Mathieu Cailler
Pee-wee’s Big Adventure Didn’t Spark Joy
for Delilah the way it did when she was young. Maturation, she justified on her dark drive home from the theater. But she thought of her friends, who were also in their thirties, laughing hard at the rerelease. When Delilah arrived at her condo, she plucked a flashlight from her glovebox and searched for her joy. She scoured a park not far from her home, where she used to play hide-and-seek with her friends, swing from monkey bars with her brother, even shoot down a long slide whose metal burned on hot days.
The light’s beam illuminated the park and vacant playground equipment. But as Delilah turned one last time, the flashlight’s cone lit up three small children at the far end. Immediately, she knew them to be her innocence, her imagination, and her inner child. She looked on and watched them as they sat on the ground, serving make-belief tea, in a make-belief pot, on a make-belief table. They didn’t even notice Delilah; they didn’t even notice the light.
The Cheetah
ran so fast its spots fell off. From a distance, I yelled, “You forgot your spots,” but it didn’t hear me. I collected the spots, and made some signs, and I left my phone number. In the meantime, I used the spots to teach my daughter about estimation. I filled a glass jug with the spots and asked her how many she believed rested inside the jug. “Fifty,” she said. I guessed seven hundred. We counted them together and were both wrong. The total was 2,149. No one ever returned my call, so we still have the jug on display in our home. Over the years, we’ve used the spots as furniture pads, for my daughter’s art projects, for lapel pins and brooches, even for the dark-colored stones in checkers. There’ve been times, too, when I have placed them atop my eyes at dawn to block the daylight and allow me to sleep until noon. When I do this, I dream of lush veldts, of mountainous terrain, of sprinting at up to seventy miles per hour through Africa’s Sahel.
Out of This World
The boy walked home after a long school day. This time, though, at the end of Juniper Lane, instead of the usual yellow Dead End sign, there was a narrow, metal staircase overgrown with ivy. The boy started up the stairs. When he reached the top, there was an elevator. He pressed the button. It illuminated, and seconds later, the elevator doors parted. Wiping sweat from his face, the boy entered. There were only two buttons on the control panel: an L and a 2. He pressed the 2. The doors came together, the inside light flickered, and the elevator rattled hard enough to knock the boy over. Then ding! The boy rose and dusted himself off. When he exited, he realized he was on the moon. The ground was rough under his Converse sneakers, the lunar rocks poking through the rubber. Earth was so perfect from here. Quiet. Cute. Swirls of blue and white, patches of green here and there, and little lights in certain spots that winked at him. He wished his phone’s battery wasn’t dead from playing Candy Crush at recess, so that he could snap a photo and show his grandma later. Above him, a comet burned and fizzled. Scared, he crouched, then stood tall again, once the tail was far away. After a couple of hours, he made his way back to the elevator. He learned he couldn’t dream while looking at Earth. He knew too many of its answers.
Mathieu Cailler is the author of seven books: a novel, two short story collections, two volumes of poetry, and two children’s titles. His stories, poems, and essays have appeared in over one hundred publications, including Wigleaf, the Saturday Evening Post, and the Los Angeles Times. He has received many prestigious awards, including a Pushcart Prize; a Readers’ Favorite Award; and accolades from the Paris, Los Angeles, and New England Book Festivals. You can connect with him on social media @writesfromla or visit his website at mathieucailler.com.
