The story of Mr. Art Fanciful, entry for Story Cubes Contest 3

This is my entry for @jacobtothe's third Story Cubes Contest, which you can read all about here. Basically, @jacobtothe throws nine dice with little drawings, and he asks to interpret (at least 3 of them) into a creative way - writing, painting, sculpting, photography, anything, really. There's one week to enter the contest.

This is the photo of the nine dice for contest nr. 3:

I numbered them from 1-9 (top left to bottom right) and used these dice in this order: 7 - 8 - 1 - 2 - 6 - 3 - 9

Hope you like it!

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Mr. Art Fanciful had always been a daydreamer. Looking at the clouds, he had dreamed his life away.

He was now in his late sixties, and, as you can imagine, he hadn't led a spectacular life. He had enjoyed the clouds for sure, and in his mind he had made many wondrous and fantastical journeys so he was a happy man, as far as he was concerned.

But when Mr. Art Fanciful sat down on that warm, somewhat cloudy Thursday afternoon, of that humid, somewhat windy August 13th, something unexpected happened. Instead of going to wonderful, exotic and quirky places, his mind went to a memory of his childhood.

Achoo!

In his mind, Mr. Art Fanciful now relived a cloudy, albeit warm Thursday afternoon on a windy, albeit humid August 13th, when he was thirteen years old and watched the clouds really attentively for the first time. It would become a tradition from that day on, as he was struck with severe hay-fever that day.

Before that day, Mr. Art Fanciful realized, he had had a splendid childhood: playing balls, digging holes in the garden where he shouldn't have, playing weird blindfold-games with his friends and on and on. But when on that life-changing day the hay-fever got to him, all that childhood fun disappeared: the young boy Artie Fanciful went inside to sit on the couch and grew into the cloud-staring, daydreaming - let's call it escapist, shall we?- Mister Art Fanciful.

You can imagine he was dumbfounded when his mind took him back to that bright, yet gloomy day. What to think of it?, he thought. His mind was racing, reliving that afternoon: sneezing, crying, going inside, sitting on the couch. Back. Sneezing, crying, going inside, sitting on the couch. Again. Sneezing, cry... I hope you get the idea of what Mr. Art Fanciful was going through.

And then his mind did a wonderful thing.

Instead of going inside, daydreaming on the couch for the umpteenth time - Mr. Art Fanciful -with all the willpower he could muster- squeezed his focus in another direction: to the kitchen where he reached for a little bottle of his grandmother's home-made brew. An elixir he - as a thirteen-year old - wasn't supposed to touch, let alone drink. In his more-than-sixty-year-old mind, he could easily reach it, and -of course- was allowed to drink it.

In his mind, the elixir smelled of oregano, tobacco and the pharmaceutical store.

In his mouth, the elixir tasted of oregano, tabasco and the candy store.

As far as Mr. Art Fanciful was concerned: what he did in his mind had become his reality: he had smelled the elixir, he had drank it.

Mr. Art Fanciful snapped out of his musings. He got up from his couch and went outside.

He breathed the air, fully, without sneezing.
He felt like a child again.