Rise of the Old King

When the new sun was born the impulse to kiss his remorseless, deathless face had to be held at bay. Slumbering peacefully, the lightest touch would rouse him, incurring the violence we feared and longed for. In our shinning world of straight edges, mirrored glass, blue screens and open source, it was easy to lose track of the other thing, that which lurked in the places we had avoided for so long, the real animal brutality of our own deepest subconsciousness. Emerging from the depths, and not from the skies where we raised our dream machines towards the stars, the old King returned to us from the realms of myth and shadow.

He came from the caves, from the hollow center of our world, a kingdom we had forgotten in our infancy as a race. Somewhere through the ages, in our race for distant suns, we ceased to look down at our own root. The memory of the inner Kingdom faded as the last pages of the world’s most ancient books turned to dust and blew into the cracked walls of crumbling libraries. When the first star was born in a magnetic bottle and its power was harnessed to make the world a fantasy of unending light, we shed that old skin of memory, of dream, shadow, and terror and began the expansion beyond the terrestrial.

In our quest to drink in the light of all the stars our universe could offer, in our dance with infinite space, and a newfound command of movement and time, we found worlds like our own. One in every thousand had the potential to raise life from its mineral rich soil, and on some we found the evidence of civilizations that had flourished and fallen before we had ever even mastered the use of fire. Thus, we learned that there had been life in the universe, but death had won over it.

Among the ruins of tumbled citadels sunk in grey sand dunes beneath the faint glow of a red star we wept. There would be no meeting with the alien other, no exchange of ideas or culture. Our archeological work began. Countless dead worlds came under our scrutiny as the expansion continued. For our biologists there came a few worlds where life was present as rudimentary single celled organisms. We would have to wait and see if our cosmic brethren might someday grow from one of these worlds.

Eventually, the expansion lost its appeal. Our songs had grown cool and calculated, our dreams had flown back to us empty handed. The age of our enlightenment was coming to a close. Our own star was near death for the second time. We had mastered the art of reviving it, yet it was upon this reoccurrence of imminent stellar collapse that we ceased to resist and plunged into darkness. The door to the inner world had been re-discovered in our arctic desert. Perhaps we had forgotten and remembered it many times during our evolution. Now we remembered it again. As our star shone small and white, its planetary nebulae dancing red and blue in the vacuum, the ancient seal was broken.

There would be no brotherhood among the stars, nor any great conquest there. No friends to keep nor enemies to vanquish, until the seal was broken, and the Old King rose from our hollow core with a fearsome bellow. His legions were loosed, his appetites awakened. In the moment of our most supreme boredom, we were catapulted into reckless, euphoric terror. Our Council was crushed, our infrastructure demolished, our stranglehold on light loosened.  The shadows grew longer, music roiled, wild and discordant, as the Old King showed us what it meant, that old word: vanquished.  He walked amongst us once more, drew us into the inner world and gave us gifts both beautiful and terrible. Upon the surface he ruled as he hadn’t for an eternity.

When the new sun was born the impulse to kiss his remorseless, deathless face had to be held at bay. The old King grew weary as it grew strong and we returned him to his sanctuary, singing our farewell. We were naked as we bore him back, our skins stained with the fruits of the vines, the soil from which they grew, the blood and sweat that had been spilled in our orgiastic remembrance. His legions followed and folded peacefully around him like fallen leaves upon a forest floor.  

The Magical Cake

None of the four Plum children ever understood their great uncle Alexander. He kept a great many strange artifacts in glass display cases throughout the house and begged the children to be careful whenever they visited. Running within the house was strictly prohibited. While some of the objects appeared to be quite valuable, others seemed questionable. In one case was kept an ugly wooden goblet which Uncle Alexander insisted  was, in fact, the holy grail, though their mother always pooh poohed this notion whispering to them that he had found it at a garage sale. The same sale, in fact, where she had obtained a rather obnoxious chicken shaped lamp.

In another case what appeared to be a potato sack was nestled between a beautiful ball of solid gold and a ring encrusted with diamonds and sapphires. Nearby this display also stood a shabby antique spinning wheel and a case containing a shoe made of milky blue glass that looked as though it might fit the foot of a 12 year old girl. In one case rested a decaying ball of thread, in another a bejeweled statue, and in yet another some aboriginal instruments adorned with feathers and bones. But of all the oddities preserved within Alexander Plum’s home, perhaps the most unexpected was a cake of unknown antiquity displayed on a solitary pedestal beneath a glass dome in the middle of his library.

While Addi Boo and Baby Ray chased bullfrogs by the pond in the garden and  Buddy  pilfered cigars to smoke behind the garden shed, Tilly Plum  stood transfixed for hours in front of the cake in the library. The frosting was an odd grayish color, which she supposed had once been white and probably would have tasted of vanilla. She would stand there wondering what flavor the cake might have been and what flavor it might still be if one were to taste it now. But most of all she wondered for what occasion it had originally been prepared and why it had never been eaten.

As the years passed and the Plum children aged Tilly continued to visit the strange gray cake in the library, memorizing the contours of the shell borders, roses and drop flowers. She took to cake baking and decorating at home, producing many replicas for birthdays, special dinners, and holidays.
Baby Ray once complained that she always made the same boring cake in different flavors. He, of course, didn’t realize that for Tilly, each cake was a different version of one particular cake whose true nature she could never know for certain. On one occasion Uncle Alexander found Tilly in his library deep in her meditations of butter cream, whipped cream, and royal icing. By this time Buddy was off in college and Addi Boo and Baby Ray had graduated to pilfering cigars to smoke behind the garden shed.

“I see something here has caught your eye.” Uncle Alexander said, coming to stand beside Tilly.
She nodded eagerly.
“I’m sure I don’t have to remind you, no touching, nor tasting.” her uncle added.
“Oh no. I know,” she told him emphatically. “I can have cake any other time. I would never touch this one. I just always wonder why it’s here.”
“Oh, well, I have it because it’s a magic cake,” he answered lightly and squeezed her shoulder before taking a book from the shelf and leaving the way he came.

This was indeed food for thought. That brief encounter left Tilly with more, rather than less, to wonder about. In fifth grade she penned a story entitled “The Magickal Cake.” in which a well meaning fairy godmother gave the cake as a wedding gift to a beloved princess. The princess was killed by a wicked witch and the kingdom fell under a dark spell leaving the cake uneaten. Its powers went unused and unknown.
Mrs.Gruber’s comments were written with scathing red ink in the margin, “Why is the cake magical? Why even mention the cake, if you don’t describe what it does? The story did not have the three elements of a story. There is no clear resolution to the conflict. Points deducted for spelling and punctuation. C-”

Naturally, Tilly was incensed. She wrote her own notes in the opposite margin.
“Three Elemints of  A story: 1.The begining: A mysteryous magical cake is made. 2. The conflict: A princes is going to ruin the mystery by eating it. 3. The resolutun: A wich kills her. My story is about a magiCKal cake that survives. Not a stupid princeses weding.”
After re-submitting the story with her own comments on the comments, Tilly was sent to the principal's office. Her parents were called in and the school recommended that Tilly speak with the school psychologist. Her mother, accustomed to accommodating a variety of difficult people since marrying into the Plum family, simply nodded, pursed her lips as if concerned, and indicated that they would consider the counseling. She whispered to Tilly on the way out that Mrs.Gruber had been seeing a psychiatrist for years now, in the same building, in fact, where Mrs. Plum saw a podiatrist for her corns.

For Uncle Alexander’s 106th birthday, Tilly created for him a replica of his magic cake. It was entirely undeniable by this point that Alexander Plum's magic cake had impacted his niece Tilly. After high school and some community college, she graduated from Le Cordon Bleu as a pastry chef and opened a high end cake shop on Colombus Ave.
Now, two years and one lost relationship into the endeavor, her personal funds exhausted, The Magic Cake was closing it’s doors for good. There were some last special orders to fill on Saturday, and then it would be off to the unemployment line and probably Baby Ray’s couch. Nonetheless, Tilly arrived that Friday night, cake in hand, to celebrate her uncle's continuing health and longevity.

Addi Boo was by then married with two year old triplets. Recognizing the impossibility of managing her brood in his makeshift museum, she hadn’t visited Uncle Alexander since their birth.
Baby Ray, recently divorced, came by often to keep the garden in shape, and particularly to care for the pond. He was absent on that particular Friday night, the occasion of Uncle Alexander’s sweet 106th birthday bash, due to an unavoidable trip to Las Vegas with the soon to be second Mrs. Baby Ray Plum. With Buddy in Brazil, and their parents on sabbatical in Florida, Tilly was the only other Plum in attendance, along with Uncle Alexander, and his live-in nurse, Amalia.

Uncle Alexander was surprised and delighted with Tilly’s replica of his cake. Spry as a man half his age, dinner was merry, the wine flowed. Even after Amalia had cleared the table, washed the dishes and gone to bed, Tilly and Alexander talked and drank. On the subject of his good health he chuckled and waved a hand,
“Gads girl, you know, I have the holy grail to drink from if anything ails me. That and more to scare off death.”
Of politic a weary sigh,
“Once you’ve lived as long as I have you’ve seen it all.”
And at last, of family matters, laughter, until Tilly herself was the subject. Then, too intoxicated to censor her woes, she told Alexander all that burdened her, more than she could ever tell Baby Ray or her parents. Who among them could understand her passion, her obsession with her cake shop?  Who could see the loss for what it really was? Not just a failed business, but the end of a quest.
“You know Uncle Alex, I always thought, maybe one of my cakes would end up some day under glass turning pearly gray, a cake too perfect to ever have been eaten, some little cyborg kid or something, wondering how it got there.”
She laughed sadly at herself then, but Alexander sat silent and perfectly still. His eyes had acquired a fiery gleam and his back had straightened. His manner demanded Tilly’s full attention and she felt herself sober up a little as he rose and left the room without a word.
Within minutes he returned carrying the magic cake, the original in its glass dome, and set it gently upon the table near the remains of Tilly’s replica. Tilly stopped breathing. She could feel the goose pimples rise all over her flesh as Uncle Alexander took his seat and spoke slowly in a tone she had never heard from him,
“I have lived so long you know. You kids and your parents knew me as great uncle Alexander, and you wont believe me, but your  grandfather knew me as the same. As many generations as I’ve watched come and go, and because I endure, no Plum has ever inherited one of my artifacts, nor ever shown the slightest interest in them, with one exception, long, long, ago. That makes you the second exception.”
He paused then, letting the weight of his words settle, observing Tilly’s breathless silence before continuing,
“I feel a certain responsibility to protect the items I have collected, not only from damage but from abuse. You’ve read fairytales, I’m sure, and so you must know that the guardian of a magical item can only entrust it to one whom they deem worthy. At least, that is my approach.”
Gingerly he lifted the glass dome, exposing the cake, and set it aside.
“I don’t know where it came from really. All I have found in my research is vague. I do know that it was passed down through generations of Austrian Princesses. This is the cake Marie Antoinette was referring to in her despair, when she cried, 'Let them eat cake!' And yet, even then, it seems it passed untouched. When the palace was stormed, and the royal family failed to escape, somehow, the cake did. It was returned to Austria until world war II, and then it was collected with a great many other artifacts by Adolf Hitler. After his death it made it’s way into private collections, finally mine.”
He pushed a fork across the table to her.
“I don’t know what the magic does.”
Steadying her trembling hand, Tilly picked up the fork. Slowly she brought it closer and closer to the cake she had spent countless hour admiring, speculating about, and endeavoring to reproduce. It was not, she now could see, the most artfully decorated cake. But it was pretty, if simple. She brought the fork within inches of its pearly surface. Everything was still.
She felt, for the first time, the naked strangeness of the house, its contents, her uncle, a strangeness that had always been pushed aside made into something small and silly, but now it loomed, immense, unfathomable, terrifying, and real. Suddenly, against such a backdrop, her cake shop, her financial worries, her failure in the eyes of her siblings and parents seemed inconsequential. It was her life which was silly.

In that moment, Tilly Plum knew that the cake was truly magical, and that true magic shouldn’t be squandered on petty material concerns. At the last moment she withdrew her hand and set the fork deliberately down. She took a deep breath and looked into the eyes of the man she thought of as her great uncle Alexander and wondered at all the strangeness. And he, whoever he was, whatever he was, relaxed back into his chair, his face melting once again into a broad easy smile, and said,
“Good girl.”

Crossroads

One time I was one of them. One of their kind. That was long ago, back when I used to practice shooting rag dolls out of the trees with Crispy.
We ran barefoot through the neighborhoods, me and the three sisters, following the strange music, our soles burning till they callused. Crispy was the youngest. Maybe that was why I liked to play with her so, because I was slipping away, watching childhood descend into the abyss beyond my reach. Shooting rag dolls with Crispy, I held on as long as I could.

But around then, that’s when I started biting boys. First Curtis, technically, though only very lightly. Because of this I’ve never known whether he changed, and maybe he didn’t because I never saw him again. He lived in the desert, but he came to play at our green lake.
The oldest of the three sisters, Angel, she liked him too, but could only express it through utter disdain which made it easy for me. I held his hand and we talked about eternity and something I would later learn that others called the eternal return, but at that time I’d never heard anyone else talk about it.
Curtis and I thought we were the only humans to ever think of it, and since we had both thought of it, it proved we were soul mates and that we had returned many times to this lifetime, repeating it every time we finished it, like re-watching a favorite movie over and over.
Considering this, the bite must have worked, but I never saw him again.

Then I started high school and met Xavier. He was beautiful and I bit him over and over,  never explaining anything- even though I was starting to understand it myself.
But with him I never talked too much about eternity. To him I preached a life of pleasure which was quite contrary to the blanket of misery he was wrapped in. So all the more I bit him and preached but he never showed a strong sign of enjoyment.
By my second year I knew what I was, that I was not like others. I was ready to embrace this, my true nature, whatever it was.

So I left high school and met Rex. Now Rex was a gunsmith and he cleaned my old six guns for me so I resumed my old habit of shooting rag dolls out of trees. But the three sisters were not so much a part of my life bv then and anyway Crispy had grown up, so I sent Xavier up into the tree to hold the dolls and made him flinch with the rabid barking of my guns.
Rex and I left the lake and Xavier behind and went into the snowy mountains.

Of course I bit Rex. With him I talked about the old Gods and we looked up the ancient rites and brought a tree stump into our living room for an altar and stole toilet paper and spoons from the local diners.
We got ourselves a little gray familiar but Rex was jealous of my relationship with the cat and he and I fought heatedly and frequently. But the familiar little feline followed us to the diners leaving adorable paw prints in the snow around the shadowy edges of buildings and pounced on us all night so that we never slept.
Then the apocalypse came and we went back to the sunny lake to eat my parents' rations.

I met Xavier at the S.S. Burger Basket one night and he was very bitter that I had left him. He spent the whole time talking about how awful Rex was so I made him stand on the table and shot burgers and gyros off of his head until he was shaking.

Rex and I fought more than ever. He was constantly afraid I was going to leave him behind, outgrow him. He also wanted to bite other women. For some reason or other we got married. 
Then I met some of my own kind out by the old Mission and told Rex I wanted a divorce. He said no and I shot him with a Russian SKS he had fitted with a special grip. Then for good measure I chopped his head off with the bayonet and buried it at a crossroads.

I moved in to the old Mission with my new found brethren imagining I would spend the rest of eternity with them. It was a very exciting time.
We ran an occult bookstore across the street from the Mission and lured people into “workshops” where we could dim the lights and bite them. We had very strict policies. Anyone we bit either came to live with us at the Mission or we killed them after they had attended a certain number of workshops.
Due to these policies, I never mentioned Xavier, or Curtis.

The leader of our group was called Calliope. He dressed like a clown,  led most of the workshops, and insisted that we should misunderstand his message. He had a childhood friend called Kaptin that lived up North  and occasionally came for our black Sabbaths.
One night Kaptin stole in through a mission window, put a black hood over my head and abducted me. He carried me off to his dilapidated castle overlooking the bay. I was incredibly flattered.
He chained me up and bit me each day. His wife, Delicious, was furious, as was Calliope.
Delicious joined Calliope at the Mission and together they launched an offensive and laid siege to the castle.
On the fifth day Kaptin and I came out of the castle together, guns blazing. I shot out Calliope’s eyes. His group carried him home and took his blindness to be a sign of greater wisdom. Delicious fled to the caves to hire a lawyer.
Kaptin and I formed a band and bit people here and there. Some joined us at the castle. We were very discreet.

The three sisters invited me to visit for the holidays. On one of these occasions I saw Xavier and took aim. I felt responsible for his abominable existence. But I couldn’t pull the trigger so I sent him a fruit basket and a card with a hand written apology.
The following year he responded by carrier pigeon., informing me that he would accept my apology if I attended a Christmas Party with him. At the party he carved the roast duck and showed me a wedding ring encrusted with emeralds and diamonds.
He had purchased it for a mail order bride in June. But after she arrived,  Svetlana stole his car with him in it and drove to the City of Lights. She hooked up with a muscular skinhead by the slot machines.  Xavier served as the flower girl at their wedding.

It was a very pathetic story, but he told it without crying so I was impressed and showed him how to use my guns. I got up on the table and danced while he shot at my feet.
Afterwards he told me that if we had ever married we would have worn flowers in our hair. Then he swallowed the ring and shot himself in the heart, ruining a nice leather sofa.
The hostess was terribly dismayed and asked me to leave the party. I cried, mostly because I would miss the white elephant gift exchange.
Tearfully I lugged Xavier’s cadaver to the crossroads and removed his head. The later I saved so I could use his skull as a drinking cup.
Thus ended my lineage, unless it’s true that Curtis is out there somewhere, biting his way through the world. I’ll never know.

Shortly after this episode I began to feel disassociated from reality. I had frequent fantasies about being an ordinary woman who did ordinary things with other ordinary people. I imagined that I would forget about eternity, bury my guns, and become a dental hygienist who sold Amway on the side and raced in triathlons on the weekends.
It wasn’t hard to imagine. After all, one time I was one of them, wasn‘t I? One of their kind, back before the biting and the shooting got out of hand.
I imagined that I would see a therapist that resembled Crispy and would work out my Daddy issues on a  burgundy sofa instead of by tormenting defenseless young men with instruments of violence. I would be a member of a homeowner's association, I would join a gym, I would buy wrapping paper from neighborhood children.

But I never  really was one of their kind. I was a latent whatever I am. A dark caterpillar waiting to turn into a black butterfly.
It took me some time to come to this realization. It was Delicious’ tortured screams that lured me back to reality.
One day I awoke again and found myself in the crumbling tower that overlooked the bay. Hearing the screams I shook off the torpor I had been bound in and crept into the bowels of the castle where Kaptin was playfully removing Delicious’ fingernails one by one.
“You’re back!” Kaptin greeted me joyfully. “Now you can help me to bite Delicious.”
It was only then that I noticed that the person chained to the dungeon wall was in fact not Delicious. Certainly they shared certain physical traits and even their names were similar, but this was someone new.
I tossed my hair and smiled merrily,
“Certainly. I never did mind the little things.”

Akio In The Park

The park bench was a mottled thing of orange and white and brown; paint jobs from different eras showing themselves unabashedly in a speckled milieu. Akio slouched on the bench, the uneaten portion of his sandwich wrapped in yellow wax paper resting beside him. He watched the duck who was almost as mottled as the bench and wore a strange red mask over his face like a super hero. It waddled about, turning its head from side to side to blink out of one eye or another, hoping for a crumb.
Akio reached for his orange flavored soda and took a swig from the glass bottle letting the carbonation tickle and burn his throat on the way down. He liked the park, this particular park, so many miles from home that he had to take a train and then hike to it in order to enjoy its charms. The great distance made his visits infrequent and enhanced its allure. Vaguely Akio could remember his grandfather bringing him to this park. The very small boy had held the old man’s soft wrinkled hand and had stared nearly eye to eye at one of those masked ducks.
“Akio,” the old man had said, “This is the most magical park in all of Japan.” The boy had looked around in awe. “I met your grandmother here. In some ways, this park is the reason that you exist.”
Saying this, his grandfather had squeezed his hand and smiled at him and Akio had felt then, more than on any birthday, that his life was a gift, that both he and Grandfather were so lucky that there was an Akio, that without the park there could easily have been no Akio.
He watched with great dismay as a young woman, far off, peered at the sky and opened an umbrella.
“What a stupid girl.” He said to the duck, because, of course, it must not rain today. He had come so far to be here, sitting on this bench, speaking to this duck, watching with some anxiety that girl out there.
Looking at the sky, he agreed that it might rain sometime today, later when he was taking the train home, but not now. The sandwich should be finished, the soda bottle with its graceful long neck emptied, and the path through the trees walked slowly with relish.
Even as he thought these things he felt the first drop hit the bare skin of the back of his arm. Then another plopped rudely down on the wax paper covering the sandwich. The duck turned one eye on Akio and three more drops speckled the concrete between them. Akio sighed. Then as the rain began to fall with greater speed and a more consistent rhythm, he scooped up the sandwich and bottle and deposited them into his back pack.
The girl with the umbrella was hurrying along the path leading down hill. Perhaps she too was heading for the train and perhaps she wouldn’t mind sharing her umbrella. Using the bag to shield his head from the onslaught of water, he took one last look at the bench where he had intended to spend his afternoon, then bidding the duck farewell, he ran after the girl huddled under her big black umbrella.

The Little Man And The Map

It was a crisp day, a morning bright with blue light that showered on her from a cloudless sky. The leaves of the dense woods were tinged in varying shades of yellow and orange and the cold air bit at the tip of her nose and left stinging kisses along the edges of her ears. The young girl walked alone along a thin trail that wound itself through the woods in lazy, meandering curves. Fallen leaves crunched beneath her feet and under the weight of her shoe, she left them as small as confetti pieces. The scent of the leaves mingled with the aroma of earthy soil and she inhaled it all deeply, letting the cold scented air fill her lungs with its raw life. She felt more than alive, she felt electric beneath the changing canopy of trees, amid a world were words were useless simulated communication. With each step, she saw more and more, as through each move forward took her deeper into a world of mystery that usually lay beyond her grasp. Now she was here, walking, alive. She saw tiny brown capped mushroom heads sprouting from the ground. A bright green caterpillar inched its way across a fallen twig. An owl interrupted from his nap by the sound of crunching leaves flew overhead, looking for a meal.
In a curve of the path, the little girl saw a large tree, thirty steps away. It looked like all the other trees that surrounded her, only it wasn’t, there was something different about it. Filled with curiosity, she stepped off the path. She approached the tree slowly and saw there was a small opening at the bottom, a little door just big enough to poke her head in. She got down on her belly and pushed gently on the wooden door. When her eyes adjusted to the dim light within the thick trunk, she saw a small Native American man sitting on a tiny stool made of bark.
He looked to her and their eyes held steady and she knew he had been expecting her. Had he waited a thousand years for her to walk the path, to see the owl, to find the tree? She smiled and said hello. He did not move his mouth, his expression did not change, he sat still on his little stool, but the little girl heard him,
"Hello!" he said back enthusiastically.
The tree was silent, he was silent, and yet, he spoke to her and she could feel the warmth of his voice, the tenderness of his heart. The little girl smiled again.
The little girl broke their contact naturally and turned her head to look around the small room. There was a small fire in the far corner which gave off just a bit of warm light. The little man pointed to the back wall. She turned her gaze and saw a map carved into the tree. "Where will this map lead?" she asked her question silently, thinking her thought and then sending it to him like an open letter.
"It is a map to your heart."
The little girl was taken aback
"To my heart?!?!" she squealed.
The small man with tan skin nodded. She turned her head again to the map. A faint blue light came from it.
"To my heart." she repeated.
She stared at the map, letting time fall around her, letting her limbs grow numb, letting the forest continue on its charge towards death and rebirth. She stared at the map, her eyes fixed on the charted path to her own heart, the internal voyage that seemed a world away, an odyssey of a task. The image burned, though her eyes, past the various masks already imprinted on her young body. She let the map burn, moving through her bones, past her personality and past her learned habits and she let it burn itself into her soul. Each line of the map went in, becoming a new vein, a new course, a new path to follow.
The little man handed her a small rock. It was a small cracked geode. She held it tightly and tilted it back and forth, the sparkling center twinkled in the light of the fire and sent sparks of light across her face. She peered through the crack, looking deep, as deep as she had when she saw the details of the forest. She looked and looked and looked some more, and then, she saw it, inside the illuminated center of the geode was a smaller version of the map on the tree wall.
"Take this with you wherever you go,” the man explained. "It will be your Guide.”
The little girl put it in her pocket.
“How can I ever thank you enough?” she asked.
"Use the map. Follow your heart. That is how you can thank me."
The little girl smiled, wider than she ever had before. The sun opened in her face, the world came through her eyes and she held out a finger and touched the tiny man's heart. It glowed blue and she felt the ground let out a slight tremor and then he disappeared. She ran back to her house, clutching the geode in her hand the whole way. In her room, she placed the rock under her pillow, the soft place she kept all her treasured possessions. She was anxious to start the search for her Heart… but first, it was time for a nap.