Faithful Pebble
Part Thirty-Six
Hidden in the bushes lost but not alone—strike that, reverse it—alone but not lost, a kitten waited impatiently. He sat playing with his fingers picking at grass, staring eagerly—but not too eagerly—at a tower that wasn't a tower, a pile of rubble that was as straight as it was tall with a hole buried in the center. That hole led to other worlds, to places and adventures he could only imagine in his dreams, in songs and stories and poems often whispered before a roaring fireplace or at the foot of a lonely bedside. For after all, a well with a girl stuck in the middle was spectacular by itself, the beginning of a fairy story like the prospect of a wanderer passing through attempting, in his quest, to save her.
That was the middle, he thought, the smallest boy, the youngest member of that notorious pickpocket gang of Warble Heights. He picked his nose and ate the booger, tugged on his blue faded hat to make its corded fabric flex about his ears. He stuck his tongue out sideways.
He was determined to see the end, the happily ever after that was bound to happen. Surely! If he waited long enough— if he just sat there and watched, he was certain to see it happen. All his life, he'd listened to these types of stories: of kings and queens and princes lost and princesses found and kissed and married. Never had he expected to see one played out, not there in his small, lost miserable nook of a town, in spite the many heroes it attended. The boy sighed resting against the base of the bush watching the wanderer's rope dangle into the depths of the well. Its mouth looked hungry. The rope protruded like his own tattered tongue. Having looked down it many times prior, it was odd seeing the corded snake. No one had EVER ventured to personally retrieve the girl before. No one dared not with the possibility of getting stuck down there. That was worse, unseemly and too much of a risk. At least, that is what his mother had said, the day he'd brought up the idea.
I'd like to call this the beginning of the end, but the end seems so far away. Either way, here we go. Act Two. Hold on tight, it will be a ride and I am not responsible for my actions. Remember I said that! - Calla