You Are Among Friends

Even though it was still nine weeks away, Gloria was ready for Show and Tell. The poppies had finally blossomed, and that meant it was summer. The poppies were Gloria's favorite flower—one of the only flowers she had ever seen growing from the ground, but still her favorite. She loved the way they looked, so bright and friendly, orange heads nodding on their long, thin stalks.

Gloria was determined to show the poppies to her third grade class come August. She was sure that none of her classmates would have ever seen such beautiful flowers. Such things barely existed in Brooklyn, and not even Gloria's parents knew how the poppies had come to the small patch of weeds in front of their brownstone. They had just always been there. When she asked, her dad would say, “It was magic, Glo-Worm.” He said this about many things. He said this when Gloria asked how he and her mother had met, even though Gloria knew the truth was that they had met when her mother had been the seamstress on duty one day, years ago, when her father’s pant legs had been just a titch too long. For the next few months, her father had bought more new pants than any man could ever need, all one size too big, even though he was a poor artist and all his pants got ruined with paint anyway.

That's the beginning of a short children's story I wrote for The Torn Pages Show, a Chicago-based collaboration between writers and artists paired up to write and illustrate short children's stories. Jason Brammer will be illustrating my colorful, hopefully sweet kids' story about poppies and mermaids in Brooklyn, for example. Look at his work! This is going to be mad interesting, you guys.

The finished, illustrated stories will be exhibited in Chicago for a brief time, but ultimately Josh, my friend the curator, graffiti aficionado and mailer of great coffee beans, wants to publish the project as a perfect-bound, full-color book. This would be a very beautiful and exciting thing.

And guess what! You can donate a few bucks via Kickstarter to help if you click right here on this sentence. Or this one. Or, hell, this one too.

That would be a very beautiful and exciting thing too.

(Photo via njchow82)