Once upon a time, in the live-action world (our world), there lived a little
girl named Mary Sue. I use the word "lived" loosely, as poor Mary Sue hardly
considered what she had to endure daily to be "living". Her real parents had
abandoned her when she was six, and had been sent to prison shortly thereafter
for their involvement in a drug ring. She had spent a year in a girls' home
where her short stature attracted bullies, one of whom left her with a
seriously bruised face. After that she was taken in by foster parents, the
Fosters; Mr. Foster was a paramedic, and Mrs. Foster was a legal assistant who
could not have natural children of her own.
Life with the Fosters proved no better than life in the girls' home, only different. She spent most of her waking hours in a day care center, as her parents were extremely busy with their careers. They had believed that having a child to care for would magically transform them into happy people, and were quite put out when it didn't come to pass. They started to treat the hapless Mary Sue as an unwelcome burden, making her wear ragged old dresses and giving her only prepackaged, unwholesome finger food to eat.
What little interaction the Fosters had with her was limited to complaining about their jobs, complaining about her school performance, complaining about her lack of social skills, complaining, complaining, complaining. They would never let her go out to play with her friends, fearing that the old associates of her birth parents might show up and steal her away. She had only a few secondhand toys to play with, so she spent most of her free time watching public television (the Fosters would allow her to watch nothing else) and reading books from the school library (they only let her check out one at a time, concerned that she might fail to return it).
It was a bleak, joyless existence for the little eight-year-old girl with curly brown hair and a lumpy face. Only one thing brought her a degree of happiness and fulfillment--a PBS cartoon series called Arthur. Her heart brimmed with anticipation every time she watched the opening credits, as the aardvark boy Arthur Read and his faithful pooch Pal strolled along to a reggae beat. She followed every story breathlessly, even if she had seen it ten times before in repeats. She loved the colorful characters, the happy endings, the small victories, the lessons learned. No one ever suffered in Elwood City, an animated universe where everybody understood and loved each other, and even the bullies were more comical than threatening.
Unlike the rough kids at her school, who delighted in taunting her because of the plainness of her clothes and her habit of stuttering when frightened.
One day Mary Sue decided to walk home by a different route, one that led through a field of tall weeds, in hopes of avoiding the ruffians who normally met her on the sidewalk. Unfortunately, her enemies had expected this.
As she shuffled slowly and timidly through the overgrown weeds, two boys and a girl approached her from all sides. They had to be nine or ten years old, and they all had sneers on their faces.
"Hey, l-l-l-look," said the girl, "it's M-M-Mary S-S-Sue."
"L-l-leave me alone!" wailed Mary, covering her face with her hands.
"Don't be afraid," said one of the boys, grabbing Mary Sue's shoulder and turning her to face him. "We just want to give you a makeover."
"Your folks need to buy you some real clothes," said the other boy. "Oh, wait, they can't. They're in jail."
"I have something to cover up those bruises on your face," said the girl, pulling a vial of nail polish from her dress pocket.
Unable to bear any more, Mary Sue ran away from the mocking kids as fast as her feet would carry her, which wasn't very fast. She heard the crunching of weeds beneath the soles of her worn tennis shoes, and the footfalls of the pursuing bullies. They would be upon her any second...
...and then, suddenly, there was nothing under her feet.
A small cul-de-sac and several houses had recently been constructed at the edge of the field, leaving an excavation with an abrupt cliff and no safety fence. Several yards below Mary Sue's feet was a bare stretch of earth covered with rocks and construction waste.
She cried out in fright as she began to fall...
...and landed, a quick moment later, in the middle of a juniper bush.
When she had regained her wits and her breath, Mary Sue pushed the leaves and branches from her face and struggled to rise. Oddly, the bush in which she was ensnared didn't appear real, but seemed to have been drawn and filled in with simple shades of green and red.
Once she had raised her head over the top of the bush, she gasped in shock. This was clearly not her town, or her world, or even her universe. It was a neighborhood with streets and houses, but everything was cartoonish in style, even the sky and the clouds overhead. As if she had been pulled into an illustrated storybook...
Looking down, Mary Sue observed that she was still wearing her ratty old dress, although it was now made up of filled-in lines instead of fabric. On top of that, her hands had changed--the skin was darker in color, and the fingers had become uniform in width, almost like bendable frankfurters. Not only had her world changed, but she had changed as well. Instinctively reaching up and touching her nose, she found that it had become larger, and was rounded and smooth. Moving her hands up higher, she felt her usual curls, but discovered that her ears had moved...and something hard and tube-shaped had attached itself to her temples.
Hearing a squeal of amazement, Mary Sue turned and saw two little boys gaping at her. They looked the same and dressed the same, and she knew immediately who they were...but it wasn't possible...
"I think she's an alien," said one of the boys to the other.
"No, she's a fairy," said the other boy. "We saw her first, so we get wishes."
"She's an alien," insisted the first boy. "You saw her fall out of the sky."
"Fairies can fly too," retorted the second boy. "And you don't believe in her, so I get all the wishes."
"She's an alien!" growled the first boy.
"She's a fairy!" yelled the second.
"Alien!"
"Fairy!"
The two boys wrestled each other to the ground and started to fight. Mary Sue, still confused and scared by her new surroundings, cleared her throat. "Uh, excuse me," she said anxiously. "I n-n-need to l-l-l-look in a m-m-mirror." At least her voice and her stuttering habit remained unchanged.
The twins stopped fighting and looked up at her. "Are you an alien or a fairy?" one of them asked.
"I'm neither," the girl replied. "My name's Mary Sue."
"I'm Tommy," said the boy. Gesturing at his twin, he added, "This is Timmy."
"There's a mirror in the house," said the other boy, pointing at the old, Gothic-looking structure that stood in the lot.
"Th-thank you," said Mary Sue, and started to extricate herself from the juniper bush.
As she walked toward the front door, she marveled at the fact that she was moving around in some sort of cartoon dream world, yet she felt perfectly natural--as if being a storybook character was indistinguishable from being a live person.
The door was open, so she wandered inside. An animated suit of medieval armor stood in one corner of the living room, which was filled with Victorian-style furniture. One side of the room led into the kitchen, where a white-haired old woman was laboring over a stove.
The old woman turned around. "Oh, hello, dear," she said in a kindly voice. "I wasn't expecting visitors." She had an elongated nose and round ears on the top of her head, much like the twins she had met.
Mary Sue stopped. "Uh, hi," she said nervously. "I'm Mary Sue. You must be Mrs. Tibble."
"That's right," replied the old woman, taking a few shuffling steps closer. "I haven't met you before. Did you just move in?"
It was becoming clearer to Mary Sue that Mrs. Tibble and the other denizens of this imaginary Arthur world looked upon her as one of their own. This could only mean that she was no longer human in appearance. Seeing light reflecting off of glass from the corner of her eye, she turned and hurried toward the entrance to what she believed was the bathroom.
And indeed it was, and there was a mirror on the wall. When she beheld her reflection, she gasped louder than she had ever gasped before.
Staring back at her was a cartoon girl with dark skin, curly brown hair, a bulbous nose...and antlers.
"I'm a moose," she said to herself, astonished. "I'm a moose person, just like George."
As she curiously ran her fingers over the long, bony antlers that had fused themselves to her head, she told herself that she would have to be very careful around lockers for as long as she was in this dream.
TBC
Life with the Fosters proved no better than life in the girls' home, only different. She spent most of her waking hours in a day care center, as her parents were extremely busy with their careers. They had believed that having a child to care for would magically transform them into happy people, and were quite put out when it didn't come to pass. They started to treat the hapless Mary Sue as an unwelcome burden, making her wear ragged old dresses and giving her only prepackaged, unwholesome finger food to eat.
What little interaction the Fosters had with her was limited to complaining about their jobs, complaining about her school performance, complaining about her lack of social skills, complaining, complaining, complaining. They would never let her go out to play with her friends, fearing that the old associates of her birth parents might show up and steal her away. She had only a few secondhand toys to play with, so she spent most of her free time watching public television (the Fosters would allow her to watch nothing else) and reading books from the school library (they only let her check out one at a time, concerned that she might fail to return it).
It was a bleak, joyless existence for the little eight-year-old girl with curly brown hair and a lumpy face. Only one thing brought her a degree of happiness and fulfillment--a PBS cartoon series called Arthur. Her heart brimmed with anticipation every time she watched the opening credits, as the aardvark boy Arthur Read and his faithful pooch Pal strolled along to a reggae beat. She followed every story breathlessly, even if she had seen it ten times before in repeats. She loved the colorful characters, the happy endings, the small victories, the lessons learned. No one ever suffered in Elwood City, an animated universe where everybody understood and loved each other, and even the bullies were more comical than threatening.
Unlike the rough kids at her school, who delighted in taunting her because of the plainness of her clothes and her habit of stuttering when frightened.
One day Mary Sue decided to walk home by a different route, one that led through a field of tall weeds, in hopes of avoiding the ruffians who normally met her on the sidewalk. Unfortunately, her enemies had expected this.
As she shuffled slowly and timidly through the overgrown weeds, two boys and a girl approached her from all sides. They had to be nine or ten years old, and they all had sneers on their faces.
"Hey, l-l-l-look," said the girl, "it's M-M-Mary S-S-Sue."
"L-l-leave me alone!" wailed Mary, covering her face with her hands.
"Don't be afraid," said one of the boys, grabbing Mary Sue's shoulder and turning her to face him. "We just want to give you a makeover."
"Your folks need to buy you some real clothes," said the other boy. "Oh, wait, they can't. They're in jail."
"I have something to cover up those bruises on your face," said the girl, pulling a vial of nail polish from her dress pocket.
Unable to bear any more, Mary Sue ran away from the mocking kids as fast as her feet would carry her, which wasn't very fast. She heard the crunching of weeds beneath the soles of her worn tennis shoes, and the footfalls of the pursuing bullies. They would be upon her any second...
...and then, suddenly, there was nothing under her feet.
A small cul-de-sac and several houses had recently been constructed at the edge of the field, leaving an excavation with an abrupt cliff and no safety fence. Several yards below Mary Sue's feet was a bare stretch of earth covered with rocks and construction waste.
She cried out in fright as she began to fall...
...and landed, a quick moment later, in the middle of a juniper bush.
When she had regained her wits and her breath, Mary Sue pushed the leaves and branches from her face and struggled to rise. Oddly, the bush in which she was ensnared didn't appear real, but seemed to have been drawn and filled in with simple shades of green and red.
Once she had raised her head over the top of the bush, she gasped in shock. This was clearly not her town, or her world, or even her universe. It was a neighborhood with streets and houses, but everything was cartoonish in style, even the sky and the clouds overhead. As if she had been pulled into an illustrated storybook...
Looking down, Mary Sue observed that she was still wearing her ratty old dress, although it was now made up of filled-in lines instead of fabric. On top of that, her hands had changed--the skin was darker in color, and the fingers had become uniform in width, almost like bendable frankfurters. Not only had her world changed, but she had changed as well. Instinctively reaching up and touching her nose, she found that it had become larger, and was rounded and smooth. Moving her hands up higher, she felt her usual curls, but discovered that her ears had moved...and something hard and tube-shaped had attached itself to her temples.
Hearing a squeal of amazement, Mary Sue turned and saw two little boys gaping at her. They looked the same and dressed the same, and she knew immediately who they were...but it wasn't possible...
"I think she's an alien," said one of the boys to the other.
"No, she's a fairy," said the other boy. "We saw her first, so we get wishes."
"She's an alien," insisted the first boy. "You saw her fall out of the sky."
"Fairies can fly too," retorted the second boy. "And you don't believe in her, so I get all the wishes."
"She's an alien!" growled the first boy.
"She's a fairy!" yelled the second.
"Alien!"
"Fairy!"
The two boys wrestled each other to the ground and started to fight. Mary Sue, still confused and scared by her new surroundings, cleared her throat. "Uh, excuse me," she said anxiously. "I n-n-need to l-l-l-look in a m-m-mirror." At least her voice and her stuttering habit remained unchanged.
The twins stopped fighting and looked up at her. "Are you an alien or a fairy?" one of them asked.
"I'm neither," the girl replied. "My name's Mary Sue."
"I'm Tommy," said the boy. Gesturing at his twin, he added, "This is Timmy."
"There's a mirror in the house," said the other boy, pointing at the old, Gothic-looking structure that stood in the lot.
"Th-thank you," said Mary Sue, and started to extricate herself from the juniper bush.
As she walked toward the front door, she marveled at the fact that she was moving around in some sort of cartoon dream world, yet she felt perfectly natural--as if being a storybook character was indistinguishable from being a live person.
The door was open, so she wandered inside. An animated suit of medieval armor stood in one corner of the living room, which was filled with Victorian-style furniture. One side of the room led into the kitchen, where a white-haired old woman was laboring over a stove.
The old woman turned around. "Oh, hello, dear," she said in a kindly voice. "I wasn't expecting visitors." She had an elongated nose and round ears on the top of her head, much like the twins she had met.
Mary Sue stopped. "Uh, hi," she said nervously. "I'm Mary Sue. You must be Mrs. Tibble."
"That's right," replied the old woman, taking a few shuffling steps closer. "I haven't met you before. Did you just move in?"
It was becoming clearer to Mary Sue that Mrs. Tibble and the other denizens of this imaginary Arthur world looked upon her as one of their own. This could only mean that she was no longer human in appearance. Seeing light reflecting off of glass from the corner of her eye, she turned and hurried toward the entrance to what she believed was the bathroom.
And indeed it was, and there was a mirror on the wall. When she beheld her reflection, she gasped louder than she had ever gasped before.
Staring back at her was a cartoon girl with dark skin, curly brown hair, a bulbous nose...and antlers.
"I'm a moose," she said to herself, astonished. "I'm a moose person, just like George."
As she curiously ran her fingers over the long, bony antlers that had fused themselves to her head, she told herself that she would have to be very careful around lockers for as long as she was in this dream.
TBC