mrlemur

[mrlemur]

And with all that, he almost completed his tasks for the day. There was just one more thing. Grabbing matches from the leftmost kitchen drawer, he then grabbed his small glass lamp. He checked to make sure it was still full of butter and then lit it. The soft glow of the lamp filled the room.

He grabbed the lamp in his mouth, and he tucked the matchbook under his right ear, to leave his paws free. He put on his biggest hat, slipped on his mittens, and then closed his eyes to take a deep breath to prepare himself. “One... two... three..." he thought to himself. "Go out!” And with that,  he quickly opened the door and slipped out of the kitchen into the frigid darkness of the unheated house.

In the midst of a darkness deeper than midnight, the floffbeast stood in a tiny puddle of light. From the small light of his lamp, he could see small outlines of familiar shapes made strange and otherworldly in the still darkness of a house buried in snow. 

There was the dark outline of the cuckoo clock that the Huttetu had brought from the mountains when she landed last spring, all 8 of its little wooden cuckoos hidden away, frozen in place behind their doors. The summer clothes was still in the corner, and a cup of floffberry juice was still on the side table that he had forgotten it in the fall, completely frozen solid. He had rushed this year. With all the preparations to say goodbye to the Huttetu for her big trip to the southern hemisphere, he had put everything off until the last moment, because he couldn’t bear the thought of summer ending. But of course, it did anyways, and he had had to scramble and rush to finish in a week what should have taken a leisurely month.

[mrlemur]

Totally ignorant of all this, the floffbeast groggily woke up to the beginning of another day in darkness. He was nestled in his box, amidst a bed of blankets stuffed with floffberry husks. The stove sleepily glowed in the corner, illuminating the windows which just showed sparkly darkness, since the floffhouse was buried in snow all the way up to its tower. Stretching sleepily, the floffbeast slowly did his winter morning things, heating up his small goose-shaped coffee pot on the stove, and making a small snack of toasted dark bread and floffberry cheese from the ample stocks in the pantry. He brushed his teeth with a soft willow twig, and then checked on his experiments (no results). And then, for his daily practice, picked up his floffbeastflute and tooted a couple absentminded notes.

[mrlemur]

Every night, in winter, the sea ice in the fjord meets up in the center of the deep waters and discusses the day's events.

"Wasn't it a little warmer today?" asked one of the smaller sheets worriedly. "We've only just come into existence and I'd hate to melt."

"Don't worry," said another, slightly older ice sheet. "I've been around for more than a few weeks, and I've seen that it gets colder and then warmer and colder and then warmer, but always finishes by getting even colder again." The other ice flows murmured in agreement, until, all of a sudden, a rogue tide pushed up a great swell all the way up from the deepest, most mysterious depths of the ocean, and tossed around all the ice sheets like little toys. They all became totally silent, terrified by the big dark blackness of unfrozen water stretching down below them into the unknown depths.

Of course, they had no idea their great great great great great grand ancestors had carved out those depths themselves, in the age of ice- only the very innermost heart of the glacier in the mountains above remembered, tucked up in the mountain's armpit. But that small, old bit of ice slumbered on, untroubled by its here-then-gone-again floating siblings. And of course the ice, having become ice, had forgotten entirely that it was the same thing as the water washing around it.

[mrlemur]

The floffbeast thought about the time the old dance floor in the barn had finally collapsed. The night before had been a splendid, once in a century party, in one of those glorious and unexpected lining up of circumstances- the long, glorious summer evening dissolving into fireflies, the musicians forgetting themselves in the spinning rush of the music, the magical evening creating a thousand hidden nooks away from the dance floor for small, dim, glittering conversations- and the dancing!! The dancing!! It was like your whole body was love, or laughter, or a cloud, or being carried by a wave on the sea. Quite impossible to put into words, and not a single person stepped on another's foot. But the wily old Huttetu had had an inkling that it was going to be a perfect party, and she had kept track of her spins, and, as the glowing twilight of night grew back into another glorious summer day, she triumphantly cried out that she had beaten the old record of Scrungly Bins, set during a drunken autumn night thirty years ago, and danced the most and most joyously anyone ever had in the floffbeast barn. But then, she didn't stop, since the musicians were still game, and had popped out in shifts to load up on coffee, and so she spun and spun, to solidify her record. She didn't stop, in fact, until that ancient floor, home to so many thousands of dances, suddenly collapsed. When the alarmed onlookers rushed over to a huttetu loudly insisting she was alright, they were astonished to see that the floor had been worn down, from gigantic ancient planks to be almost paper-thin, in the ring where dancing was.

All the friends of the floffbarn came together and pitched together the funds, and there was no shortage, and they were able to install a handsome new floor, good for another two hundred years of dancing.

[mrlemur]

[mrlemur]

Just a normal drawing of a normal horse.

[mrlemur]

[mrlemur]

[mrlemur]