Page 17 - Sample Flip Builder Project

sleeping. How good it was to wake with the sun, still safely

abed! At Christmas, the same children would turn from side
to side in the same beds, torn between watching for one

fearsome stranger coming in by the door and another by the
chimney.

I don’t remember when it ended, or how. Gradually, I
suppose, unnoticed. When the village became just a farm,

the mountain a pit heap, the desert a mere sandy dip in the
earth. The tiny marsh had been drained, the frogs long gone,

before I recalled the bottomless lake and knew its

impossibility, understood the reason for the lie. The forests
shrank to their true size: small woods and copses. The wild

boar were the farm’s hogs freed to root and snuffle in the
grass, the buffalo soft-eyed cattle, the wild man a lonely farm

labourer. The cats and rats and mice are long dead. The
Sandman never appeared, and nor did Santa Claus.

I miss the starry, people-silent nights that will never

come again. I miss the world’s fantastical clothing a child’s
mind creates from the fabric of the mundane. The terrors of

childhood are gone. But so is the magic.

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