Hello dear fellows and sheilas of the Locals community. Here is a little story I've been working on called Barry Baxter and the Magical Pygmy Possums.
Please comment below so I know you've read it. If people are getting sick of these I'll stop.
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Chapter 2
So this one hot day in January me and my mate Z were driving to Kapow! Windows down, Farmer’s Union Iced Coffe’s in hand; loving life. We were on our way to play Mindcraft. And no, I don’t mean Minecraft. I mean Mindcraft. Think D&D for intelligent people. So anyway we walk in through the shop and the bell rings, the bell on the door, you know? And I see this girl there that I hadn’t seen before and she’s wearing these shoes that are fluffy like kittens. And I think to myself, “man, those shoes look like kittens.” No sooner did I think this than her shoes actually turned into kittens. Like real kittens. Sorry, I need you to understand this. I don’t mean her shoes changed into different shoes. Shoes that looked like kittens or shoes that had pictures of kittens on them. I mean her shoes were gone and in their place, a pair of gray kittens … I watched them—the kittens—screech in agony right before they died. The girls' feet were in the kittens. Like in the kittens. Through their backs and I guess into their innards. I can only assume they materialized out of nothing and then lived long enough to be crushed by that girl. Freaked everyone out, obviously. Gus and the rest of the guys at the store—including Z—just assumed the girl brought the cats in with her and that they didn’t notice until, according to them, she just jumped on them. Place went crazy. People were screaming, chairs were pushed back, a table flipped over, cards and dice and game pieces scattered over the floor. Kapow! closed for the day. There was an investigation. Not sure whatever happened to that girl. Probably in some kind of home. No one believed her, of course. Poor thing.
Poor ol’ Z, being an animal lover, took a while to recover. Wasn’t in the mood to play Mindcraft. Said he wanted to go home. Play some Zelda. “No worries,” I said. We hit up Maccas on the way home. Sustenance.
So we get back to Z’s house and I’m watching him playing the new Zelda. But I wasn’t really watching if you know what I mean. My eyes were pointed at the screen but I was all up in my head. Trying to understand what had happened. Wondering if it really were me who made those cats appear. So I look down at my shoes. They were red. I imagined them yellow. Boom, they turned yellow. Pretty freaky, hey? So then I start wondering if it’s just shoes or if I can make other stuff happen. I look across the room at this replica of Sting Z has from The Lord of the Rings. I imagined it with a scabbard. Nothing happened. I imagined it with a scabbard again. This time concentrating really hard. Nothing. Weird, I thought. I then looked down at my watch and imagined it with a different strap. I had to concentrate. Boom! It turned from one of those annoying bloody metal one’s that pinch your arm hair into a black leather one.
I turned to Z wondering how to tell him. Z, I said, “you know that thing that happened at the shop.” “Shit,” he said, “don’t bloody remind me.” “Well, I said, umm. I have some news about that.” He’s like, “yeah?” “Well,” I said. “That lady didn’t jump on those cats. You see … what happened was. … I turned her shoes into cats. With my mind.” Z just laughed in an awkward sort of way. Then when I didn’t laugh with him he looked at me and then stopped laughing. He was like, “you’re not serious.” And I looked at him and I said, “Z, my friend, I’m as serious as a heart attack. I turned her shoes into kittens. On accident, obviously.” He put down the controller and asked me why I’d joke about that kinda thing and said I knew that he loved cats and that it wasn’t funny. I took a sip of my Iced Coffee, cracked my knuckles and then asked him if he believed in evolution. Weird question, right? I was trying to throw him off. Shake him out of his closed minded ways of thinking. “What the hell are you talking about?” he said. I asked him a second time, eyes wider and head slightly tilted for effect, “do ... you” I asked, spacing out the words “believe … in … evolution? Survival of the fittest, that all life forms have evolved from a single-celled organism.” He just looked at me and asked what the hell all this had to do with exploding kittens. Hah! Literally just made that connection. … Anyway, I tell him to just answer the question. He says he does. Okay, I said. “Now, what if we could rewind the film of evolution and play it again. Isn’t it possible that instead of the life forms we now see, a whole different set of creatures could have evolved.” He agreed and so I said, “men like us could have had wings.” Z began screwing up his face like he was about to object but I didn’t have time for that so I interrupted him and said, “I’m just saying it’s possible, no?” He relented and said “sure, it’s possible.” “What about our five senses,” I asked him. “Isn’t it possible that we could have evolved with fewer? Worms, for example, can’t see. Don’t have eyes. Z, again, was about to object. Said something about light receptors. “Yeah, that’s great mate,” I said. “They can’t bloody see the way we can. Light receptors aren’t sight the way we know sight. That’s all I’m saying.” He gave me a skeptical look. “Alright then, how would you explain what a rainbow looks like to a worm? Go on, try it.” Z just looked at me and said he wasn’t going to try it. “But you get my point,” I said. “Our five senses engage five realms—as it were—of reality: eyes see, ears hear, noses smell, tongues …” “Yeah, I get it, I get it. What’s your point though?” Not as quick on his feet as me, old Z. I looked at him and said “my point is that if certain life forms have evolved with fewer senses than we, and if it’s possible that we could have evolved with fewer too, maybe … just maybe it’s possible we could have evolved with more. Think about that,” I said. “How crazy is the concept of sight to a worm?” “Yeah,” said Z with that skeptical look again. “a worm can’t understand us though,” “Anything we try to say to it would be incomprehensible.” “Fine,” I said, “a blind man, then. blind from birth. He can understand me, can’t he.” “Sure,” said Z, “all things being equal.” “All things being bloody equal.” I said in a mocking tone. “What are you doing? Trying to derail the conversation at all costs?” “Fine,” he said “yes. He can understand you.” “Thank you,” I said. “Now, Imagine trying to make him comprehend what the color purple is like. How do you describe what a mountain looks like or a sunset, or any of that? Go on, try it” Z said he wasn’t going to try it. “But you get my point,” I said. “Just like a man blind from birth couldn’t comprehend colors and things so we with our five senses wouldn’t be able to comprehend a sixth realm which lies completely beyond our realm of sensation. You see?”
Z, fed up with the conversation, picked up his controller and began playing Zelda again. Without looking at me He asks why I’m so sure a sixth realm exists and didn’t this all amount to an argument from silence.
“Shall I show you how I know,” I asked? “Sure,” Z said, his eyes not moving from the screen in front of him, “why don’t you show me.” And that’s when I turned his television into a gigantic potato chip. I didn’t imagine it bolted to the wall, I guess, so it dropped from where the TV was and hit the floor.
Z—and I swear I’m not making this up—Z drops his controller to the floor and looks at me with a jaw that couldn’t have dropped lower if he tried. I get up and walk towards the potato chip which had broken a bit from hitting the floor. “You see?” I said and took a bite out of it. Tasted good too. Z stood up and tried desperately to speak but couldn’t. Said later that it was like a hundred sentences were trying to come out of his mouth and all got jammed there. “It’s alright, I said. You’re looking at me like a worm looks at a man. Not that a worm has eyes. We’ve been through that. The point is … the point is,” I said. The point is you’re afraid; but you don’t need to be, okay? That realm of reality that no one has accessed up until now. The realm that is so unthinkable it’s laughable. … I’ve accessed it. Just like sight and touch enables me to manipulate lego, say, or Link on the screen over there, so this new realm I’ve tapped into enables me to manipulate reality. Z went to sit back down on the couch but missed. He got right back up again and looked at me and then looked at the chip, and then looked at me. “Have a bite,” I said, “go on.” He finally got one of those sentences out: “what happened to my TV? Where the hell did this potato chip come from?” And a thousand more questions like that. I was like, “Z, mate, I just told you. I can change things with my mind.”
Without taking his eyes off of me he pointed at a lamp in the corner and said, okay. … change that into a … into a … gherkin.” “A gherkin?” I asked and he was like, yeah, a gherkin. So I did. The lamp vanished in an instant and I saw a gherkin fall from where the lamp shade was to the carpet. Z started to laugh in a sort of crazy way as he walked over to inspect the gherkin. I for some reason was completely calm. Z and our buddy Karen—who I haven’t mentioned yet. We’ll get to her soon. Anyway, they’re always asking how I’m so calm and level headed and intelligent. That’s just me, you know?
