Free The Boy Who Lost Fairyland by Catherynne M. Valente

“Magic.”
    Thomas put his arms around her neck. He called her Mother and not Gwendolyn, because these were Normal things to do. And when his patchwork scrap-yarn wombat, who wore a little puff-yarn cocoa-barrel round her neck like a Saint Bernard, did not answer back when he asked her to tell him tales of the marvelous Land of Wom where everything was Biteable and Good, he did not tear her head off in his anguish, though he wanted to, very badly. Instead, he named her Blunderbuss and dreamed of holding her in front of him, wriggling and warm and alive, while she fired passionfruits and horseshoes and whiskey bottles out of her mouth at his enemies. He woke up with a guilty start—Normal wombats couldn’t do that. Thomas tried to be good and dream about something else.
    *   *   *
    Every day, even though it was Not Normal, and he knew it, Thomas Rood stood under the chandelier and whispered:
    â€œWill-o’-the-wisp! If you come out today, I shall give you a kiss!” And after a moment, he added: “Please, please talk to me.”
    But the chandelier did not want a kiss, and years went by, and the heart of Thomas Rood fired itself at all the quiet, still objects of our world, begging them, pleading with them to come alive.

 

    CHAPTER V
    T HE A DVENTURES OF I NSPECTOR B ALLOON
    In Which Thomas Meets a Book, a Desk, a Mud Puddle, and a Girl and Fights the Battle of Hastings Over Again
    In the lower left-hand corner of his clothes dresser Thomas Rood kept a notebook whose cover was red and whose pages had no lines. The clothes dresser was called Bruno. The notebook was called Inspector Balloon for the six bright balloons and a big white moon like a magnifying glass painted on it.
    Thomas named everything he could put his hands on. After all, he reasoned, nothing could really be real unless it had a name. How awful he would have felt if he had been called nothing at all and had to be summoned to dinner with cries of “Nobody in Particular!” He preferred strange-sounding and thorny names out of his books and his head, and secretly resented every day being called something as workaday as Thomas. He called their cantankerous oven Hephaestus, the laundry tub and washboard Beatrice and Benedick, the chandelier he dubbed Citrine, the standing radio Scheherazade. His bed was clearly an Amalthea; his toothbrush answered to no name but the Ivory Knight. He insisted upon calling their neighbors’ cats Henrys I through VIII, though they had their own names to which they had become quite accustomed. Thomas knew they weren’t really Patches or Moustache, but eight proud Kings, and he would not be moved on the subject. Names were a serious business and no mistaking. You couldn’t expect anything to talk to you if you didn’t call it by name.
    When he saw the notebook in a shop window, Thomas had gotten very still inside. He recognized it like he would recognize his own hand. He sometimes had that feeling when he saw certain objects—that they were already his, only temporarily and embarrassingly separated from him due to some error in cosmic bookkeeping. He knew instantly what it was for, what it wanted to be when it grew up—a Real Live Book Owned by a Boy. Gwendolyn, thrilled that he wanted something so small and so Normal, had bought him an impressively businesslike silver-capped pen that spat blue ink to go along with it (called Mr. Indigo). The pen, unlike the book, was not cosmically his, but it would do. Thomas had rushed into his bedroom as soon as the door closed behind them, flung himself onto Amalthea, and opened Inspector Balloon to the first beautiful blank page, new and perfect as the head of cream in a glass milk bottle. Mr. Indigo’s ink carved thick purpley-blue rivers into the paper, dividing it into a fertile and well-watered countryside, every inch of white fed by those deep, generous streams.
    Thomas Rood had excellent handwriting. All