On Paper

I found him lost and abandoned out in the woods one morning. I was passing an old fallen tree when I heard a faint tapping sound coming from beneath the trunk. I crouched and bent down and peered into this little opening where the wood had rotted away, and I saw that there was a space that was hollowed out inside the trunk, and there was a little cartoon boy sitting in there. He had an oversized head with neatly trimmed black hair, and he wore a white shirt and a black tie. I recognized him as Little Jack from an old cartoon that I used to watch as a kid. The shirt and tie that he always wore signified that he was navigating a child’s world of stupidity and petty meanness and bullying with an adult’s patience and maturity. Little Jack never said much in the show, although he did speak on a few rare occasions. But he always went about his business with a big heart and a forthright confidence, and he never let anything get him down. He just scuttled past the other slack jawed kids standing around their lockers taunting him as he went by, his black shoes quickly tap, tap, tapping as he zipped along.

It was this tapping that I had heard, like a suggestion of a memory from years ago. And now, seeing him sitting there, he was still the same. There was another opening rotted through on the other side of the trunk, and the sunlight shined through this opening and fell across Little Jack’s face, and he sat there with this perfectly plain expression that didn’t hold a trace of pity or fear or sadness in it at all, just a simple faith that whoever had left him in this nook inside the tree trunk would be right back if he just sat there patiently keeping watch, a faith in a love that was no longer out there in the world motivating anyone to find their way back to this forgotten place in the woods, a faith in something gone. How long had he been there? The show had ended a good thirty years ago, and little cartoon children never age.

And I started to think. Maybe I could acquire the rights to the character, and I could bring him back and write all kinds of new adventures for him. I could adopt him, in a sense. I had something that the original creators of the show didn’t have. I had seen him there, sitting inside the tree truck, his tie still neat and his shirt still clean and bright. I’d had this heart breaking look at him there, and there would always be something of that now in the character, that extra hint of vulnerability and melancholy, adding new dimension and depth. Yes, I would bring him back, and wind him up, and send him zipping along with a place and a purpose, and everyone’s face would light up, and they would smile and laugh and love him again.

But then I got greedy with it. I figured maybe I didn’t need to get tangled up in all the complications of trying to secure the rights to an existing character. Maybe I had something new altogether. I had the idea! The all important idea. I started working it all out, counting across the fingers of one hand and then the other, charts and graphs and schematics populating in the open air all around my head. And somewhere in all this scheming and twitching and nail biting, I lost touch. Little Jack and the nook and the morning light on his face, it all evaporated like a mirage, and I was left with nothing. The idea itself just fell apart without Little Jack. And I knew that I could spend the next ten, twenty, thirty years following every path and checking every corner of those woods, and I would never find him again.