[Blindman]

I'd really appreciate feedback on this story... it's unlike anything I've ever written before, so I'm a bit at a loss in deciding whether it's any good or not... Feel free to tear it to shreds; it's mainly an experiment, and I can't tell if it worked...

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There once was a boy named John, who lived with his parents in a house in the desert. This desert was a vast wasteland, very dry, and very little grew there. The plants were small and prickly, and the animals were all either defensive and skittish, or aggressive and venomous. When the sun was overhead, the sand grew so hot that the air shimmered in the heat, and each night when the sun disappeared the weather turned freezing cold.

Life in the desert would have been unbearable except for one thing. To the north of their house was a high stone wall, and behind that wall was a Garden. This was no ordinary wall - it stretched from horizon to horizon and was built of old and weathered stone, which seemed to be as ancient as the world itself. In this wall was a gate, and whenever John's parents needed food or water, they would walk through the gate into the Garden and come back carrying whatever they needed.

But John himself had never been through the gate; he had never seen the garden from which these good things came. And the strange thing is, the gate lay open for him to enter whenever he wanted to; the only thing keeping John from walking through the gate was John himself. Years ago, his parents had said to him, "You must come with us through the gate one day, and see the Garden for yourself." But John had questioned them, asking why he must go through this particular gate; was there no other way?

Having been told that the gate was the only way into the Garden, he set out to prove them wrong, and refused to come with them through the gate. He was content to let his parents visit the Garden, and to enjoy the good things that they brought back each time - water, cool and refreshing; fruit, infinitely sweeter than the bitter, shriveled desert fruits; flowers, filling the house with their fragrance.



But just because John refused to enter by the gate does not mean that he did not want to visit the Garden. He had never seen it for himself, but he had seen its fruits, and he was determined to get into the Garden somehow. But although anyone who has never been as stubborn as John could perhaps not understand why, his determination not to take the way that he had been told was the only way was even greater than his curiosity. Otherwise he might have simply given up his stubbornness and walked through the gate.

He decided that, if he would not go through the wall, he must go over it, so as he got older and stronger, he began trying to climb the wall. At first he could make no progress at all. His arms were strong enough, but the wall was solid and unyielding, offering very few handholds. Day after day he wore out his hands until his fingers were scraped and bloody, trying to use the small cracks in the wall as handholds. Each day he tried to scale a different portion of the wall, but to no avail.

Eventually his hands and fingers became stronger, but that only made matters worse. He was now able to climb a good distance up the wall, but his grip always failed at some point, and the further he climbed, the more painful the fall. As he got better at climbing, he reached heights where the fall was more and more painful, although he was still only climbing a fraction of the distance up the wall. He soon realized that if he continued climbing higher, he would reach heights where the fall would be crippling or lethal.

And so it was his fear of falling, instead of the limits of his strength, that began to discourage John from climbing. He kept trying, because he didn't know what else to do, and because he was too stubborn to quit. But even if he had overcome his fear, he would never have been able to climb over the wall. If he had ever gotten close to the top, he would have seen that the last dozen feet of the wall were as smooth as polished marble. Even one of the nimble-toed desert lizards that John often found climbing the walls and ceilings of his house would have found no footholds there.



One day, in the process of an especially heroic attempt to conquer the wall, John lost his grip and fell flat onto his back, and the wind was knocked out of him. Desert sand feels soft underfoot when you are walking on it, but when you fall on it from ten feet up, it is as hard and unyielding as stone. As he lay on the ground, trying to catch his breath and wondering if he had broken any ribs, he saw a snake coming towards him. He tried to stand up and run, but his whole chest ached and every time he tried to move, the pain paralyzed him.

The snake slithered up next to John, and sat there staring at him. John stared back, eyes wide with fear, knowing that snakes were dangerous animals. But then the snake spoke. "Sssssilly human, trying to climb the ssssstonesssss... Why isssss it sssssiting there, ssssstaring at me? Why doesssss it climb? What isssss it ssssseeking?"

John was surprised. He had been taught to fear the rattlesnake's venom, so he had never engaged one in conversation before. "I'm seeking to get into the Garden," he said, "The Garden which is over that wall." He didn't mention the fact that a gate existed.

"Humansssss always thinksssss the gardensssss are on the other ssssside of the wallsssss..." hissed the snake, "The fruitsssss of that garden tassssste sssssweet only becaussssse they are different. The onesssss who are wissssse build their gardensssss here and do not dream of thingsssss on the other ssssside of the wall."

John wasn't sure what to think about this. "Do you mean to say that I can find a garden here, in the desert? I've never seen one. All the fruit here is rather sour, and nothing seems to grow."

"Sssssily human, in the desssssert each one tendsssss hisssss own garden. He who isssss wissssse, can bring forth fruitsssss from the sssssand..." The snake slithered off, in a mesmerizing, undulating motion. John struggled to his feet and began to follow, but the snake turned and hissed at him, rearing its head and baring its fangs. "I go back to my own garden," it said, "Itsssss fruitsssss are very ssssweet, and itssssss flowersssss very fragrant. But it issssss my garden, and mine alone. You cannot sssssee, you cannot tasssste, you cannot touch."

It was too bad for John that he did not follow the snake back to its garden, for if he had he would have discovered that the fruit there was just as bitter, and the plants just as thorny, as everywhere else in the desert; it was only conceit and long habit that made the snake regard it as a paradise. For John, who was used to the taste of the fruit from the true Garden, the snake's folly would have been obvious.

But instead, John let the snake go its own way and walked back home, thinking to himself that perhaps snakes were not so bad or so dangerous after all. When he got home, he asked his parents if they would let him build a garden of his own along one side of the house. They agreed, and even offered to bring him plants from the Garden to put in his garden. "But," said his mother, "I'm not sure that those plants would grow here. The soil is very different."

John declined the offer. If he was going to cultivate a desert garden, he felt that he should use desert plants. The next day, he walked out into the desert looking for something to transplant. Eventually he found a cactus with beautiful bright pink flowers. "This would look good in my garden," he thought. This cactus didn't have the big needles that some of the others had, so he assumed that it would be safe to touch. He grabbed it and pulled on it to uproot it, then screamed in pain and jerked his hands away. Looking more closely, he saw now that the skin of the cactus, which had looked soft and fuzzy, was in fact covered with tiny, almost invisible spines, many of which were now buried in his hands.

Deciding that the cactus had already done its worst, and not wanting to come home empty-handed, he grabbed it near its roots, where its skin was the smoothest, and heaved it out of the ground. Looking at it, he saw that the roots were smaller than he had expected; many of them had broken off when he uprooted it. He carried it home, dug a hole in the sand (which was difficult because the loose sand filled in the hole as quickly as he could dig it) and planted the cactus.

For weeks afterwards, his hands constantly itched. Touching anything with his hands was a strange sensation. If he ran his hands over a sheet or a piece of fabric, his palm would stick to it. If he ran a hand over the smooth wood surface of the kitchen table, his hand scraped across it. It was as if he himself had become a cactus. He quickly learned not to touch any other part of his body with his hands, because the invisible needles, and with them the itch that they caused, would spread.

Meanwhile, his cactus was dying. He tried everything he could think of to save it, but each day it shriveled up a bit more. When his parents saw how much this distressed him, they began watering it each night with water that they had brought back from the Garden, without telling him. Soon it was restored to health, and when his hands stopped itching, John went out into the desert again - this time protected by a pair of gloves that his father had given to him - and collected more cacti. He planted them all in his garden and they grew. He thought that this was the result of his efforts, but the real reason they grew was the water that his parents brought back from the Garden, with which they watered John's garden while he was asleep.



At first, the garden didn't grow any fruit, because John had chosen the cacti with the most flowers, not those with the most fruit. But eventually the cacti began to produce fruit, which he proudly brought inside to show to his parents. They ate it, of course, wanting him to feel that he had accomplished something good, but only John found any real sweetness in it. John began to eat the fruit of his garden more and more, and as he did so, it seemed sweeter to him. He despised the fruit that his parents brought back from the Garden within the wall, saying that he preferred fruit which his own two hands had grown.

Soon John was eating nothing but the fruit of his own garden. For a while he still drank the water that his parents brought, but then he decided that even that was wrong. If, as the serpent had said, "in the desert each one tends his own garden," then surely he should not rely on his parents for water. So when he was thirsty, he would go out into the desert, cut open a cactus, and drink the water inside it - for that is the only place in the desert where you can find water.

It was bitter water, even more bitter than the cactus fruit, and one morning he woke up with a terrible stomach ache. He was bedridden for the whole day and by evening he was very thirsty. He asked his father, "Can you go find a cactus for me so I can drink the water inside it?"

His father laughed. "There's no need for that. Your mother and I went to the Garden just yesterday, and we brought back some fresh water from there." He handed John a glass of water, but at first John was unwilling to drink it; this water was not from the desert, after all. But his thirst overcame his stubbornness, and when his father insisted, he drank it. To his mouth it refreshing and sweet, almost too sweet; he was overwhelmed by the taste of it and could only drink a little at a time. But pride kept him from admitting that this water tasted better than his own.

Then it was dinner time, and as his parents prepared the meal, the house was filled with the fresh sweet smell of the fruit of the Garden. But this smell that had once been a sweet fragrance, full of life, was now sickly sweet and nauseating to John, the fragrance of death. He choked down a few mouthfuls, and could eat no more. Standing up from the table, he ran out of the house and kept running - not knowing where he was running to, but wanting to get away from his failure of a garden and from the food that had once tasted sweet but whose taste was now unbearable.



He had tried to grow his own garden in the desert, and had failed. And at last he began to recognize the snake's venomous lies. All the fruit of the desert, he saw now, was bitter, and too much of that fruit at once was poisonous. The only good fruit that he had ever known was from the Garden, past the wall, and he should have gone there now. But he had walked away from that gate long ago, and was still not willing to go through it.

Instead he ran along the wall, hoping to find a different gateway into the Garden. He ran until the sun disappeared over the horizon and a chill spread over the desert. Then he dug himself a nest in the sand - which was still warm from the heat of the day - and burrowed down to spend the night. It was a very cold night, and he slept very little.

When the sun rose, John woke up. He set out immediately, hoping to make progress in the morning before the desert became too hot. But as he walked, the sun seemed to move faster than usual; it soon crossed its zenith and began to sink behind him in the west. And by now, he was dizzy and faint from dehydration.

Finally he saw a change in the wall up ahead. A shorter wall extended out from it and enclosed an area that stuck to the larger wall like a blister. He drew nearer and saw that this new wall was constructed out of sandstone, and was not nearly as high as the main wall. As he approached it, a woman walked out from an opening in the sandstone wall. "Greetings, traveller," she said, "I can see that you have come far looking for this garden. Come inside with me, and see - nothing in the desert or beyond the great wall could ever compare to what we have here."

He followed her into her garden. His desert-born eyes were accustomed to the gray and tan and yellow of the sand, the hazy blue of the sky, the muted red of the stones, and the faded green of the cacti. Nothing had prepared those eyes for what they now saw - everywhere were growing plants, in vibrant shades of green, fountains of crystal clear water, and brightly colored flowers. It made him forget the fruit and flowers that his parents brought back from their Garden - here at last, he decided, was the true Garden, and he almost felt pity for his parents that they knew only a shadow of this reality.

He spent the night with the woman in her garden, but when he woke, no longer dizzy and light-headed from thirst, it all looked different. What had seemed magical and mysterious in the fiery light of sunset, now looked much less supernatural in the clear, calm light of dawn. He was indeed in an oasis - there was a pool of water, and next to it grew palm trees, something that he had never seen before. But it was still just a collection of desert plants, far from the paradise that it had looked like the night before.

This was still the most beautiful place that he had found in the desert, and the closest to what he was looking for, so he was tempted to stay. But then he saw something else: that the fountain which gave this garden life came up from under the wall of the Garden. It was from there that the life in this oasis sprang, and that meant that this place must only be a shadow of the true Garden. He was no closer to his goal than before - he must still find a way to get into the Garden, from which everything good that he had ever known in the desert had come.



So he set out from the false garden, and followed the wall, once again walking east towards the rising sun. Again the day sped past and the sun moved across the sky and set in the west, and again he spent the night burrowed down in the hot sand for warmth. Then he woke up, and began walking again, and soon he came to a gateway in the wall.

As he looked at this gate, it seemed very different from the one near his house. The other gate had always seemed oppressing, uninviting; this one, somehow, seemed to call out to him. He walked towards it, knowing that his journey was at last at an end.

There was something that John didn't discover until afterwards, but which you should probably know now, so that you don't get the wrong impression. John had not found a second doorway; he had, in fact, come back to the one that he had known all along. Directly over the sand dunes behind him was his house. The gate looked different, not because it had changed, but because John had.

You see, although the world inside the wall was very large, the world of the desert was very small indeed. In a mere two days John had walked around the whole circumference of the world he knew, and had come back to where he had started, to the door that he had always refused to go through. But now it looked different to him - inviting, rather than hateful, and he said to himself, "This cannot possibly be the same oppressive gateway that I walked by every day on my way to climb the wall or tend my garden. If only I had seen this gateway, and not the other, all those years ago!"

But this was the same gateway; he was simply seeing it in a different light. If he had known that, perhaps even now his stubbornness would have prompted him to turn away. But this gateway seemed so new and inviting to him, that he didn't hesitate to walk through it. He found himself in a long hallway, through which wafted a smell which once again seemed sweet to him, borne by a cool breeze that invited him ever deeper in.

The corridor ended, and John found himself standing at the edge of a deep pool of water, more water than he had seen in his entire life. Beyond the pool, the Garden stretched out as far as his eyes could see, all that he had imagined it to be and more. It was too late to go back, so he took a deep breath and dove into the pool...

["BrooksB"]

I read the first sentence and decided to stop. "There once was a boy named John" just doesn't do it for me. Sorry.

[Tracy]

I only had time to read this over once, so I'll probably be back later.

I agree with Brooks about the opening line. If you can, try to think of one that will better grab the attention of the audience, and get them interested in the story. Also, the first line which describes the desert would do best to go into particulars: we expect that a desert will be a dry wasteland of sorts, but what makes this desert so special? Even making it a more extreme sort of desert should work, really.

Overall, I really enjoyed this one. I especially like that you noted that John would have been better off had he visited the snake's garden and seen it to be nothing special.

[Blindman]

Originally posted by "BrooksB"
I read the first sentence and decided to stop. "There once was a boy named John" just doesn't do it for me. Sorry.

Well, I needed some way to let the reader know that they were reading something in the fairy-tale genre... perhaps I should have just started it with "once upon a time" to make that even clearer.

So often when I use a more complicated, sophisticated writing style, it just comes out sounding stilted and unnatural. So in writing this I decided to just tell the story, in as simple language as I could, and let the complexity come from the story itself, not from the words. And that's the part that I'm wondering if I succeeded at...

[Tracy]

I'd say that you did.

[Jared]

I, too, loathe the opening line. And please, don't change it to "Once upon a time." Scratch it all together.

Anywho, I like the juxtaposition of childlike language over more complex themes, but I think you could have been a bit more imaginative in the wall descriptions. Why not personify the wall? It has such huge symbolic potential, and you waste it.

Good stuff, though.