Page 39 of Finding Jeremy
An image popped into Gray’s head of the comic strip Jeremy had presented him with the week before. The split panels had depicted entwined feet and legs on a bed in various positions that had left no doubt about what they were doing, but the real focus had been on the squirrel whose facial expressions had left Gray choking on his coffee. Jeremy had drawn him scowling and confused in one image, standing on his head with a perplexedexpression, and finally, with his eyes popping out and mouth wide, like he’d finally realized what was taking place on the other side of the glass.
Chaos had taken one look and muttered, I don’t wanna know, filled his thermos from the coffee pot, and headed back out to the machine shed to work on Jeremy’s dirt bike while Jeremy and Gray collapsed into a fit of laughter at the kitchen table.
Opening the book to the first page of the story revealed the pocked surface of the moon reflected in little puddles and a tiny house on the edge of the puddle-covered field.
“Once there was a tiny farm on the edge of the universe where nothing but grass would grow,” Gray read before turning the page once he was sure Jeremy had the time to enjoy the picture.
“The farmer who owned it tried everything. Grain, fruit, corn, beans, but nothing ever sprouted.”
The image on the left side depicted a gnome, slightly bent over and using a gnarled walking stick for balance as he moved down the rows, a pouch tied to his belt, as he sprinkled seeds into the holes he’d made between the puddles. On the right side, the gnome sat in a rocking chair on the porch of the house, a glass of something in his hand as he stared out at a field that was nothing but puddles shimmering with the reflection of the moon.
“One day the farmer decided that his fields must be too wet, so he covered all the puddles with dirt and waited for the field to dry.”
Despite it just being a story, Gray felt kinda bad for that hardworking gnome, as he dug, pushed, poured, and carried dirt from one place to another until he’d flattened out his field.
“But in the morning, when he checked his field, he found that there were new puddles and even more of them than there had been the last time.”
The scowling, sad-faced gnome peering through the window of the house looked positively exasperated.
“The puddles made his field look just like the surface of the moon, and he angrily declared it the cause of all his troubles.”
The gnome in this image shook its fist at the night sky, where the moon sat lonely, without a star around it.
“Stop looking at my field!” the farmer demanded. “You’re making it as barren as you are.”
“Of course, the moon couldn’t stop; its place was in the sky, where it had always been, always glowing alone in the empty sky.”
The artist had drawn a little teardrop dripping off the sad face of the moon in response to the little gnome’s rant.
“For days the farmer sewed together all the cloth he could find. Blankets, pillowcases, towels, even his own clothing, creating a canopy big enough to cover his entire field.”
This picture showed a gnome sitting beside the fireplace inside his home, needle in hand, with nothing else visible in the room but a patchwork collection of all the things he’d already sewn together.
“Bet you he poked his fingers a dozen times,” Jeremy muttered as he stared at the image. “I know I would.”
“I need a first aid kit handy just to sew on a button,” Gray declared, drawing a little snicker from Jeremy.
“I’d better be careful with my buttons then, huh?” Jeremy said.
“Yup, unless you want your Daddy’s fingers to wind up covered in Band-Aids.”
“Ouchie.”
“Exactly.”
“I don’t think the canopy is gonna work,” Jeremy declared. “And he’s gonna make the moon sad.”
“Yeah, I don’t think this is going to work out in his favor either, but let’s see what happens next.”
“Okay,” Jeremy said as Gray turned the page.
“When he finally ran out of cloth, the farmer went outside and gathered as many tall sticks as he could find. He poked them into the ground and stretched the canvas over them, tying it to the sticks with twine.”
On the left was an image of the gnome with a bundle of sticks on a sled behind him; on the right was the gnome tying the canvas to sticks he’d stuck in between the puddles that marred his field.
“That will keep you from scaring my crops! You should be ashamed of yourself. I’m trying to grow things here.”
Gray made the voice of the gnome as high and grumpy as he could manage and even gave it a hint of a New York accent, after a character in one of his favorite movies.
