Effie listened through the house, and the curious feeling remained, hovering around her with a magnetic quiver.

Even the way that he pawed through that box in the hallway closet-- it was a vibrant silence, unlike the quietness from the other children who’d been drawn to that closet in the past. Effie’s wise ears could hear the child’s curiosity in each pause, and yet from her rocking chair, she dared not guess what wonders the boy might be seeing in there. The game that they played suddenly seemed very real.

So young! Maybe four years of age, the boy had explained to Effie the methods for creating a world, and had reminded her of a lifetime of forgotten duties with his simple words: ”With my eyes closed up-- like this-- it’s my favorite pictures that I watch inside.”

So very shy, but he knew that he had Effie’s attention, and seemed intent on teaching Effie how to “make pictures” of her favorite animals, her favorite colors, and her most loved and cherished family and friends.

The child insisted that she imagine something nice, and he politely reminded her that she had a choice in the matter.

The child discovered that Effie likes the redbirds, and that she especially likes the four-o-clocks on the sunny side of the house.

He found that she likes colored glass, and that a simple cobalt bottle in the sunlight on a windowsill might well be her favorite color.

Together, Effie and the boy learned that Effie likes to have a cat or two around, but that four or five cats was too hard for her to enjoy imagining all at once.

Effie had listened and discovered that her grandson saw games and toys, dogs and cats, his mother and father, and an elaborate list of animals, fruits and chocolates, and a ride in the country on a Sunday afternoon with the windows down.

He had witnessed freshly puffed clouds, puffed by the very same flying cloud-puffers that he’d dreamed up under a blue sky day, and he indeed seemed to have imagined the world itself with his vigor.

He vividly saw a mysterious pool with a pebbled bottom, with periwinkles and flickering minnows around a dark castle of roots, and he’d explored it’s depths in a thrilling submarine adventure. Then, he had narrated the whole event as Effie listened intently.

It was quiet again, and the electrical air became still.

As the boy had now quite disappeared into the hall closet without a sound, Effie sat and rocked in her chair-- it was one of her favorite things to do-- she enjoyed bringing such a grandmotherly image into reality with a squeaky rhythm from that antique rocking chair. In an ocean of stillness, the chair announced the will of it’s occupant in a woody symphony throughout the floors, shivering a grooving bass-tone deep into the Earth itself.

According to the child’s simple instructions, Effie could simply rock the world into existence if she so chose to, and in fact here she sat, doing just that.

If the boy was correct, then the utility closet that he now explored was whatever he wished it to be. It may be a submarine right now, easing past a giant sleeping crawdad, or he could be steering a cloud-puffer, or flying next to a flock of prehistoric raptors, tipping a single feather enough to change everything in the world.

The air changed, and a new silence rang through the house. ”Grandma?” She had dozed off in the chair, maybe for just a second. The boy’s face was aglow, and he held forth a wooden paddle with a rubber ball attached to it by a flexible string. Apparently he had imagined such a thing to exist, or so the look on his face would have suggested.

”How do you play this?” The boy beamed, and Effie shook her head with a laugh. She did try to explain, but to put the toy into words? It was a device which rewarded each flick of the wrist with a sound, THOP! and the rubber ball would react to the intent of that gesture of the hand, radiating outward like an errant thought, and be that thought good or bad, the elastic cord would bring that ball back to the paddle with an equal force.

“Think such a soft rubber ball into the world enough times, and that you are sending it out-- so that it can come back to you” Effie explained.

”You get to choose which ones come back, and how quickly they return, by how hard you send them out.”

The boy seemed satisfied with Effie’s explanation, but was busily imagining a new world, one that involved chocolate again, and as if to test his skills and accuracy with this amazing creative device that he now commanded, he made a picture and put it into words-- out into the world, and felt the certainty that it would return, and that it was one of his favorite things to imagine:

”Grandma, do you still have any of those bonbons?”

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photo above is mine, 2018

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