Today is brought to you by Lemon Zinger herbal tea and the Velvet Goldmine soundtrack.

When I was in elementary school and junior high my favorite part of the school week was usually Friday afternoons. This was the time when our teachers let us write stories or creative essays or participate in dramatic exercises.

Sixth grade, academically, was awful¹. I can't look back on it and find much of anything that I enjoyed during the school week, other than some units in social studies and the last period of Friday afternoons. This is when I had English and the English teacher (whom many referred to as Mrs. Earwig) had us write stories.

I spent many Friday afternoons working on the story of a young human boy who was left in a graveyard when he was a baby. He was reared by dead parents, had dead friends, and dead relatives. According to his tiny shoes his name was "Nike". There were squirrels and crows and lots of trees, and the occasional human visitor. He played amongst the tombstones and the giant old trees with his ghoul friends. But it was a bit twisted, you see, and I thought this was horribly creative of me--Nike was the odd one in the graveyard, and the ghouls and the dead and the usual cemetery inhabitants were the normals. Nike had lots of adventures growing up in the graveyard, and I knew that at some point he would probably have to leave his graveyard home and venture out into the human world. This thought, of course, broke my heart.

I didn't finish, and not because my story horrified Mrs. Earwig or because I got bored with Nike, or even because I dreaded writing the end where he would leave his family. I quit because I ended up running into Ray Bradbury's Elliot family and realized that my idea wasn't exactly new or different. I felt as if I'd ripped Nike off of Bradbury, and so I left him be. Looking back on this I realize this isn't the case--some of Nike's story is similar to Bradbury's Elliot family (the normal in the family of monsters), but not entirely.

Sometimes I think about going back to Nike and rewriting his story again; I would really like to know what happened to him. I doubt the original story still exists; I think I trashed it, along with the wish-fulfillment novelette I wrote that year in a teal-colored spiral bound Mead notebook. If nothing else I suspect Avadore and LD might like it ... someday.

1 But, as Michael Ende would say, this is a story for another time.