Wooden Tears

There once was a girl named Livi who cried.  She cried when it rained, or when her brothers fought.  She even cried when she heard beautiful music.  And when she saw a pretty flower, then she cried as if her heart would break.

One day Livi saw a carpenter sawing a piece of wood.  Dust motes floated in the sunlight all around him, and what do you think happened.  Yes, she got a little teary.  All of a sudden a piece of sawdust fell into her eye and she blinked.  What came out was--a wooden tear!

From that day on, all of Livi's tears were made of wood.  Perplexed, she went to the village healer.  He gave her a vial of rose water with which to bathe her eyes twice daily.  When this proved ineffective, she sought the help of the village witch.

The witch made her an ointment of elderberries and beeswax to smear on her eyelids at bedtime.  But the greasy concoction had unfortunate adhesive effects, so Livi discontinued its use.

Livi's younger brothers, Petra and Lief, took to gathering up the tiny beads of wood and performing experiments on them.  They found the wooden tears to be buoyant, aerodynamic, highly flammable, and most wonderful of all, to glow in the dark.

One day as Livi was weeping woodenly through her math homework, there was a clap of thunder and darkness covered the village.  Only Livi's house had any light, due to all of Livi's tears.  Neighbors gathered to the little house, comforted by the soft glow.

The darkness lasted several days, and the neighbors needed light of their own, so they lined up and each told Livi a story, or sang her a song, or described the most beautiful thing they had ever seen, to make her cry.  Her brothers would bottle up her wooden tears and give them away, and the neighbors would take them home to light their houses.

The dark days took their toll on Livi.  When they unexplainably lifted, and the sun returned, her eyes were red and her heart felt tired.  She went to bed.  The next day nothing looked the same.  The colors didn't glow as brightly for her, the mountains didn't make her weep.  Her brothers fought and her eyes were dry.  Not even wooden tears came.

Livi decided it would be a good time to do her math homework.  The numbers usually made her want to cry, but not today.  She sat down and finished a whole worksheet.  There could be advantages to not crying, she decided.

Then she went and cleaned her room.  And organized her closet.  She did all of the things that would usually take her a long time, and she finished them.  One day, maybe she would be able to cry again, but until then she would do what she still could.

And that is how Livi passed all her math classes with an A plus, until one day she stumbled over a piece of wood in the forest, and looked up to see a carpenter.  He was carving something with a pocket knife, and he said, "Come see this."

So Livi came to him and looked at what he was carving.  It was a little wooden tear.  He said, "You lost this," and he gave it to her.  She felt something wet in her eyes.  A real tear ran down her cheek.  She looked up, but the carpenter was gone.
 

The Princess and the Sweet Pea

There once was a princess who lived with her four brothers in a castle on an island in a lake.  The princess loved flowers, especially sweet peas, so one day her well-meaning brothers gave her some sweet peas to plant outside her window.

The princess planted the sweet peas, imagining how beautiful they would be when they grew to be flowers.  "I want some to be pink, some to be blue, some to be red, some to be purple and some to be white," she thought.

That night the sweet peas grew and grew.  The princess slept past her alarm, for the sweet peas were already blocking the sun from her bedroom window!  When she awoke, she thought it was still night, but feeling rested, she got up and looked out the window.

What a strange sight awaited her: nothing but sweet pea vines filled and effectually blocked the sunlight from her bedroom window!  With a cry, the princess ran out to see the marvelous sweet pea plants.

Far above her head, the vines were putting forth blossoms in all the colors she had hoped to see: pink, blue, red, purple and white!  The huge blossoms withered and transformed into seed pods, which grew to an enormous size, bursting with loud fireworks of seeds, which hailed down all around the princess.

Sadly, one such seed landed rather heavily upon the princess herself, and she suffered a mortal blow.  As she breathed her last, her four brother gathered round and exclaimed, "Alas, our sister is killed by a falling sweet pea!  She must have been a real princess!

The Flooded Kingdom

It rained for four days, until all the roads were impassable.  It rained because a magician named Sory mixed up his weather spells and couldn't remember the remedy.  Frantically Sory tried to undo what he had done, but the rain continued to fall.

Soon after the rains began, a baby boy was born to the queen of the kingdom.  The king and queen consulted together and came up with the name Noah.  Noah was a normal boy, except that he was born at a soggy time and place in history.  He learned to swim before he could walk, and was taken out in a boat instead of a baby carriage.

Sory tried to make amends to the young prince for all the rain by inventing the first raincoat, but he could do no more, and died of guilt for having made it rain so much.

By this time, the kingdom was nearly completely destroyed.  Most of the poor had lost their homes and come to take refuge in the castle.  The king sent out an appeal to all the wise men in the land to find a way to stop the rain, but no one could locate the elusive remedy.

Finally the castle itself was flooded, and the whole kingdom took to their boats, and sailed down the flooded waters all the way to the sea.  They became refugees on the seashore and built huts out of palm branches.  They lived for awhile on coconuts and wild game, until they were able to prepare fields and plant crops from seeds they had prudently brought with them.

Years passed, and little Noah grew into a youth.  He pestered his father to let him study magic in order to stop the rain in their homeland.  His father allowed it, but with this advice, "Dear boy," he intoned, "study all you want, but if you find you are prone to confuse your spells, by all means desist!"  To this advice Noah promised to adhere, and went to study Sory's magic books.

Several years later Noah stumbled upon the lost remedy for deluges.  He found it in one of Sory's old cookbooks, between the recipes for scrambled eggs and ludafisk.

A shiver of destiny swept over him, and he went to his father with the discovery.  "Father," he declared, "I have found a possible solution to the flood:  I will need a boat to return to our inundated kingdom where I must work the remedy for the deluge."

"Very well,"said the king, "you may go."

Noah sailed one of his father's ships all the way back up the floodwaters to the site of the old kingdom.  He sailed up to the highest mountain and began to climb until he climbed above the rainclouds.  He climbed till he came to the very top of the high mountain.  For the first time in his life, he saw the sun shining above him.

From where he sat, he began to work the remedy for the flood.  He took two teaspoons of cloud, mixed them with one tablespoon of rain and one teardrop.  He added some artificial tears for good measure and shook everything together.  Then he sprinkled the mixture over the raincloud nearest him.

Soon the raincloud turned blueish pink and evaporated, followed by the next raincloud, and the next.  Noah watched in awe as the rainclouds all disappeared, one at a time, and the flooded kingdom slowly appeared below.