Trip & Stumble

{ CHAPTERS 2 4 - 3 1 }

24

Stumble awoke to a luscious sin of a smell. Chocolate chip/blueberry pancakes with scrambled eggs and bacon. Her thimble was filled to the brim on this Friday morning with extra chocolate-chocolate milk, complete with a fairy-sized drinking straw for optimum bubble-blowing potential.

Stumble ate apprehensively but didn't put even a small portion of a helping to waste. She inspected her reflection in the window and saw that she too had been fixed up and washed clean. But the balk of the room was still in ruin. Stumble felt the Elmer's Glue residue on the cracks upon her itty bitty fairy heart. She began to cry out drops of Trip's sweat. She walked down the steps today, pit-falling one of each of the twenty-four steps at a time in reverse chronological order.

Trip was waiting by the front door with a grin on his face, "Ready to go on our best adventure ever, Stumble?"

Stumble cried harder and could only manage to force out this one line, "Trip, I love you so much. But I'm going back where I belong and I'm never coming back." And just like that, Stumble melted to her invisible state and carried her tear-soaked remains back to the portal above the old horse barn.

Trip didn't know how to feel. There was a definite emptiness lurking in his soul. "Was she really gone forever?" Trip had to know if Stumble was ok. He couldn't let her return to the fairy world so heartbroken and torn apart. He didn't even say goodbye! He, at least, deserved a goodbye.

Trip ran faster than he had ever run in his whole life over to the back wall of the old horse barn. There was a quiet hum of nature filling the air. "No!" Trip fell to his knees. "Don't go! Stumble! Come back, I can't live without you." Trip was sobbing like a boy could never admit. "I need you to come back to me-hee-heeee! Stumble!!!" His cheeks shone as bright as the reflections of sun that dipped and floated inside them.

Trip tried to stand, unsuccessfully. He fell right back down and hit his hand on something hidden in the grass. It was his grandfather's notebook. He opened it and saw that the rain had only scorched the outer rim of the pages. And Trip suddenly had an idea, an idea born of distress and driven by madness. "If I can't make Stumble come to me..." Trip ripped a large handful of grass and dirt out of the ground and threw it to the side of the old barn. He hit his grandfather's initials directly. "If I can't make Stumble come to me... then I'll bring everybody else to her!"

25

"Grams! Grams! Come quick!" Trip tore through the living room like a knife through a fairy. "Grams!" Trip pushed back her bedroom door and went in and sat beside her. "Grams you have to look! Pops found a portal to the world of fairies and I found one that fell into our world! Grams! Wake up! Grams?" Trip slowly reached his hand over Gram's shoulder and just as he was about to touch her... she snapped awake!

"Child, child! What's the matter, can't an old woman get any rest in peace?"

"Grams! It's unbelievable, I know, but Pops found an entryway to the world of fairies out behind the old horse barn when he was younger and now it's opened back up and I found a fairy that fell out here in our world!" Trip sat down on the bed and let his breath catch back up with him.

"What have you done to my Byron's notebook!?" She grabbed the notebook from Trip's fingers.

"Read it. It's all in there. I'm telling the truth. I promise!"

Grams felt the curves by the spine with her wrinkled old fingers and thought for a moment in silence. She closed her eyes and held open the pages of the notebook in front of her. Then she opened just one eye and looked into its contents. Trip felt his heart rest easy in his chest and sighed a great, big sigh of relief. But what Grams said next tore his heart right out of this dimension.