Little Wonders
Written by
Sighani
A Note: This was an exercise assigned by my creative writing teacher. He passed us all out a blank comic script, had us fill in what we thought the dialogue was, and then write a short story based on the art and the dialogue we filled in. I ended up with one of the many billions of Calvin & Hobbes comic strips where the two are going on a magical adventure in Calvin's wagon. And since my teacher pretty much assigned us a oneshot fanfic, I figured I might as well post it here, since I never post anything else (and this is really, really out of my fandom range, but whatever. It's a fic). Anyhoo, I hope it brings some kind of amusement. It only took me a couple hours, if that, to write. Enjoy.
Disclaimer: Not mine. It belongs to Watterson. Don't sue me. I'm poor.
-----
The rasp of old metal against metal groaned through the garage, a soft screech, the wheels of the little red wagon sending out a whirring hum. The axles lathered in a fresh sheen of glistening oil, it took some time before the two white blurs made their transition back into worn, rubber wheels.
"All right, Calvin, looks good," Dad sighed, picking at a bit of gravel lodged in the dull, white rubber. His eyes narrowed speculatively behind the oil-flecked lenses of his glasses, and he spun the back wheels a final time, nodding to himself, the corners of his mouth tipping upward into a ghost of a smile. Calvin's hands flew impatiently to his hips as he watched Dad go through the wagon-inspection routine for what had to be the millionth time, pale brows knitting as he pretended to know exactly what was going on, peering at the painted hunk of metal in much the same manner as his father. Who really knew what Dad found so intriguing about rusty wagon wheels, anyway? Maybe he liked the scritch of wheels against a corroding axle; maybe he liked to see how many times that little notch in one of the rubber rings would go by before the wheels finally squeaked to a stop; heck, maybe it even reminded him of his own days as a kid, if he could even remember that far back anymore. It never occurred to Calvin that maybe Dad was just checking to see if the wheels would fall off so he could finally chuck the ancient piece of junk into the trash.
"Are you done yet?" Calvin whined, forcing out a long keen that sounded like it could have come from a sick animal caught in a steel trap. Dad's eyebrows shot up to his receding hairline in response, the grown-up leering at the blond boy from over the frames of his glasses. It always reminded Calvin a little of the way a cat would look at a mouse just before the mouse became lunch. It was a look that almost screamed, "Dad's not impressed." And it was a good thing the look said that, too, because Dad never actually would come right-out and say it, no matter how long Calvin the mouse stood there twiddling his thumbs and waiting to be devoured alive.
With a little gulp, Calvin shifted his weight, stuffed his hands in his pockets, and tried again. "I mean, just make sure you've got it greased up really good. You've gotta get rid of all that friction, otherwise it's just gonna slow the wagon down."
The black eyebrows resettled in their respective places above the equally black frames, and Dad pushed his glasses back up his nose with the back of one oil-stained hand. The beast was sated, and the mouse was spared a vicious mauling--or lecture, in this case. Mission accomplished. Calvin tried not to gloat. In fact, he didn't have time to, in light of what came next.
"This is the third time this week you've had this wagon in here, Calvin. I know when you're up to something. What are you planning?"
"Planning?" Calvin asked incredulously, his laugh forced and his smile a little too innocent. "Who said anything about planning? I'm not planning anything. Wagons need tune-ups too, y'know."
"Three times a week?"
"Sure?"
There was a pause in the interrogation, and, his glasses slipping discreetly down the bridge of his nose, his eyebrows twitching in anticipation, Dad almost went back into cat mode. Before Calvin let that happen, though, he snatched up the handle of the wagon and hurried out the open garage door, the wagon bouncing along behind him, making a racket that was sure to make the neighbors look. Again.
"Try not to hurt yourself!" Dad called after the retreating figure of his boy.
"All right, Dad!" But of course, Calvin never really paid attention to what Dad said. Dad could have just said that an asteroid was hurtling towards the earth and the family had to get to their secret bomb shelter before it hit and wiped out half the planet, and Calvin's response still would have been the same.
And, of course, Dad knew this, and could only smile to himself as he stood in the garage, blotting his hands off on his jeans, hoping that his kid wouldn't come home with a broken arm (and almost wishing that the wagon would fall apart before his son got too far down the street, but that was beside the point).
As soon as Calvin was sure he was out of sight, he veered off the sidewalk, his wagon taking the turn on two wheels, and headed off into a grassy field. The sun was bright and happy up in the sky, nestled comfortably between pillows of cotton cumulus, its golden radiance warm on the shoulders and the back, made all the better by the sweet summer breeze. The sun pricked gleams of light off the morning dew in the grass when it flew up from beneath the creaky wagon wheels and the shuffling feet of the small boy, who liked the hems of his pants wet so he could watch them dry, because it happened to slowly that nothing would happen if he sat and stared, but if he looked away for a while, they'd be dry the next time he glanced down. It almost worked like magic--but Calvin knew better. Still, that didn't make it any less interesting.
Staring at his shoes mowing over the grass, lost in his thoughts, Calvin didn't notice the appearance of creamy paws in his vision until he felt the velvet brush of fur against his cheek and the squish of a soft belly. Jarred from his mind-numbing amusement, Calvin bounced off the fuzzy body, stumbled backward, almost landed on his rump in the wagon, and avoided it only by crashing to the ground. The tiger's honey eyes softened in amusement, ears pressing forward, whiskers twitching in something of a snicker. Hobbes fully expected the boy to heave himself off the ground and fly into a forced rage, but was somewhat surprised when Calvin just plopped himself down in the wagon instead, grinning like a kid on Christmas--or maybe a kid with a freshly-oiled wagon.
"Okay," Calvin started, adjusting himself in the front of the wagon and taking hold of the handle, "the wheels are greased up and we're ready to go. Did you remember the watch?"
"Got it." In a flash of gold, the tiger held up the stopwatch. Calvin's grin widened, and only continued to do so as Hobbes lowered the watch and began to push the wagon over the rise of the first hill.
"If we can get going fast enough," Calvin started to explain over the rush of grass past the squealing wheels, "we should be able to rip open the fabric of the space-time continuum."
Hobbes nodded, though Calvin couldn't see. He couldn't really put a number on how long Calvin had been planning this out, but based on the scrapes on the boy's knees and all the bruises on the tiger's own poor paws, it was nearing the couple-week range. Time travel had always been a minor fixation for Calvin, who probably thought more than a six-year-old ought to, and Hobbes knew that if they couldn't build their own time machine, they were going to get the forces of the universe to work with them. When the wagon angled slightly downward, Hobbes mashed his thumb down on the button on top of the stopwatch and watch the second-hand jerkily tick into motion. "The watch is going."
"We'll launch ourselves into the future!" Calvin called from the front of the wagon. The hill-riddled field was gradually melting into a hill-riddled forest, and when Hobbes couldn't keep his paws pumping fast enough down a steep, emerald incline, he pounced into the wagon behind Calvin. If he wasn't completely covered in fur, his knuckles would have visibly blanched from the force with which he was gripping the edge of the red wagon. Cackling like a maniac from the front of the wagon, whooping like a savage when the wagon actually lifted off the ground, Hobbes began to wonder why he had agreed to help support Calvin's insanity in the first place. "You know what this means?" the psychopath hollered between his rabid laughter.
Hobbes gulped and looked at the face of the watch, hoping maybe it could tell him how he always managed to get himself into these messes. Unfortunately, it lacked the mouth to tell him that he could have prevented the two of them from crashing blindly through the woods in a red death trap if only he had suggested a Saturday morning stroll instead.
"Um, we'll be drifting through space and time in a red wagon?" Hobbes tried, yelping when a branch slapped the side of the wagon in a flurry of green and brown. Maybe that was a sign, a sign telling Hobbes to save himself and bail while he still had the chance.
"It means no more eight o' clock bedtime!" Hobbes had to strain to hear Calvin as he screamed out the words, the roar of the wind swallowing the boy's voice. Claws dug into the side of the wagon, tearing away the brick red paint, and Hobbes set his feet against the insides of the wagon in attempt to keep them both from being ripped from the wagon--which was, somehow, still gaining more and more speed.
"We'll be free to do what we want, whenever we want!" Calvin was raving, his spiky hair whipping around his head, his eyes watering from the rush of the wind, his body thrown back against Hobbes from the sensible force of gravity--the force that told them that they definitely weren't supposed to be going this fast in a wagon. "We can watch David Letterman!"
"I don't think David Letterman is my main concern right now!" Hobbes howled back, but his words were lost to the wind. Calvin was about to ask him to repeat himself, but before the boy got the chance, the tiger squealed in terror, latched onto his head, and the wagon was airborne.
"We're doing it!" Calvin exclaimed as they sailed through the air, the wagon zipping out from underneath them in a flash of crimson lightning. Somewhere, way deep down in his subconscious, Calvin was thankful that the tiger claws had been removed from his scalp when Hobbes was thrown off his back. Currently, however, all he could focus on was the excitement that practically had his heart exploding out of his chest. They were doing it! "We're really doing it! We're flying through a wormhole into the future!"
"I hope they have hospitals in the future!"
It was the last thing Calvin heard before he got closer to the ground than he had ever cared to get.
"Dad didn't grease the wagon enough," Calvin grumbled disdainfully, studying the cracks in the earth beneath him with closer detail than ever before--and with half-blind eyes, no less! The bones in his back cracking audibly, Calvin peeled his face off the ground and sat up, spitting out a mouthful of dirt, his eyes watering furiously. "We weren't going fast enough. Now we'll never know what goes on in the world after eight o' clock." The knees of his jeans were blasted out, and he was pretty sure his own knees were just about as gravel-ridden as the wheels of his wagon, wherever it went. He smeared the dirt from his eyes with the heels of his hands, blinked through the hot water until the fuzzy orange blob a couple feet away came into focus. He arched a concerned eyebrow when the tiger didn't stir right away. "Hobbes?"
A groan. The raspy noise, caught somewhere between a whine and a cavernous growl, was definitely a groan. Then came the twitch from the black tuft on the end of his tail. Even though his whiskers were kinked and crumpled and his fur was matted with dirt, when he sat up, he grinned and held up the mangled remains of the stopwatch.
"By the time we crashed we were only at a minute thirty-five," he said, looking slightly dazed as his smile crawled lazily from ear to ear. "That's a new record."