What Dreams May Hatch

Author's Note

The #CTC29 prompt for Day 22 (see link provided in comments below) was to rewrite the Humpty Dumpty nursery rhyme using the voice and style of some particular writer. The idea, I must admit, did not initially inspire me. Mother Goose and I aren't ready acquaintances, and the story of the Egg's rise and fall I find particularly boring. As for mimicking the style of a famous author, I felt helpless. I had no ready references. My books were packed away in storage while my husband and I were going on Week 3 in a Louisville, Colorado hotel while our home was being reconstructed from the inside out.

I suppose I could have visited Project Gutenberg or dug through the ebooks on my hard drive, but I didn't think of it. I relied instead on having the opening of The Last Unicorn all but memorized, and attempted a loose imitation of Peter S. Beagle. To some extent I think I even succeeded. If I look aslant at the bees and the butterflies, I can almost see Beagle's blue jay couple bickering in their nest. From there, the piece meanders through a number of modern fantasy writers' voices before striking out at last across the desert on a path of its own making. I'm absurdly pleased with how its adventures turned out.

Nevertheless, it seems embarrassingly obvious that the first sentence to cross my mind was, "The great egg-shaped man sat atop a brick wall, and he sat there all alone." In my defense, I did not actually write it down. Well, until now, of course.