For the special little girls who grace the cage.
Be sure to enjoy wonderful Jade's bedtime song.
Daftsville is a strange little place, found on the back of some treasure maps. Not all of them though, and never in the same place. Children and pirates know that no two treasure maps are ever the same. Ever. Well, maybe sometimes, but that would be very unusual. And Daftsville was unusual enough without being filled with i-den-tick-L treasure maps.
It wasn’t the blue furred Daftnessians with their large padded feet, or the marshmallow fairies who flew through the streets that made Daftsville so unusual. (The fairies weren’t MADE of marshmallow. That would be silly. Marshmallows were just their favorite food.) No, what made Daftsville weird, what made it so strange, was the wind that never blew down in the valley. Daftsville was windless, you see. Not a puff. No Blue fur ever got ruffled, no Wahbler trees ever swayed. The sailboats never sailed, they simply just stayed.
It was Snooter, of course, who found it. Everyone in Daftsville knew Snooter was the boy who found stuff. Last year he’d found the brightest Snark egg on Snargoggle Day, and the year before that he’d found the biggest. Ever since then, the entire town joke that at least on Snargoggle Day, Snooter was the biggest and brightest of all the Dafteneses. Snooter would roll his eyes when they told him that but secretly he enjoyed the attention.
Anyway, this is why no one was surprised that Snooter was the one to find the magic pinwheel.
“Look! Look!” He burst into the room of the Breezless Inn, waving the fantastic pinwheel in the air. A-ha! I know what you’re thinking, but you’re wrong. No matter how fast Snooter ran or how hard he waved, the pin’s on the wheel, like the sails, they just stayed.
The ADULTS stopped all their drinking and most of their thinking, and gathered around little Snooter with plenty of “Oohs,” and quite a few “Ahhs.”
“It was hidden in one of the berry bushes.” Snooter loved berries. All berries. Couldn’t get enough of them. Anyway, no one was surprised that it was Snooter who found it, but they were REALLY surprised at what he found.
“What is it,” whispered Flounce? “Some kind of flower?”
“Don’t be Daft,” snorted Grund. It’s a shovel of some kind. Grund was Daftsville’s most talented gardener and very dedicated. If something couldn’t be used to garden, Grund wasn’t interested.
The rest of the room started talking and shouting all at once. Even Mayor Lokkint started shouting opinions. Soon the furry grownups were all yelling and arguing and forgetting all about Snooter.
So he went outside to show his friends what he’d found.
They were all in the same place. That is to say, they were all over the place together, kicking a can. And running. In Daftsville there were no TVs or fancy phones and children were always kicking cans and running and singing songs and stuff. It sounds very sad, but somehow they managed to have fun doing it.
“Hey,” Snooter shouted!
“Hey back!” That was Izzy. She was Snooters best friend. She had scabbed knees and her hands were permanently stained green from glowberries. Snooter thought she had the best eyes out of all his friends, but he would never tell her that. Never!
“What’s that,” Issy asked?
“Dunno. Found it in the berry bushes.”
“What’s it do?”
“Dunno. The old people are trying to figure it out, so I left.”
Issy shrugged. “It must have come from the hill.”
“Why do you say that?”
“’Cause it didn’t come from here silly.”
Snooter nodded. Made sense. The hill was everything that wasn’t Daftsville and no one ever, EVER went there.
“Race you!” Snooter took off even before anyone said “One, two, three!” The children were too busy running and shouting to care though.
Snooter was the first up the hill (but only because Issy let him win).
They found themselves in a clearing at the top of the hill. The hill actually went all around Daftsville so maybe it wasn’t really a hill. Maybe Daftsville was really at the bottom of a hole. But such musings are for the wiser adults to consider. The children were much more interested in the little hole - the one at the top of the hill, in the center of the clearing, in the middle of a ring of blue stones.
“What’s that?” a kid asked.
“It’s a hole. In the middle of those blue stones there.”
“Oh.”
From the valley below, the children heard the adults. They were really shouting now. Sometimes that meant they were close to figuring something out, and sometimes it meant they weren’t.
Snooter had an idea.
“I bet this thing goes in that thing,” he said, pointing to the hole in the middle of the ring of blue stones in the center of the clearing on the hill surrounding the town.
“Maybe. Try it and see.”
Because they were only children, they did just that. Snooter placed the pinwheel in the hole. By the way, did I mention the pinwheel was magical? I did? Well, did I mention it was orange, and gold and pink, and that the colors all swirled together kinda? See, you don’t know “EVERYTYHING.”
When Snooter put the pinwheel in the hole, something magical happened. Can you guess?
That’s right! Wind! A cool breeze, the likes of which no one in Daftsville had ever seen or felt, swept across the hilltop. And the magic pinwheel started spinning. It spun and the colors changed into something like a rainbow, only rounder. Plus, it shimmered and even sparkled a little, and made the softest whicker/whisper noise. Even the best rainbows don’t do all that.
All the children laughed and sang and played. It was wonderful.
But later, some adults made their way up the hill, still arguing, to see what all the fuss was about. They saw the pinwheel spinning furiously in the breeze. And they smiled. And they laughed. All the grownups LAUGHED!
And that’s how we know the pinwheel really was magic.
The End
