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.