The day has laid its head to rest at least just for a moment. The sky is dark, the stars are out, a million trillion stars to count. And if you focus in on one, then take three steps from that star called Sun, you’ll find a rock with little lands, where the middle of this tale began.
And the story goes, two adventurers, both curious and clever, could not seem to fall asleep in the heat of a smoldering summer.
“Hey…hey,” the younger one whispers across the darkened bedroom,
“Hey!” she tries again, and her raspy exclamation swims through the shadows, across the moonlight that splashes in from the large window between them, and through the shadows once more until it reaches the older one.
“I’m asleep,” the voice mumbles dismissively.
“No, you’re not,” the younger one protests. She scrambles into her cousin’s bed, having already traversed the distance between them, and pulls the covers tightly around her.
The older one sighs, putting her phone down. “And what’s wrong with your own bed?” she demands. But her younger cousin merely pretends to have fallen asleep.
The older one looks down, with a frustrated annoyance, but relents, throwing off the covers and getting up.
“It’s so hot, at least open the window,” she complains. She presses her palm hard against the old latch, worn shut with time and cracks the window open to let the summer breeze in. She leans her arms on the sill as the wind tickles her skin and in the distance, if she listens, there’s a faint whistling melody. She looks back at her cousin still pretending to sleep, as a mischievous smirk puckers her lips.
“You know… it was the strangest thing,” she begins, her voice feigning surprised contemplation. “Some kids from the neighborhood came up to me today. They were looking for you.”
The body under the covers shifts for just a moment. “Said you tricked their younger brother and his friends, convinced him to trade a pack of cards for…a bag of stickers?” The older cousin circles the bed watching the covers tighten.
“Told them it was a QR code.”
“They were making fun of us,” the younger one defends, throwing off the covers and abandoning her charade. “They said we couldn’t understand the game. What’s so hard to understand about cards?” she protests, sitting up quickly. “If they were so smart they’d–”
But the second she saw her cousin’s face, eyebrows raised in amusement, she grinned. “It wasn’t my best work…what’d you say? I know you didn’t rat me out.”
She scoffs. “Of course not. I told them they had to download a special app then scan the barcode.”
“And they believed that?” the younger one asks, her brow furrowed in disbelief.
The older one shrugs. “Probably not, but it bought us some time.” She hesitates, noticing her younger cousin’s shoulders rise and her face quiet with anxiety.
“Don’t worry,” she assures. “I think we can take ‘em.”
The warm assurance worms its way between the younger’s knitted brow and tense shoulders. A wily grin replaces her panicked expression as she asks her co-conspirator. “You wanna know how I did it?”
“Sure,” the older one sighs, her eyes softening before pulling half the covers out from under her cousin’s self made cocoon. “We should probably get our stories straight, and I can’t sleep anyway.”
“Okay so as I was saying…” the younger one begins, excitedly relaying her mischief, but before she can finish her tale, the bright lights of their room flicker on.
“Now, I know I told you two to go to sleep,” a voice says from the doorway.
“We’ve been caught,” the older cousin groans.
“You came upstairs an hour ago, have you been talking this whole time?”
“If we were, you would have heard us,” the older one mumbles under her breath.
“Are you sassing me, young lady?”
“No, Nana, she’s not!” the younger one answers quickly. And, thinking fast, she comes up with an excuse.
“We were gonna go to sleep, but–uh—well we felt we couldn’t possibly sleep without a story, right?” She nudges the older one for agreement.
“I guess,” her cousin responds halfheartedly.
“And why not?” their grandma asks.
“Because…uhhh…because what would we dream about?” the younger one stammers out after a moment’s thought.
“You don’t need to dream of anything, you need to go to sleep,” their grandma responds. She looks at the two of them for a long moment, then, turning to the older one, asks. “Is that true? Would you like to hear a story?”
“Do I have a choice?” she mutters sharply.
“I’m asking,” her grandma replies softly.
The older cousin looks down at her blanket and picks at the stitching. “I would like to hear a story,” she admits after a moment.
“And after that, do you two promise to go straight to sleep?”
“Yes!” the younger one states quickly, and the older one mutters the same.
“Alright then,” their grandma replies, walking over and sitting on the edge of the bed. She inhales, adjusts to the sink of the mattress and looks out the window at the crescent moon.
“Now let me see,” she contemplates, as her voice becomes dreamlike and far away. “Yes, I’ve got it,” she hums, before clearing her throat.