Deleted Scene - Two Chapter Twos
As I’ve confessed in previous blogs, the initial draft of The Tiltersmith was way too long for its own good. There was so much work I ended up cutting and some of it was really hard to let go of. In any case, I always save my old drafts. Below are two opening excerpts from Chapter Two of The Tiltersmith. Can you guess which one is from an early draft and which one is from the final draft?
From Chapter Two Science Class Feenix was distracted by the sight of Mr. Ross standing in the middle of the room with a daffodil stuck behind his ear. Even though they were late, he nodded to them in a friendly manner as they entered. After everyone was seated, he took the daffodil out from behind his ear and waved it at them. “And today would be?” “The Vernal Equinox,” Detestable Robert answered without waiting to be called upon. “Otherwise known as?” Mr. Ross asked. “The first day of spring,” Danton answered. “Yes, siirree bob!” Mr. Ross glanced out the window at the cold icy rain and shook his head. “Let’s get back to the problem of spring later. I think we should forge on with the digestive system, don’t you? We seem to be falling behind.” “Yeah well, if certain people would simply duct tape their mouths shut,” Robert said in a voice just loud enough for Feenix to hear. Feenix turned around and shot an invisible poison arrow into Robert’s eyeball. Mr. Ross went on, “Okay—let’s do a quick review before diving into the poop. Why do we need a digestive system?” Sam raised his hand. “We need digestion to break down our food into nutrients so we can grow and get energy and repair stuff in our body that breaks down.” “Sooperpooperooney! And who remembers the specific function of the small intestine?”
Elena told everybody that the small intestine was where most of the work got done in breaking food down and passing the good stuff into the bloodstream. “And who remembers just how long the small intestine is?” Feenix raised her hand. Robert gave a small groan. “Yes, Feenix?” “I don’t understand why we have to do this review thing every day. Isn’t it enough that you teach us the stuff once and then we go over it again when we do our homework? I mean what’s the point? It seems like it wastes a lot of time. And you know there a few really serious students in here who get so impatient.” She gave Robert a nasty grin. “Huh!” Mr. Ross exclaimed. “Does anybody else feel we are wasting our time when we review?” “No!” Robert groaned again. “She’s just trying to distract you. I think you should ignore her.” Mr. Ross considered what he’d said. Feenix watched him look back and forth between herself and Robert. To her satisfaction, she saw that he couldn’t help himself. He turned to the class. “Well, but Feenix’s question is interesting though, don’t you think? What is the point? Why do we spend our precious time on reviewing?” “Because it’s hard to remember stuff like this and it helps us remember,” Aneeka answered. Mr. Ross nodded. “Exactly. It’s obvious isn’t it? You feel it. We all know from our experiences that learning things, remembering things takes repetition and practice. But why? Why does memory work like that? Why don’t we just remember stuff?”
Nobody had an answer. Mr. Ross tapped at the front of his forehead with one finger. “The Short Term Memory. How much can you hold in there at a time? Anybody know?” Silence. “It’s estimated we can only hold four to nine items in there at a time. Shall we try an experiment?” They waited. Feenix grinned at Robert again. Robert ignored her. Mr. Ross put up a list of about thirty words on the Smart Board and gave them two minutes to study them. Then he clicked the words off. “All right. Everybody write down as many as you can remember.” When they were all done writing, he clicked the words back on. “Anybody get more than twelve? Be honest.” Everybody counted their words in silence. Apparently, nobody had. “See? Short Term Memory is small. It’s like a tiny entrance hallway. And it doesn’t hold onto things for more than a few seconds, maybe up to minute. So, if you want to keep what’s in there, you’ve got to move fast and get it into Long Term Memory. How much space in your Long Term Memory?” They stared at him. “That’s correct,” he said into the silence. “Nobody really knows. It appears to be humongous. Perhaps limitless.’ Mr. Ross grabbed hold of the top of his head with his spread-out fingers. “You, too,” he commanded. “Fingers over your heads.” Everybody obeyed. “Do you feel it? I’m not just talking about your memory. I’m talking about your brain. The size of the world in there. Try to imagine this. There’s a hundred
thousand miles of blood vessels. Really. I kid you not. There’s also billions of neurons passing information around. Can you feel the humming?” He lowered his voice to nearly a whisper. “So many worlds hidden inside of other worlds.” Now he raised his voice again. “Did you know that your brain is generating actual watts of energy right now? There’s enough electricity to light up a lightbulb if we knew how to hook it up. But we are only now beginning to get a peek at how the thing actually works. And memory is just one of the many many new frontiers. However, one of the most important ones. “If you think of the Short Term Memory as being like an entrance hallway, then you can think of Long Term Memory as being the vast mansion that the hallway leads into. In order to get a piece of information past the front hallway into the mansion requires some work, some activity. It appears that a retrievable long term memory usually gets stored not just in one place in your brain, but in many different connecting places in your brain. And the more places it gets stored—” He paused and touched his eyelids. “In the Video room for instance.” He touched his ears. “Or in the Audio room, perhaps.” He touched his nose. “In the Fragrance closet, maybe or in the Happiness Cabinet.” He smiled a big smile. “Or up in the Scary attic?” He made a face of terror. “The more places it gets stored, the more likely you are to be able to pull it out of storage.” OR? From Chapter Two
Science Class In science class Mr. Ross was standing in the middle of the room, greeting each student as they entered. There was a bright floppy daffodil planted behind one of his rather sticky-out ears. Brigit was particularly struck by this, because in her dream that morning her brother had had a daffodil behind his ear, too. In the dream, he was old enough to walk and he was holding her hand and trying to get her to climb a hill with him. Brigit wondered where Mr. Ross had gotten the flower. He must have bought it at a fruit and veggie market or someplace like that. She hadn’t seen any actual daffodils growing anywhere around here yet. She was sitting at the high lab table which she always shared with Feenix and Edward and Danton now that they had all become friends. So far, no sign of Feenix, which wasn’t unusual, but Edward and Danton were here. She glanced at them from time to time. She liked what a contrast they made next to each other— Edward so pale-faced, definitely someone who didn’t get outside much, a little soft around the middle with his uncombed hair and that look he often had of having left his body and wandered off to some entirely different dimension where he was concentrating on some fascinating scientific idea. And then Danton so brown and glowing and completely here, watching everything and poking up into the air conspicuously like a giraffe. He was already well over six feet, with long skinny legs and knobby knees and huge feet. When he caught her looking at him, she looked away quickly. Brigit hoped that Feenix wasn’t late because she’d gotten stopped by Ms. Trevino again. Then, just as the second bell rang, Feenix made her entrance and Brigit breathed a sigh of relief.
Feenix was in full noise mode—boots clacking, jewelry clinking, coat flapping. As everybody knew, Feenix had a thing about this coat. In school, she carried around a fake doctor’s note which said she should be allowed to wear it as she was prone to something called ‘hypothermatics” and could have a heart attack if she got too cold. Mr. Ross laughed when he read this and didn’t bother her about the coat again. Now she sat down with a flourish and slammed her books on the table. She looked around the room defiantly and shook her mane of dark rough hair back. One of her eyes was slightly higher than the other. It wasn’t all that noticeable, but when she smiled that higher eye seemed to lift up a fraction of an inch and it startled people. Somebody else might have been given a lot of trouble about a thing like this, but people gave Feenix trouble at their own risk. Sometimes she inked a picture next to this eye—an animal or odd design. Brigit was pretty sure she did this to distract people from the asymmetry. Plus, she liked to see how far she could get through the day before their principal, Ms. Trevino, caught her and made her wash it off. Today she had painted what looked like a small blue lightning bolt. The bell rang and Mr. Ross bowed to the class and waited for silence. Then he spoke in a hushed solemn voice. “Are you ready? Shall we continue with our courageous and daring journey down the digestive system?” When no one answered he turned to the smartboard and clicked on a photo of a slippery pink and tangled mass of intestine. “What are we looking at?” Feenix’s hand shot up. He nodded at her. She pointed at the daffodil behind his ear. “What’s with the flower?” Brigit and everybody else knew that this was another game Feenix played. She would try to keep Mr. Ross off topic for as long as possible. Mr. Ross was a person who was easily led off onto other topics.
“Ah ha!” Mr. Ross answered happily. “I thought you’d never ask.” Detestable Robert groaned. He did not like when Feenix succeeded in distracting him. ‘Detestable Robert’ was Feenix’s name for him. Brigit didn’t think this was exactly fair. Robert was irritating, but Feenix drove a lot of people crazy, too. Mr. Ross went over and pulled a couple of things out of his backpack—a big yellow grapefruit and a bright green apple. There was a chopstick driven through the center of the apple so it stuck out at either end. He laid these down gently on his desk. “Who can tell me what great celestial event occurs on this very day?” Brigit knew the answer, but she wasn’t about to raise her hand and have everybody stare at her. Robert lifted his arm, looking bored. “The vernal equinox,” he said. Mr. Ross nodded in satisfaction. “Magnifico!” he said. “And who can tell me what the vernal equinox is?” Robert raised his hand again, but Mr. Ross ignored him. He looked around and stopped at Edward. “C’mon, Eddie, my man. I know you know this.” “First day of spring,” Edward said. “Spring?” Feenix objected. “Does that look like spring to you?” She threw st her hand toward the window. How can you call that spring? It’s March 21 . This isn’t good, is it? What if something’s happened? What if spring doesn’t come at all?” Mr. Ross wrinkled his brow and pulled on his ear. “These are good answers and a difficult question. Knowing that you are thinking about these things makes it worth it to get out of my bed in the morning.” He bowed to them all. “But before we can go any further we need to take a closer look at what the vernal equinox is. “First of all, I want you to realize that in ancient times people did not have our advantages. They had no clue. They saw that the seasons came and went and
the year turned round in a somewhat predictable way and they really wanted to know why. But they had no telescopes and not enough math to figure out what was going on. “They reasoned that powers greater than they were must be responsible. And what were these powers, they asked? If they could answer that, maybe they could get some control over them and maybe they could make sure their crops would always grow again and their cattle would be fertile. Well, they thought hard and started coming up with all sorts of answers. You will know some of them from studying mythology. The Pueblo Indian story about the Blue Corn Maiden. The Winter Katsina god lures her into his house because he has fallen in love with her. He seals the windows with ice and the doors with snow. There will be no more spring and no more new growth unless somebody can rescue her. “That story might remind you of the one from Greek mythology about Persephone and the pomegranate. Persephone falls down a great crack in the ground and is held prisoner by Hades, the god of the underworld. The whole world stays winter until, at last, he agrees to release her as long as she promises to come back to him at the end of the summer. There’s lots of stories with that shape, but lots of other story lines, too. There are monsters who must be vanquished and lovers who are being kept apart and must find their way to each other before the seasons can move on. “Then humans gradually began to look more closely at the physical world. They began to stare at the stars and the sun and do the numbers. They learned about astronomy and geology and the scientific method. Because of science, today we know about the vernal equinox and why we have seasons. “Let’s take a look, shall we? I’m going to need a couple of volunteers so you can visualize this properly. I’ll be asking these volunteers to be traveling about 100 million miles out into space. Who’s ready?”
Only Feenix volunteered. She liked nothing more than to be the center of attention. Her noisy bracelet, which she had made herself from Scrabble tiles, clinked and jingled. But Mr. Ross ignored her. He looked around the room thoughtfully. “Brigit, you will be the earth.” Brigit froze in surprise. Generally, teachers had gotten into the habit of giving her a free pass in the class participation department. She was pretty sure it was because of her condition and they felt sorry for her. But this was already the second time Mr. Ross had called on her this week. Feenix leaned over and whispered to her, “You’re good. You’re good. Just remember to breathe and count slowly.” Feenix had been giving her instruction all through the winter. Brigit nodded at her and went to the center of the room, breathing very deliberately and counting. Mr. Ross handed her the green apple with the chopstick.