I started this blog soon after I quit my job at Telltale to freelance, with the nebulous plan of posting about writing and other stuff. It’s become a place where I mostly post pictures of dollhouses and occasionally of my spoiled rotten dog. I still write, I just don’t talk about it much. For someone who makes a living getting press coverage for other people I’m kind of shitty at self-promotion. (We writers call that irony.)
In the early 2000s I spent some time writing short stories and creative nonfiction and trying to get published. This dropped off when I started focusing on novels in 2004, but I did get a few pieces published in literary journals, most of which are archived halfway down this page.
“Big Bird Grows Up” was not published. A magazine was interested but they were concerned about trademark infringement, and I stopped sending it out after that. I recently stumbled across it in an old folder after thinking it was lost and figured I’d post it here for posterity. If Jim Henson’s lawyers come after me, well, that’ll be a funny story someday.
Considering I wrote this more than ten years ago, there are things I’d do differently now. But there are also things I wouldn’t change at all. I hope that means it doesn’t suck.
Big Bird Grows Up
Big Bird has had it.
He’s been trying to tell them for months — years! — about the gentle giant with whom he spends his afternoons, playing Checkers, Chutes and Ladders, Parcheesi. He simply wants to widen the circle, to introduce old friends to his new friend. His best friend. But they don’t listen. They tell him in patronizing tones that Snuffy is imaginary, a figment existing only in the deep folds of his bird brain. “Then who’s moving the red checkers?” Big Bird insists. Snuffy always plays red.
It’s okay to have imaginary friends, he’s told. Many children have them. Many adults had them once. Over birdseed milkshakes, Mr. Hooper speaks of an imaginary friend who lived in an old-fashioned popcorn popper. “In those days,” Mr. Hooper says grandly, “we popped corn over an open fire. When I flipped the popper on its handle it looked like a boy, with a round flat head, just my height. Johnson and I, we had adventures!” Big Bird clamps the tip of his beak on the straw and sucks, sucks his thick shake down his throat. “But all my mother saw,” Mr. Hooper says, “was me playing with the popcorn popper.”
Big Bird knows the difference between reality and imagination. Snuffy was not conjured in this way. Together, he and Snuffy have cried real tears; imaginary things can’t cry.
“You’ve got it all wrong,” Big Bird insists to the adults. “Snuffy is not a popcorn popper. He’s real! He’s alive! He’s my very best friend, and a bona fide Snuffleupagus!”
His name shoots back at him in chorus: “Oh Big Bird!”
Emily is a freelance writer, miniaturist, and adventure game enthusiast.
