Field Trip to Ko Ma

This is the story of the day that didn’t happen.

It began like any other day, with Emily’s breakfast. She went to breakfast right away after waking up from bed, not stopping to put on slippers or even her glasses. She jumped out of bed and went straight to the kitchen — her bedroom door leads directly into the kitchen — to pour herself some cereal and milk. She knows her cereal because it comes in a red box. She knows the milk because it comes in a big jug with a little handle. Sometimes the milk is almost too heavy for Emily to lift, but she manages. Emily enjoys managing things herself.

She munch munch munched her cereal bites in the fog of her blurry vision and tried to remember her dreams. Emily has such colorful, brilliant, adventurous dreams, but it’s so difficult to pin them down in the morning. Being nearly blind helps. Once she sees the real kitchen and can read the red cereal box and look out the small window over the sink, the dreams flit away like butterflies. But if she stays in her hazy cocoon of color and light, sometimes they come back to her and land on her mind and linger a while.

But this morning, because it was the day that didn’t happen, she remembered no dreams at all. This made Emily frown as she munch munch munched.

When the cereal bowl was empty and she had sipped up the sugary milk, she placed her things in the sink and scooted back into her bedroom to get dressed for the day, beginning, of course, with her glasses.

Emily liked to braid two tight pigtails that would fall on each shoulder. Then she liked to pick out mismatched socks based on her dreams, to help her remember. Because she had no dreams last night, she sadly picked out her brown socks. They still didn’t match — one sock was tan and the other was chocolate — but they said nothing, because these socks were made of dirt, and dirt doesn’t talk to her through the day. She put on her brown-and-white sandals so the brown socks would feel cozy. Even dirt needs to feel cozy.

Ready for school! Emily picked up her canvas bag full of books and loose colored pencils and empty candy wrappers and mangled hair ties and one wooden ruler with all the numbers smudged and faded, then she dashed out the door to catch the bus.

The bus was big and bright and yellow and empty, because Emily was high, high up in the hills, and she was the farthest from the school. She even had to get on the bus before the driver. The bus pulled up and opened its doors. Emily got on and patted the empty driver’s seat and skipped to the back where she took her usual seat in the final bench on the left. Then the bus rumbled to life and drove off to the driver’s house.

Outside Emily’s windows it was a cloudless blue sky day, which suited the dragons just fine. They were swirling and spiraling in the distance above the tallest mountain peaks, trying to catch and eat their morning breakfast of swallows and finches. Emily sat on the left because once they turned the corner from her house, there was a steep cliff into a brilliant green meadow full of wildflowers, and Emily liked to count the bunnies she could spot hopping up and down.

After the span of one daydream, the bus stopped at the driver’s house. Emily liked the driver, even though he was tall and had a booming voice and his skin was made of dried, caked mud. He had seven teeth all shaped like triangles, and sometimes he belched while he drove. The other kids made fun of the bus driver, but Emily thought he was good at his job and she liked how safe she felt once the bus gave him control.

“Good morning, Emily,” the bus driver said in his funny, rumbly voice.

“Good morning, sir,” she replied, then resumed her vigil out the window. She was all the way up to nine bunnies already!

The drive to school was endless as the bus filled up with kids upon kids, crowding into every bench and, eventually, stuffing themselves under the benches and tucking themselves into the corners and crawling up onto the ceilings to hang upside down, clinging with their toes to the rivets on the ceiling panel. Eventually, to make room, some kids had to open the windows and crawl out and hang on, screaming as they turned each corner down the mountain while the bus went up on these two wheels and then those two wheels. The bus was always in a hurry once it became so full of children. Emily thought it was because it couldn’t wait to get a rest. The bus has an awfully hard job, when you think about it.

Because this was the day that didn’t happen, the bus never got to school. Instead, without Emily noticing, the bus took them on a long and winding field trip through the countryside. The flowery meadows gave way to deep and scary forests full of blinking yellow eyes, then open monotonous fields of the tall grains they use to make gold coins, then a coastline that hugged a gray ocean full of whales spouting water at seagulls. Eventually, the bus pulled to a halt at a zebra’s house.

The house was striped, but not like the zebra. The stripes went sideways, because it was made of two colors of wooden logs stacked up on each other. One row would be pale as an aspen, then the next would be dark as an oak. These alternated, and that’s what made it a zebra’s house. The zebra came out to meet the bus in her robe, sipping a mug of coffee. Emily tried to see how a zebra was holding a mug of coffee in its hooves, but her glasses must have stopped working because everything went blurry the more closely she looked.

“Hullo,” said the zebra as the children jumped and poured and scuttled out and off the bus. Emily escaped last, careful not to leave her canvas bag behind. “Welcome. Please, go inside. I’ve made marshmallow tea. Help yourselves. In you go. Please don’t step on my flowers now. Hullo.”

The bus driver got off behind Emily to be the chaperon since they never picked up a teacher, and the bus rolled over on its side to take a nap. Its belly was so dirty. Emily didn’t like to look at it, and she said “bluh” and stuck her tongue out and concentrated on the zebra’s house instead.

It had four windows and one door and one chimney with pink smoke curling out of it. The pathway to the door was covered in shimmering stones that looked almost like diamonds except not so clear. She started towards the door when the zebra stopped her, putting her non-coffee hoof on her shoulder.

“Whoa there,” she said, then snorted. “Are those brown socks?”

“Yes,” said Emily, even though as she looked down at them, she saw she was wearing no socks at all, and she was looking at her bare shins and ankles.

“You had no dreams last night?” asked the zebra, who still sounded friendly enough, but Emily could tell the answer to this question would be important.

“I couldn’t remember any,” she said.

“When you tried,” the zebra snuffed, stomping one of the legs it was standing on, “did you remember nothing, or colors, or…”

“Just black,” Emily said. “Like an empty chalkboard.”

“Then I’m afraid you’re in the wrong place,” the zebra said, now looking meaningfully at the bus driver, who shrugged his enormous rocky shoulders. “You need to go up.”

And with that, Emily started flying. Not straight forward, like a bird, but straight up, like a balloon. Emily floated up and up and everything became so small, so small, that she started to feel afraid. Emily never felt afraid. Everything got small, so small, but she never got to outer space. Instead, the world became an all-pervading smooth plane of green, like a lawn, but so far away. What if she fell? Emily’s fear caused a fear, a fear of fear, and she wanted to scream or cry, but she couldn’t scream or cry, because she was too far away for anyone to hear her, so her mouth stayed closed.

She dropped her canvas bag, and it fell below her so fast and became so small and then disappeared completely. Now, Emily couldn’t tell if she was moving up. There was green to her left and right and behind but still blue, endless blue, above her. No dragons or swallows or finches or mountaintops. Emily was trapped between two colors and weightless, and she stayed there forever, because clocks couldn’t reach her, and that was the day that didn’t happen. The day that didn’t happen was twelve years long.

That’s what the doctor told her, when the next day came, and Emily was in a hospital because she finally fell and hitting the ground made her body all big and long and lumpy and funny and sore. They decided to call the day that didn’t happen “ko ma” and Emily didn’t like to talk about it but another doctor made her write it down so that tomorrows would keep on coming and she’d never get stuck in yesterdays again.