The Strange and Fantastic Adventures of Melonie Cricket

Melonie Cricket - Coincidence is unrealistic.

It is a strange place, this world of ours. Full of interesting creatures and overflowing with unique and wonderful things.
And yet, the ordinary person, who is generally preoccupied with the "real world", and "taxes", and such, never stops to contemplate the queer beauty that has been lavished upon us.
So, it is not all that unusual, I suppose, that if people do not notice the regularly bizarre things that are right in front of them, they most certainly would not notice those things which are hidden deep underneath layers of logic and reason. Particularly magic.
People do not believe in such things, even when it set plainly before them. Magic exists everywhere, in every heart a freckle of magic is hidden, however small.
In those unfortunate people who beat down every shred of wonder and imagination in their lives the magic is never expressed.
But for the people who hold onto the unexpected and wait for the miraculous, magic has a way of letting itself into the physical world through them.
Usually the only result of this is being particularly good at spelling, or having the uncanny ability to predict the next song that will play on the radio. Some people have amazing luck when it comes to finding lost money on the street, or perhaps the magic allows them to always find the one pen that works out of a pile of empty ones.
There once was a man, who, how ever sweaty and dirty he became, was unable to shake the pleasant petrichor musk that had followed him throughout the entirety of his life.
In all of the examples here the user is unaware of the magic in their lives, for it comes in very mundane forms. The magic is so very bland, in fact, that most people accredit these peculiarities to coincidence or luck.
There are a select few, however, that are unable to let the strange feeling of awkward oddity pass. The realization that magic runs as an invisible current throughout our lives is a difficult and curious one to come to, but that is exactly what Melonie Cricket did.
It was always plain to her that there was no such thing as coincidence or luck. Melonie was always a strange girl, and made stranger still to her parents and friends when she plainly explained to people that they had not, in fact, won the lottery by chance, but that the lucky victor had an abundant amount of magic that allowed his chances to be significantly increased.
It was rather disconcerting to her teachers, when she expressed to them the desire for magic relating to animals in the second grade. Now wanting that particular gift was a common one among most second grade girls, but Melonie was the only child who had ever seen that the help of magic was a requirement of becoming a veterinarian.
So, when the little girl decided that she wanted her hair to be amber and that she wanted freckles like her friend Riley, her mother and father were rather shocked to find that their daughters hair had suddenly started growing red at the roots instead of the honey blond it had always been, and that small freckles had been scattered like little kisses across her nose during the night.
But such strange occurrences became common in the Cricket household, so when Melonie told her parents that the cat had turned pink because she wanted it that way, they merely shook their heads and wondered if that could possibly be true.
When Melonie was younger they had scolded her for lying, but when the door handle to her room developed a face and started talking about the white rabbit shortly after her introduction to Alice's Wonderland, they thought perhaps there was something to the nonsense that seemed to be constantly bubbling from their daughter's mouth.
It when she was six, her parents noticed three mysterious men in trench coats standing just outside the circle of light from the street lamp outside their house, staring at the Cricket house underneath their dark hats. The Cricket parents then decided that perhaps something should be done about little Melonie. Never before then did they think that they should possibly be concerned about the gifts of the little girl.
As it turns out, the three men were from their local public library, the cat had an overdue book, but even still, the fear that someone sinister would someday discover Melonie's abnormalities was present in the Cricket household for ever after that incident.
Unfortunately, those fears were realized in the form of a minor misadventure on her eighth birthday.
They had been enjoying a nice day in the park; Melonie's mother had brought pizza and chocolate ice cream for her birthday lunch, which was Melonie's favorite.
She had been playing with her new mechanical bird on a chain her father had given her. It was made from gears and springs left over from his work in the clock shop (or the horology emporium), and she was sure to make it fly later.
She had just put it over her neck and was going back to her chocolate ice cream when a loud boom and an explosion of blue smoke erupted from over the hill.
Melonie's parents immediately dropped their bowls and her father scooped her up, beginning to run away from the disturbance. Blue smoke was definitely not luck or coincidence, and the threatening man that stepped out of the haze was most certainly was not.
He turned and pointed a twisting black wand towards the little picnic.
Protecting their daughter from unfortunate people was of the highest priority to the Crickets. At the same time, protecting her parents was of the highest priority to Melonie.
So, while her mother stood in the way of the blue smoke man, Melonie observed from her father's arms as they ran. She watched as her mother, armed with only courage faced the malignant figure.
She knew these were dire straights, and as she watched the fear on her father's face, she realized that her abilities were perhaps the only weapon they had.
She looked down at the small bird around her neck, and had an idea to do much more than her parents expected to the little bird, which was merely to make it fly.
Jerking it from her neck, which hurt more than it seemed to hurt in the movies, she launched it into the air. As it soared, its wings and metal heart started to click, and the coin sized bird began to grow.
At one moment it was small enough to rest in the palm of a child's hand, and the next it was large enough to swallow a large adult.
Which is exactly what it did. Zipping over to Melonie's mother, the bird opened its long thin break and gulped down a rather shocked woman.
The apparent villain stepped back. I suppose anyone would be rather appalled to find that the person you are trying to kill has been swallowed by a giant bird, so considering, he handled it quite well.
Melonie's father on the other hand, did not. He had witnessed the whole affair, and as you can imagine was rather upset.
He stopped suddenly, dropping his daughter, and stared, open mouthed, at the bird which had just eaten the love of his life.
Melonie tugged at his sleeve for him to keep running, but he did not budge.
After a minute of her begging falling on deaf ears and the apparently evil man coming closer and closer along with his blue smoke, Melonie decided that perhaps it would be best that her father join her mother in the stomach of the bird, which was hovering just above the tree line.
After the bird had swallowed her father, Melonie shrunk it back down and placed it back around her neck.
She turned to where she knew the nearest people were and started running. Now no little girl can run faster than a fully grown man, so it was just as well that Melonie didn't have to run for very long.
When she got to the first road going into the city, not far from where the Crickets had parked their car, she found the nearest pothole, which wasn't a difficult task (the state of the roads in her city made Melonie wonder where all those taxes were in fact going), and jumped straight through and into the place below the ground.
Melonie had been to this place before by jumping into a little pit of sand she had dug at the beach, but she had not visited for several years on account of her parents had become very concerned.
She dropped into the purple market, which was filled with enough people to successfully hide her from the apparently evil man should he have the ability to follow, and judging from his rather sudden arrival in the crowd using blue smoke, he did.
Hopping on a small rock and then turning in circles, Melonie searched carefully though the crowd for the purple police. A tall pigeon in a violet outfit stood on guard in front of a watermelon stand. She hopped off the stone and trotted up to him. Yanking on his jacket, she pointed to the apparently evil man when he looked down at her.
The pigeon pushed Melonie behind him when he saw the hostile and stormy expression disfiguring the man's already unpleasant features. His wand was outstretched and a flash of blue light shot suddenly from the tip, lifting and bending the violet pigeon into a smaller and smaller shape, until he was but a small purple box on the street.
The patrons of the purple market began to spread and run, and creatures scattered with the shrieks of the purple polices' whistles. A rhino ran full force at the back the apparently evil man and he bent backwards over the officers horn in a manner that made Melonie violently uncomfortable.
The black twisting wand clattered to the stone street, and when no one picked it up Melonie stepped forward and held it awkwardly in her hand. She kept it in her pocket as she was ushered, and the apparently evil man was carried, to the giant amethyst that was the purple police headquarters.
Melonie was given a little stool to sit on, and she sat quietly while swinging her legs back and forth. After she grew tired of unavailing inquires, she pushed the questions the mer-squirrel that worked the front desk aside, and set back out upon the streets. She climbed the stone slab stairs back to the upper world, and set out for home.
Along the way she stopped at the park and picked up her family's things; the ice cream was mostly melted, but after blowing on it for a minute it cooled considerably. She gathered everything in the checkered blanket and flung it over her shoulder as she had seen hobos in the Sunday comics do.
After Melonie realized that it was much farther home than she had expected, she circled back and found her father's car, or 'Bella', as her father called her.
She wasn't exactly sure how the giant vehicular contraption she was sitting in functioned, but she crawled across to the passenger seat and found a manual in glove box. After turning it n all directions, she realized that the words were not, in fact, in another language or upside down, but they were merely jibberish. She threw it out the window and climbed back into the driver's seat.
By copying what she had seen of her Father's driving, Melonie was able to successfully roll out onto the streets, but after she nearly swerved into the wrong lane, she decide her Mother's example was much better.
She pulled into the driveway of her home, and after unlocking the door with her teeth, she shut the door behind her and plodded through the thick carpet into the living room, where she sat down in her Mother's rocking chair.
The little bronze bird, still around her neck, clicked. Melonie removed it from herself and opened the head. Picking the two little eggs out, she looked them over carefully. After a moments indecision, she carried them out into the kitchen. Opening the fridge, she took out an egg carton and set the two bird eggs in empty spots, and then replaced the carton carefully in its spot. Taking things out of a refrigerator is often comparable to playing Jenga.
The grandfather clock in the hall yelled out that it was bedtime so Melonie skipped into her room and changed into her puppy footy pajamas. After taking the apparently evil man's wand from out of her pocket and setting it in the pen cup on her desk, she laid down and closed her eyes.
A commotion rose up from the kitchen, and exactly three minutes and sixty-seven seconds later an incredibly feathery and slimy pair of parents came crashing into her room. Her Mother had a piece of eggshell sitting on her head.
"What on earth were you thinking?! What happened?! Where is the apparently evil man?! Why are you just laying there!?!" Her mother and Father exclaimed.
Melonie sat up.
"I was thinking I wanted to come home, what happened was that I wanted to come home, the apparently evil man is with the purple police in the purple market at the place below the ground, and it's bedtime. Clock said so. Goodnight."

The End