The world up above - a short story

A short story written by a 15 year younger me about a prickly hedgehog and his imaginative idealist dreams and adventures. -May 13, 2016

I recently found a peachy story that I wrote in 2001 when I was around 19 years old. I remember writing it some time after reading Jonathan Livingstone Seagull by Richard Bach. Although there are some similarities in the storyline the themes of the book and my old short story are very different and it's also a bit less pompous.

It is about a hedgehog that wants to fly. Looking back at it right now I can sense the feeling of not being part of the world that I had back then and still do. In general I see a calm imaginative idealist in Francis the hedgehog, which probably reflects some aspects of myself.

Like Richard Bach's novella it could be suitable as a children's story. My plan now is to simplify and translate the late teenage angst language to Dutch so I can read it to my two children. The illustrations here are new and are first sketches for the Dutch children's version.

The story begins

The trees were tall, to the stars they reached. The leaves were lush and green. They filled the sky near totally, the big blue was hard to see.

Below dwelled creatures. A habit quite common to creatures, even those, who are rarely seen. Some of these animals liked warm, wet and squishy places, while others were more dry and cold hearted. Some would nose around holes, others would climb the trees.

Among these critters a hedgehog lived, and his name was Francis O’Shannon. A stout little fellow he was, and packed with a back full of spikes. Now Francis was a curious critter. Yet he was a tad small, insignificant to the rest of the forest, and even less significant to the birds fluttering above. You see the birds never went down to the forest. They thought themselves to be above petty forest matters and their land-bound creatures.

On one of his usual walks through Hackle-berry Nut Lane, which connects a large tree with a smaller one, Francis was lost in thoughts. He knew he would probably not find his way back into sanity on Hackle-berry Nut Lane, but this place was as good a place as anywhere else. ‘Or maybe altogether not so’, thought Francis.

Ever since our little hedgehog was even more little, and therefore less, he felt that he was locked up in a too small a body. Not only was his hedgehog body small, it was also very inadequate. Francis felt he could not move as freely through the woods as Pjotter the fox, who was now probably being agile with his foxy girlfriend Shamela in the foxhole. Nor could he hop like the rapidly growing Bunnywop family.

But to Francis even these fellow forest inhabitants were limited. He saw a squirrel running and crossing his path. He followed the critter with his eyes uninterestedly. The squirrel seemed to be in a hurry. It ran up a tree, for only 20 squirrel steps, knocked on the tree, and ran as if possessed down again and into the forest. ‘Miraculous creatures, squirrels’, he thought involuntarily. But looking up at the tree where the squirrel had knocked for no reason, it came to poor little Francis. There was an entire dimension missing in his world. Up. He could look up, he could see up, but he could not be up. And even the squirrels went no higher than the height that they might possibly sprain an ankle at.

For the next days and days and even more days Francis would be pondering the thought of being up and of meeting things up there. He discussed this with some of the other animals. But the other forest dwellers had no time for those affairs, they were too busy with warm, wet and squishy places, or knocking on trees for no apparent reason. And it did not take long before most of the critters were getting quite enormously annoyed by Francis.

On one day when the evening was falling, pushing the day down, Francis was sitting next to a toadstool. Poor little thing did not know that most of his companions had decided it was time to give Francis presents from a large bag full of ass whooping.

‘There he is, the vile annoying creature!’, said the leader of the gang, which had by now ritually encircled the toadstool. ‘We’re doing this for your own good, O’Shannon, you’re keeping us from doing our important business in our important lives, like searching for warm, wet, and most preferably squishy places. We don’t need dreams let alone a whole new dimension.’ By now Francis was just coming to from an afternoon dream about things up and even more upper. Only then he saw the large group of animals coming near.

It started raining a bit. A sad atmosphere for a sad situation. Francis got kicked and punched in all the wrong places. And it took some blows before, after all the other paws, his instincts kicked in, and like a human child in a freezing cold bed, he rolled himself up into a ball.

The treetops started to make noises, a large blow of wind came swooping down and brought turmoil to the forest. And others came. The gang was now seeing more niceness in their warm holes than in kicking the hell out of an insane hedgehog showing only nasty looking spikes, so they left.

Francis was terrified, he was rolled up and had no idea what was going on. The pain in his body was not helping either. It was storming as if someone was sneezing in a glass of water. Pretty badly that is. The night was dark, cold but admittedly squishy. And so Francis was all alone with leaves swirling around him and rain drops wetting him.

Then thunder struck, and it struck again. Lightning was flickering like a strobe, enough for a neurotic to read a book. Loud crackling noises sounded from afar and nearby. And when a tree only eyesight away from Francis was struck, he passed out altogether. Which was not at all bad considering the following events.

The tree was by now ablaze, and a nearby tree was the target of a divine electrical discharge. The wind created a firestorm, branches were flying around and the sound would make a deaf dog hear. The first tree was falling down tearing with it another tree. It was just mayhem. But it was also the end of that.

When Francis woke up, the following day, he was unrolled and dry. He lay there in confusion. Looking around he saw fallen trees, tree trunks and an altogether big mess. ‘But it looks more bright than usual,’ he thought, ‘and what oh what do I feel, it feels like warmth, but not like the air, rather like a warm blanket.’ And then he heard a screeching sound up in the sky. Francis shook up, and threw his sight into the air, almost toppling over. He was looking straight into the big blue sky and far more important into the blazing sun.

This was the first time Francis could actually see straight into the sun, the forest was so thickly leaved it only let through light and an occasional sun ray here and there. The storm had created an open space in the woods. And in the middle of that open space stood a small insignificant hedgehog.

Francis’ eyesight was gone by now, he simply did not look away from the sun. He lost his senses, it felt like his spikes fell off his body. From the eternal brightness there seemed to flutter down a creature from up above. She landed next to Francis and spoke to him, with a contralto voice. ‘Hey there, cuteness. What is your biggest wish?’ Francis without delay answered, ‘I want not only see up, I want to be up and meet things up. Oh, up-creature, that is my wish.’ ‘Well then,’ the up-creature ejaculated, ‘I can bring you up, but you MUST remember the wish you had now.’ ‘Sure, sure, anything I shall do’, the hedgehog answered without thinking.

So Francis started feeling light and not long after he was tiptoeing. The creature explained him how to swoop his paws. The hedgehog followed every command and he started rising up and up. Francis looked down when his eyesight was reasonably recovered and he saw a few other forest creatures moving about below. He yelled to them and he yelled again. But the forest creatures would not hear and seemed to be rather busy with walking about.

Above the trees Francis felt like never before. He started flying over the tree-tops as if he had flown all his life. Soon he lost sight of the creature that had helped him come up. Francis did not care he had no more constraints, he felt free and nothing would matter anymore. He followed flocks of birds to fascinating unknown places. He would fly above the clouds when the weather was bad. He mocked with the birds about the silly ground-dwellers and he had meals with them on open grounds. One time he was drinking in a creek and when he looked down into the water, he failed to see a hedgehog as a reflection. ‘Well isn’t that a surprise? I look like one of the birds. Oh well, that must mean I am now really part of the up-world’, twittered Francis.

For sun-turns and sun-turns Francis would flutter in happiness until one evening he was caught in a storm. He had forgotten to climb up above the clouds and so he was trapped in the grasp of the winds. He felt terrible, not being free of what to do and he was hoping the storm would end soon. It was then that what the up-creature had said to him came back into his memory. ‘Never forget your wish,’ Francis whispered to himself.

Not much later the storm ended abruptly and he found himself floating over a large forest. Confused by the turmoil he was looking for a place to land. Not much further an open space appeared in the forest. Smoke puffs drifted up from it, from where lightning had struck. So Francis circled down. And there he saw, in the middle of the open space, a small wild kitten. It was looking up directly into the sun. Francis landed next to it and asked the kitten: ‘Hey there, cuteness. What is your biggest wish?’