowly outlining small circles inches above the paper. The hair on our scalps touched, concentrating our attention on the circle he formed in the air, stirring a whirlpool of roundness as the pen came closer and closer to the paper, boring down like a heavy feather of thought.

When the nib finally touched down on the paper I expected it to skip clumsily … for the circle to be lost and a jagged skid to streak across the page and crash on the piano bench. But the paper seemed to be waiting for it, recessed in the center of the page like a wheel waiting for a tire, and the pen completely primed to dump in a rubber tire. In a split second, a deep wet ring of black ink stood on what looked like a halo of honey, consumed in three more rotations by the black ink spreading, my godfather’s hand moving with hypnotic speed and precision in circles. The sound like a solid steel marble spinning in a felted ring, and my mom’s spoon whipping batter in the kitchen faster and faster.

The last thing I remember is the circle in the center of the paper splitting into thinner and thicker bands of brown, like mixing chocolate into milk, and the eye of the cyclone turning dark and thick, going deeper and deeper drilling down past the piano bench, and deciding to dive in.

*****

I was lying on the couch with my feet on mom’s lap when I woke up to her watching TV. I had only two questions:

“Is there any pudding left?”

“Pudding? I didn’t make pudding, remember? I made your favorite fudgy cake.”

My second question was answered by my godfather handing across a saucer loaded with a frosted slab of crumbling dark brown; he was still there.

I ate the cake and fell back to sleep.

He was gone in the morning.

*****

At school they handed out order forms for class rings, embossed announcements, and photo packages. I returned the form the next day with only the mandatory cap and gown option checked, and a check from mom that we both knew would bounce. Just to get them off my back, because they said that I had to. I knew when the day came they would loan me an old mortarboard and wrinkled robe, and the parents of ninety-one people I’d gone to school with for twelve years would wonder who I was, having never seen me at sporting events, school dances, plays or fundraisers. Never having heard my name mentioned as friend or foe.

Must be an exchange student from someplace else.

I’d been here my whole life, but I imagined I was from wherever my godfather hailed from, placed here to be raised in anonymity before … whatever. Before I figured out how to get back through the pudding tunnel? I must have missed a vital point in that lesson, or maybe it was just a simple trick to entertain a child.

I made handmade graduation announcements and notes for him: a blue circle ripped by ballpoint on top of the coffee ring of a diner napkin. A note asking if I could borrow his corduroy coat for college even though I wasn’t going. A postcard with a picture of the sky that just said See You Soon? Addressed to him care of the museum that had his invention on display.

“Is Godfather rich?”

“I don’t think so … but he could have been.”

“How?”

“If he let them put The Whewm into production.”

“Why didn’t he sell it to them?”

“I don’t know.. But he was very passionate about it. Very protective. They wanted to patent the process for synthesizing the material. And the design.”

“Is that all? How else could they manufacture it and actually make money?”

“Well they also wanted to market it as The Whewmmm. With three Ms. He wouldn’t stand for it. That wasn’t all he objected to but he was practically incoherent in defense of The Whewm. He described the process for building it in esoteric terms. Naturally, they wanted a clearly engineered blueprint. He wouldn’t provide one.”

Wouldn’t? Or couldn’t?

*****

When I was a kid Mom took me to the museum to see The Whewm on display: a king-sized black oblong orb sedately lit in a corner of a very large room with grey walls showcasing half a dozen bigger-than-human sculptures. The Whewm was the only one surrounded by thick black vinyl ropes hung between chrome stanchions to keep people from touching or climbing on it.

A placard in what must have been The Whewm’s front said PROTOTYPE OF THE WHEWM by LEON POWDER. I thought it looked like a motorcycle helmet on my favorite cartoon ninja hero, and in that moment of thought a sort of visor lifted on The Whewm, exposing an inviting bedlike surface. Mom was busy admiring big metal blobs puddled around in another corner of the room, so I ducked under the rope and climbed into the open mouth of The Whewm. As the visor closed with me inside, I felt transported into the soft glow of my bubble night light at home, with the added bonus of the surface supporting me exactly like a giant marshmallow. I pressed my fingers and face into its firm foaminess, smelling something like vanilla, and falling fast asleep just like the time my godfather drew the pudding tunnel.

Mom says she was scared when she couldn’t find me, but not because she didn’t know where I was. She stood in front of The Whewm until just before closing when she heard three taps from within just before the visor opened and I tumbled out.

Mom said I begged for marshmallows the rest of the year, but only poked, sniffed and pulled them apart, never eating them. “It’s like you were conducting experiments. You drew circles on them until the pen got all gummed up. You glued a grid of them next to your bedroom door. Like elevator buttons. I’d open your door and you’d be standing right there on the other side with your finger out, like a little businessman or special agent interrupted on the way to the floor with the x files.”

*****

The day before graduation a padded envelope came in the mail for me. From The Museum of Modern Marvels. I had to sign for it.

Inside was a key, and a letter formally addressed to me:

RE: Leon Powder

Due to your recent mailings and our inability to locate Mr. Powder (whereabouts-unknown and inexplicably incommunicado as long as current staff can recall), we discovered the existence of a box in our vault held securely for him as a condition of his donation of The Whewm.

Upon opening Mr. Powder’s box to put your mailings in for safekeeping we discovered a smaller box within the box, a key to that box, and a note from him instructing us to contact you and give you the key along with the box contents. You are invited to inspect and retrieve the contents or allow some or all of them to remain in our vault.

*****

One efficient-faced woman manned a long unadorned counter in the empty lobby of The Museum of Modern Marvels.

“I’m here to inspect Leon Powder’s vault holdings.” I presented the key and my student identification card. The woman behind the counter picked up a phone and pushed a button. “Escort for the Powder box.”

A heavy door opened and a woman in a transparent plastic lab coat over a grey suit told me to follow her. I did, down two flights of stairs, a very long corridor and through two more heavy doors requiring her keycard. She finally opened another door to a small room with just a chair and a desk. “Wait here.”

She came back with a plain metal box like something designed for holding and transporting secret codes, maps and passports in a WWII movie.

“I’ll give you some privacy.” She gestured to a phone on the wall. “Punch 3 when you’re done.”

*****

Looking at the plain box, I suddenly realized the obvious: my godfather was not inside it. I’d slogged through a long tunnel towards the idea of a light that just turned out to be a small empty room with a small meaningless box with small things. And not even one of the coats that I wanted.

The fluorescent lights buzzed. I stopped feeling everything except that sound. Metal key in cheap metal lock. Lid lifting with a creak of tinny hinges.

Three fat bundles of hundred dollar bills, one just a tiny bit taller than the others. Somehow a letdown I could count up tomorrow.

But there was a fourth bundle and the fountain pen from pudding tunnel.

Next to the stacks of money was a weird black book, shorter than the hundred dollar bills but almost twice as wide. I immediately recognized the material of the cover: synthetic fabric like an impervious flexible skin tattooed from the inside with black. Even the piping lining the seams of the jacket was incorporated into this book.

I gave in to a sudden urge to push down on the book. The hunch paid off so well I stood up and knocked the chair over.

I pushed down on the book again with more of my weight. And the book pushed back. Just like the marshmallow material inside The Whewm when I was a kid. Responding to my pressure, exhaling sweetness.

I opened the book and started drawing circles.

*****

*****

*****

Note from author: this is a cropped version of a story I originally wrote for submission to The Little Black Book Challenge:

Create a fiction story about someone who unexpectedly comes into a large sum of money, involving a mysterious small black book.

A longer unedited version exists. Along with my wish to take the tunnel even further ... if you do too.

Fantasy
1

About the Creator

P. M. Starr

I love reading and writing for pleasure, comfort, and creating introvert sanctuaries.

Top-tier contender for all-time favorite book: Lizard Music by D. Manus Pinkwater

Early influences: Judy Blume, Ray Bradbury, (real) V. C. Andrews

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