Allamenea

KNARTE

 I stay crying softly for a long while.  When the sobs finally subside, I sniff and look around.  I am on a dirt bed.  Or maybe it is tentetelek…I don’t know.  There is nothing else except the hole in the wall that Irwin and Linnyt had crawled through.  There is no roof on this house, either.  But, I had been crying longer than I thought; it is dark now.  The moon is showing.

 Suddenly, Irwin comes, hurriedly crawling back through the hole in the wall.  Looking up at the sky, he picks me up and slings me over his back.  

 “Hey!” I protest.

 “This is for your safety,” Irwin states.

 As I try to kick, I learn that I am too weak to do hardly anything.  Irwin gently pushes me through the hole and crawls through again himself.  Then he picks me back up and begins jogging through the night.  Outside is too dark to tell where I am, so I just close my eyes and wait for this all to be over.  I wait for Mom to say: “There you are, Natalie!” and to go to bed in my comfy blue pajamas.

 Yet, it doesn’t end.  Instead, Irwin abruptly sets me down, and I am stand. I open my eyes.  The night is still too dark to say where I am.  I try to find his face with my eyes.

 “You need to leave,” he says in a rushed voice. “The welerly is here. Wear this.”

 Irwin closes something around my shoulders.  I do not know what it is, but it feels like a blanket until he fastens it around my neck and pulls up a hood.  He then finds my hand and puts some hard square things in my palm, pointing to a large, odd shape, maybe 20 feet away.

 “Buy a turn on that knarte and go to Gellorgani,” Irwin whispers.

 “What? Wait, where is Gellorgani? You haven’t told me how to get home!” I cry.

 “What is this scary welerly? Why won’t you tell me?”  

 There are footsteps, and he is gone.  Now I am alone.  I suppose that my best chance is to go over to the odd shape that Irwin called a knarte and see what happens.  I begin to walk over, although I stumble quite a bit without being able to see my own feet.  When I get there, I lay a hand on it.  Suddenly, a tall shape shoots up out of it.

 I scream.

 “Be quiet, li’l missy,” a man’s voice says. “What do you want?”

  “Um…I was wondering…if I could…buy a turn on the…..knarte?” I squeamishly squeal.

 I don’t even know what a knarte is, and yet here I am asking to use it.

 “I need five gellallions,” The man wriggles with delight.

 “Is that what these things are?” I ask, dumping my five hard squares into his palm.

 “Yup, welcome aboard!” he cries, and pulls me up into it.

 “So, please do explain to me,” I say as he fidgets. “What a knarte is.”

 The man laughs a little bit.

 “It’s just a traveling device. Rather modern, but if you know how to drive the thing, it can get you anywhere.”

 My eyes have started adjusting, so I watch him.  He presses a tiny button twice, then a large one five times.  The knarte makes a small, screeching noise and starts to move.  There is no roof, I notice, and there is a long stick of some sort in the very middle of it.

 “My name is Lexus, by the way,” the man says as he presses the tiny button once more.

 The knarte is going fast now, so Lexus grabs the large stick and begins shoving it in all different directions, different patterns.