Puff! The Magic Draggin'
your raft down a river. Or was it some kind of creek?
You’d have to be on drugs to take The Magic Schoolbus over this.
The SnakeCharmer and the rest of the kids rode across the sky on a dragon. What kind of dragon?
“What kind of dragon do we ride, boy?” The SnakeCharmer’s echoes and the screams (of joy!) of the children echoed through the starry night.
“Dunno, too dark to see.”
The dragon pulled up to the boy’s face. The SnakeCharmer at the head, followed by the rest of the little children, peeking their eyes out from behind him.
Before the pale moonlight they glowed before the boy. He stood up on the raft he was sailing upon to raise his nose at the billowy smoke, the ones round the waves around him.
“Now it’s too smoky,” the boy said, outstretching his arms, yawning.
“Then what about this!” The SC said, the rest of (t)his sentence filled in by the whoosh of the dragon, filling his ears with the sound of Japanese air1 . A silhouette shone before the boys eyes, reflected in the clear waters, a looking glass at the dragon encircled by the moon.
“Do you see our shape now?” The boy heard, still looking deeply across the ripples.
“I see schools of fish, the beasts of the sea; the ocean in my eyes, and the beasts in these—”
The boy waved at the rest of the children’s reflections, each illuminated by the different stars above.
"And what of these shapes you see in the sky? Do they not form pictures of youth in disguise?”
“What pictures, what pictures, what pictures I see, of classmates, me staring, the sea on the rise? What laughter, what laughter, what laughter I find,
Look at these treasures, I’ve got them! they’re mine!”
The stars and the twinkling of the children’s smiles (which was the real treasure, wasn’t it?)2 dusted the moonlight like sprinkling gold.
While the rest of the kids took a ride on that magic puff of nostalgia, the Beast remained on his raft, reading the rest of some other book.3
Which is weird, for they were in China I mean Saudi Arabia I mean the deserts of Huckleberry Finn, I mean, who can survive the winds of conquest I mean the kamikaze I mean the desert sands I mean the trip of Marco Polo across the Atlantic to bring back colonialism.
As long as those slaves are smiling am I right!(?)
Depending on how hard the letter R was for you in school, you may be surprised to hear that the Beast was reading some other black magic book he wasn’t supposed to read. And could you believe it, he’s tying to summone a dagon!