Penlandria

After generations of children controlling the world they made, does anyone have the courage to destroy it?

The summer of 1920 was hot, even for East Texas. Alexandria and her little sister, Penelope lived in the oil-field shanty towns scattered across the pine barrens. Their father, Joseph, was working sunup to sundown, seven days a week, doing the best he could since their mother died from Typhus. The girls seldom saw their dad, but they had each other.

On this particular day the heat had driven them to the creek, one of their favorite getaways. They could cool off in the water, hidden by the high banks of eroding earth. But this particular day would prove to be far different than they expected. They found something down there that would change the course of not only their lives, but the lives of their families for generations to come.

While digging in the sandy edges of the creek, Penelope, the younger, spotted tiny grains of sand, smaller even, that seemed to be alive. They moved back and forth, toward each other and away, swimming in the watery sand like microscopic tadpoles. Alexandria came over and watched in amazement for a while, then decided to collect the specimens for closer examination.

When they had brought handfuls of the mud home, placed it in a mason jar and rinsed it, they found the tiny specimens still swimming around in the clean water. There were a baker’s dozen, thirteen of them in all.

It was Penelope who first had the idea. Her eyes grew wide with wonder, the way a child’s do when inspiration comes. “Let’s make a world for them!”

Alexandria smiled, nodded, agreed, ran to her father’s bureau, stole a hat box and returned to her sister, giggling. Together they decorated the inside of the box, painting mountains around the edges with blue skies around the top and inside the lid, then tiny trees, sand, grass and rocks for mountains, even a tiny lake. Then they took the lid from the mason jar and placed the freed specimens in their new home, their own world. The girls named it Penlandria.

It took less than a year for Penlandria to start to change. Before Alexandria’s 13th birthday, it was the specimens themselves, changing shape from tiny tadpole to more animal-like, leggy and scaly. Then, when she was fourteen, the terrain inside the box began changing, becoming more real, more lifelike. By the time Alexandria was seventeen years old, her sister now fourteen, the hatbox was emitting an odor, like the ape exhibit at the zoo.

They would peek into the box every day, carefully looking through one of the many holes now carved into it. Moss now covered parts of the inside, and grass, tiny grass that seemed rooted into real earth sprung up all over the bottom. Even the sky-blue sky, once painted, now seemed alive with an invisible breeze. The specimens, the Penlandrians, were still animal like and still ever so small, but they were now starting to grow fur rather than scales. Penlandria was evolving.

Then, Joseph struck oil.

Within a year, Alexandria and her sister Penelope had gone from living in the shanty-town to living in a mansion. They had a staff, stables, fields and even an automobile. Alexandria was quickly courted by a gentleman of good standing and married off to live in Dallas. Penelope inherited the hatbox and took it with her when she attended college in Louisiana, always peeking in on the Penlandrians with interest.

By the time Penelope was ready to marry, the world within the box was changing again. The specimens were becoming tiny apes, and the once stick-like models of trees were becoming real trees, taking root somehow into the cardboard earth. The Penelandrians swung from tiny branches and hid among tiny grass fields.

As the girls aged, the question arose as to who would take the hat box. But soon, Penelope would discover she was unable to have children. So when Alexandria had a son, who she named Alex, the hatbox went to Dallas.

Alex inherited the box when he was twelve, the same age his mother was when she built it with his aunt. Alex loved Penlandria and it’s inhabitants. He never saw the world inside the hatbox before, so to him it was a sight to behold. By now of course, the world was alive. The tiny lake now flowed into streams, running from mountains in majestic yet tiny waterfalls that produced a fine mist near the floor of the box, creating a dense green forest rich with ferns. The ape-like specimens were grouping together more often now, walking more upright, communicating through body language and gestures. Alex had to use a magnifying glass, but he could see.

Alex spent several hours per day exploring Penlandria with his magnifying glass, every day for the next twenty-eight years. Until his own daughter, who he had named Jamie, turned 12 years old. But Alex had been so obsessed with his Mother and Aunt’s creation, he forgot to spend time with her. So as Jamie inherited the hat box and the miniature but wide world Penlandria, she saw it as a curse, a slight to her upbringing.

Jamie only looked into the box a few times during her youth, her father chastising her for her apathy toward the creatures within. But when Alex died at the age of fifty-four, Jamie stopped looking altogether and abandoned the Penlandrians. She fell into drug and alcohol addiction. She was 24 years old, the year was 1982.

The following year, Jamie opened the hat box for the first time in a long time. She had just given birth to a fatherless child and had returned to her grandparents home in Dallas to raise the baby with their help. She named her Helen.

In 1995, Helen was given the hatbox. The twelve-year old would be the fifth ruler of Penlandria and other than perhaps her mother, would also be the worst.

Helen not only neglected the box itself, but the now evolved inhabitants as well. The creatures from the box were now using tools, harvesting tiny timber to build shelter, building dams in tiny torrents of water that flowed through their remarkable community.

She liked to play god too much. She would create an Earthquake by shaking the box, just to see how the Penlandrians reacted. She would douse the box with the water hose to see if they could build boats, set it on fire momentarily to see them scramble, even kill one one of them to see how the loss was mourned by the others.

Her Great-Grandmother, Alexandria had died before she was born, but her Great-Aunt Penelope was still alive at age eighty-nine and had a few things to say about the way Helen was treating the hatbox. It was taken from her and the reign of oppression on the Penlandrians was aover. Old Penelope, the co-creator, would keep the box in her home until her death the following year. At that time it went into storage at the family estate in Dallas.

Then came Joseph, the savior of Penlandria, who was born in 2004, inherited the box on his twelfth birthday as the previous three generations had before him. He was the son of Helen, who had turned out even worse than her mother, starting a life of drug addiction at age thirteen, when the box was taken from her. She was now a part-time cashier and part-time drug dealer. Joseph had grown up poor, in the trailer parks of Western Louisiana, but went to Dallas on occasion as he got older and could travel without his mother, who was never invited.

The box was taken out of storage and opened for the first time in a long time. What had been built by Alexandria and Penelope’s discovery in 1920, handed down to his Great-Grandfather Alex, then to his Grandmother Penelope and to his Mom, Helen, whose life it had ruined, was now Joseph’s to rule.

When he opened the box, this is what Joseph, named after his Great-Great-Great Grandfather, saw:  The Penlandrians had evolved into cavemen, clothed, communicative and bearing weapons and tools. The landscape around them was lush, evolved and overgrown, among it were tiny dwellings built by the inhabitants, now in numbers closer to a thousand. What began as thirteen tiny tadpoles, was now a whole species of tiny men, microscopic humans with a world all their own. Joseph loved them, but not with a shallow infatuation as his Great-Grandfather, Alex, had. He loved them with a selfless love, like a son has for his mother, no matter how terrible of a person she might be.

It took him four years to build the bomb, but at age sixteen, Joseph had what he needed and took the box to the shooting range. He wired the fueled explosive to the bottom of the box and took up his post behind the barricade. After a small whisper of a prayer, he pushed the button and watched the sedan-sized plume of flame mushroom upward. 

And the world of Penlandria was no more.