The Reader in the Pod
Photo of an old, rusty metal carriage with missing windows lodged into a wooded bank. There is ivy growing over it, ferns in front, and trees behind. A blue jumper is slung over one of the open window panes.
There are lots of kooky tellybox shows which say that aliens built our wonders like the pyramids and Stonehenge and whatnot. To be honest, I think they are probably right because this pod fell from the sky a very long time ago, and once contained millions and millions of books and their Reader.
The Reader who lived and traveled in the pod came from a star system full of light and stories. Her planet had fourteen suns, although they were smaller than our own. The suns were different colours and traced patterns across the sky so that the whole day was kind of like a rainbow. Not too bright though, due to their smaller size, and the fact that they were pastel coloured.
As beautiful as the light show sky was, the Reader sometimes found it annoying, as not all of the colours were the best to read by. So one day, the Reader packed all of her books into this pod, alongside a very good reading lamp and some snacks, and ventured out into space to find a world with better light to read by.
The Reader travelled for a very, very long time, longer than her life, in fact, so she never found the home she was looking for. It’s a shame as I am a reader myself, and I am pretty certain she would have found our sun amenable to her habits. Earth daylight certainly suits my reading habits, but perhaps her eyes were different to mine. They were probably on stalks, for starters.
Anyway, the pod drifted for a long time after the Reader died, getting caught by this or that gravitational field, twirling through the stars like a pinball. It kept trying to autocorrect itself, waiting for the Reader’s approval to land, until eventually, it ran out of steam and dropped down here on the North Downs Way, just to the west of Guildford.
By the time it arrived it was in pretty bad shape, so it wasn’t long before the stories inside, sad and lonely without a reader, went out looking for eyes and ears to know them. They made an easy escape through one of the missing windows and set about populating the earth. Each story took a square kilometre and lay there, waiting for a new Reader.
Of course, the alien stories were not the first stories to inhabit the earth and over time, they began to co-mingle with the indigenous stories of the earth. Nowadays, you’ll often find the descendants of the alien-earth stories floating around as if they owned the earth, and they do in a way. They own the hearts and minds of readers.
Some of the stories only exist in fragments now, as it takes a reader constructing them in their mind for the stories to grow. Who knows, perhaps by reading them, you will cause a swelling and growing of their skins until each one fills its own book. Only time and your eyes will tell that.
It is likely that some of the stories I have found along the North Downs Way are the children of the stories from the pod. I like to think this is why so many of them brought me a great pleasure to write down, given that my earliest memory is how much of an idiot Elliot was for not leaving earth with E.T. to find a new home in the stars. At the heart of many of the stories I have found, is the memory of a world where suns weaved impossible, multicoloured shapes in the sky and everything in life was beautiful, free, possible. This is why they glittered and glinted and were so easy to find.
I hope you have enjoyed the stories that are a part of my Writing Walking project, but remember that I am but one woman with limited pockets to put things in. If you want to honour the Reader and her journey from the stars, the best thing you could do is to go out and walk the earth, collecting more and more of the escaped stories. They are out there waiting to be found, glistening and glinting with promise.
Listen to me read this story: