The Patterner: Andrew Finds the Pattern
an excerpt

For Michelle:

Andrew woke up to a bright spring morning. He looked out of the bedroom window that he shared with his brother and saw that the sun was shining and the wind was blowing slightly. Was it enough to try out his new kite? Andrew had a little bit of cabin fever as he had been suffering from a broken leg through the fall and winter and just a few days ago the doctor had finally decided that the cast could be taken off. It felt like he was a prisoner who had been shackled and was finally released. He wanted to go run and jump and play. He had been in bed too long over the winter.

In a way it was good, as he had a lot to think about, and there is no place better than thinking than in a bed with lots of covers during a cold winter. You don’t want to get out of bed or move much, so you just lie there and think until events make you get up. Right after he had broken his leg (by the way, he knew it was broken, even though his older brother had told him that he was faking right after it had happened – his brothers never really expressed any apologies for what had happened and actually thought it was kind of funny that they had just left their brother in the backyard on a cold November day after they had broken his leg during a game of ‘fumblitis’), he had been transported to a place where plants could talk and move about. He also was able himself to move about much better than he normally could. Ordinarily, he was clumsy, awkward, and un-athletic, but on the tree world he was none of those things. He had also made two good friends of two trees, Nutt and Toth, who had helped him to get back to his family. He almost had not gotten back, as some spiders from somewhere else had appeared and wanted Andrew to be their prisoner or even worse. Luckily, he somehow was able to get back home.

He still didn’t understand it all, so was glad of the time to ponder the events. It also disturbed him that he continued to have odd dreams. Some of them were nightmares about large spiders – understandably enough after his experiences, but the others were ones similar to the dreams he had right before his adventure took place. In them, he was again something different from the ordinary, un-special Andrew. He could swim underwater without breathing, like he had gills or could shoot fire out of his fingers or do a million other amazing things. It excited him to dream about these incredible things, but it troubled him that he was having these dreams so frequently.