in imagination are all things possible
Harold held up the envelope. Ya know, Holly, doing the same over is stretching today until you run out of tomorrows.
Don’t start, Harold. Please, do not start this.
Harold felt the corrugated strength of Holly’s words and folded the travel brochure back into the rest of the mail.
Her words left a taste, as if silver were a flavour. She hadn’t meant to sound sharp and Harold was right. Not another winter as spectators to the world from a window. They needed sun-on-skin.
Even so, her husband, having hung the moon in a crescent drawn of line and curve, never outgrew his purple crayon. It could be because, as a boy, he never made it home. Home as a feeling, not only a place.
Harold lives to slow the clock by finding the thrill ( some say danger ) hidden in adventure. But the crayon is gone, and vacations can’t be drawn on a bank account. Not without a bit of transfusion.
That’s how it works in the adult world. Trade health for wealth in the first half of life. Later, the reverse. In short, for now, he had to get back to work. Creating the shared hallucination of a cartoonist, using a crayon of another colour.
( David Johnson Leisk, under the pen name Crockett Johnson, produced Harold and the Purple Crayon in 1955. Four-year-old Harold creates his world by drawing it. In Harold’s Crayon, I imagine Harold grown up, a cartoonist, creating worlds by drawing the adventure. I suppose the same world-making could be said of the story itself. )
