THE TURQUOISE PEN

HENRY'S HOUSE

Noël R. King

Henry Toyles found out one day that there were more rooms to his house than he had ever believed or known.

"I had no idea I lived in a mansion!" he exclaimed shortly thereafter as he circled around his estate on foot. "This is totally unbelievable!"

"What I find unbelievable is that he only now just sees this," his neighbor muttered as he watched Henry skirt the grounds. "Where has he been all his life?"

"What? What was that you said?" called Henry, whose ears seemed to be unbelievably keen this day. He had no idea he could hear so far—or see so clearly, for that matter. Was that really a distant mountain over the rise of his hill? How had he never seen THAT before? Where in the world had he been?

"Unbelievable!" his neighbor called back.

"Why didn’t you tell me?" Henry shouted.

"Tell you what, that you’re alive?" muttered the neighbor, now very softly. Out loud, he yelled back, "Tell you what?"

"That I’m alive!" Henry leaped and did a little jig. "And that I have a huge big HOUSE to live in, not just that little one-room efficiency I thought I lived in!"

"I don’t know, man, this is getting a little too weird for me," muttered the neighbor, now so softly as to be barely audible even to himself.

"I think I’ll go in and get me some lunch!" he yelled aloud, cranking up the volume. "Do you want some?"

"No!" cried Henry. "I have my own KITCHEN now! I am going to get my own self some lunch! Hooray! Hooray! And then I am going to go sit in my LIVING ROOM. My LIVING ROOM! Did you ever hear the likes of that before? I have a LIVING ROOM!"

Feeling more than a little over-exuberized by Henry’s outbursts of joy and discovery, his neighbor snuck back into his own house and closed the kitchen curtains for a while, to shut out too much new life from sliding in as it rang out from across the way.

I may just have to move, he thought as he ate his pastrami sandwich standing up by the kitchen counter. This exuberance is killing me!

Meanwhile, across the way, Henry was already arranging a party for one and all, up and down his street, along with long-lost relatives and friends from out of town, to give himself a proper housewarming party.

"This is my house," he declared, "and I am gonna live in it."

And that he did.

—As circumstances warrant, through her Turquoise Pen column Noël R. King, Scottsville, Virginia, reports on strange and wonderful things, including the risk of going poof.