The Child of the Meteor: Chapter 3

 

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Lynn awoke mid-snore (though she was not aware of this), at the sound of her father’s car sputter and clank to life. That seemed to be her alarm clock. Though not always punctual, it never failed to wake her up.

Ordinarily during her summer vacation she resented this alarm clock, but on this day she welcomed it. Lynn rolled out from under her covers and pulled on some new clothes without bothering to wash up first. As she bounded the stairs and took the corner by the kitchen, she saw a piece of paper lying on the table. On it was a list of bits of information;

- Avoid dairy

- Mind the shades, sunburns easy

- Medication in top shelf of bathroom

- Call list of numbers if anything happens

Lynn skipped around it and made her way to the door to the basement. Unlike the rest of the house, the basement was relatively orthodox. A single light bulb illuminated the cold cement floors covered in boxes. Most of the boxes were from when they moved in, but had never been opened. Off in the corner was a small workspace. A toolbox, some partially cut wooden boards, and a thick layer of sawdust filled the area. After parsing through the toolbox and not having a single clue as to what any of the tools were, Lynn decided to just grab as much as she could carry, and she dumped it all in a dusty old hiking backpack lying nearby.

With the backpack slung over her shoulders, Lynn marched upstairs, grabbed an apple to have for breakfast, and set out towards to the forest. As she came upon the clearing, Lynn was nibbling the last bits of apple around the core.

The grass was now coming over the crater completely. If not for the grass in the crater being slightly shorter in height than the grass in the woods, it would be almost impossible to tell the difference. The white sand scattered around had settled into a ridge by the base of the meteor, where it bounded a small basin of water. The exploded cores of fruit had been presumably scavenged by wild animals, and the shattered bits of woods had all been collected into a pile. The whole scene was becoming very familiar. Something inside Lynn made her feel at home here, like this place was meant to be here.

Orion poked his head out from the other side of the meteor as she walked up. “Is that a fruit you have there?”

Lynn looked at the browning core of her apple and said, “I guess. There’s not much left.”

But Orion didn’t care. He ran over and pressed his wide eyes up close to the core. He looked up at Lynn in disbelief. “So you have them too!”

“What? Apples?” Lynn scoffed. “Of course we do.”

“Where are your fruit trees? I haven’t been able to find any in the forest. No apple trees, no orange trees, no cucumber trees, no banana trees. There aren’t even any bread trees!”

“What the- bread trees?”

“Obviously,” Orion rolled his eyes. “Where else are you supposed to get bread from?”

“The store!” Lynn shouted. “You get bread at a store! It doesn’t grow on trees, where on Earth did you get that idea?”

“Earth?”

Lynn threw up her hands in exasperation. “Yes, Earth. Where we are. The whole planet.”

“Oooh okay. I get it,” said Orion, nodding in understanding (He didn’t understand).

“Anyway,” Lynn said, “I brought some tools to help you fix up Home.” She overturned her bag and, with a metallic clang, a collection of hammers, screwdrivers, nails, bolts, wrenches, rope, saws, and a bottle opener all clattered to the ground.

It didn’t take long before both Lynn and Orion reached the conclusion that neither had any inclination as to how they were supposed to use these tools at all. Orion said that in order to make home fly again, they would have to build a sail.

“Well how did you make it the first time?” Lynn asked.

“It’s hard to say, it was so long ago. I think I just pulled all of the stuff out of the desert and tied it up to the fruit tree.”

“Desert? You have a desert on Home?”

“Of course I do!” Orion threw his hands up in the air. “It’s right there.” He pointed a tiny finger over at the base of the rock, at the small sand shore that surrounded the basin of water.

“That’s your desert? That’s barely anything! Deserts are huge!”

“Hey!” Orion shot back “That sand covered up the whole bottom half of Home. It’s a desert.”

“Oh and I suppose that water over there was your ocean?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Orion taunted. “It was the sea.”

“Whatever. What was that you said about making the sail?”

“I don’t know, I made it years ago!”

Lynn arched an eyebrow and peered closer at Orion’s small frame. “How old are you?”

Orion reached inside his coat and pulled out an old brass pocket watch. He flicked it open and pressed his face close towards it. “I dunno how old I am, but I’m older than 9,125 days that’s for sure.”

“What’s with that watch?”

“I started it when I first started flying Home towards this place. And it says that is has been 9,125 days since then, so I gotta be at least that old.”

Lynn shook her head at him. “You’re so weird. Let’s just get to that sail.”

They used the saw to cut down some thick branches from the nearby trees. Orion scrambled up the trunk of a tree with the saw in between his teeth pretending to be a movie star tough guy. He started sawing off the base of the branch and had carved a notch about halfway through when he became impatient and decided to crawl out onto the limb and jump up and down. The branch broke, Orion slammed face first down into the dirt, and Lynn could not stop laughing for the next half hour.

Once Lynn’s sides had become too exhausted to laugh anymore, they broke off all the twigs that split off from the main branch until they had a single, long stick.

“Now,” Orion explained, “We’ve gotta tie it to the tree.”

“There are trees everywhere, Orion.”

“Not those trees. My tree. It’s great! It grows everything you could ever want to eat.”

Lynn took a look around at the forest filled with pines and maple trees, all of which had a distinct lack of fruit hanging from them. “Well I don’t see it.”

“Not yet,” Orion rolled his eyes. “I’ve gotta grow it! I just need to find the seeds…Aha!” He lunged down at the grass by the base of Home and plucked out a small, inconspicuous white seed. With a smirk plastered across his face, Orion marched up to the top of home, carved a small hole, and planted the seed.

“That’s it?” Lynn frowned. “Trees take ages to grow. We’ll be here until we’re ninety!”

“Wanna bet?”

“Fine!”

Orion stroked his chin as if he had a long spindly beard. “If my tree is grown by tomorrow...I want you to come along with me on Home.”

“Well if your tree hasn’t grown by tomorrow, which it won’t, I want you to finally give me a straight answer about you.”

“Deal”

And they shook on it.