The Future People

Below is another story I wrote in 4th grade, this one for a school assignment. I believe it was written sometime in the spring of 1981.

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The Future People


Monday

I first got into my time machine at noon. I began the controls. I became real dizzy. The Time Machine seemed to fall over. I stopped the control dial.

It read 3 PM. But the Time Machine did go into the future! So I turned the dial again.

The days went by. In 1989 a rocket to Mars went up. In 1992 I saw large blueish-white tanks holding water. A large hurricane was over part of South America. In 1999 a space shuttle went up to give fuel to a space station. Then everything was red.

In the twenty-first century some apes were in a space station, working with people.

My time machine was going at the speed of light. It was 300 feet up and it would land back at my house where I went up.

By 2150 there was a nuclear war in America. It ended and a new city was built in space. It was red. Mutants walked in it. The Washington monument was 1 inch high. The tower of Pisa was on the ground. I stopped the time machine. Seven landing arms touched the ground. They pulled me to the ground and shot out blue globes of water in every direction. The year-reader read 3902. I opened the door and got out. A fireball crashed right beside me and went back up. The desert lasted for miles. Cactus plants were far ahead. I ran to an oasis in the distance.

I saw a man running away from the oasis. He was tall and wore lion fur. I found a beach and walked along it. The statue of liberty was on the shore. It was cracked and half-buried underground. Tall weeds and boulders were surrounding it. In the distance I saw the Empire State Building. It was on the other side of the lake I was walking by. Near it were the Twin Towers. One of them was broken on the top. The rest of the buildings were either gone or broken.

I went back toward the statue. I passed it and then I walked to the time machine. A person was chained up by some red-haired people. There were some black-haired people holding chained people in a large cage.

I saw the time machine. I took off and went backwards in space. A skeleton was on a spaceship and it was getting its organs and skin back. The tower of Pisa went up. The Washington monument rose up. I came in for a landing. Cars were driving backwards. I touched the ground and got out. I think that I would like to be in New York in 3902.

The Sad Saturnian

Here is a little piece of nonsense verse that I composed earlier this year.

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The Sad Saturnian

I saw a sad Saturnian

On Saturday in the park

His eyes buzzed bright and furry

In the wrinkling, twinkling dark

His squid hands held a juniper branch

Which he swallowed like a Thomistic whale

He murmured forth a yellow bank of turtles

Then told a dismally sweet and languid tale

If he had been a cat from Venus

Or even a caribou from Mars

We might have let him taste the bitter lichens

That fell from certain grim and mountainous stars

As it was, he gurgled, then laughingly eluded us

Warbling along the ridiculous brook

His echoing gray name he never left us

But left us with a sad and Saturnish look

Steven Holland
March 13, 2013
 

The 20th Century Dinosaur

The following is one of my earliest surviving works of fiction. I started writing stories as soon as I knew how to write (c. late 1976), but little if anything remains of my literary creativity from before my 4th grade year, when I composed this tale.

This story has been transcribed faithfully from the original manuscript of December 25, 1980. I have even preserved the mysterious misspelling "refrigetar". I say mysterious because I was an excellent speller, and it seems to me rather surprising that I would have misspelled the word refrigerator at all, let alone so egregiously. I did sometimes purposely alter the spelling of words so as to invent some similar but new concept, and that may be what I had in mind in this case; but, to be quite honest, I have no memory of any such intention, and it may actually have been simply a terrible misspelling. In any case, I am leaving the text as is so as to faithfully preserve what I wrote that Christmas Day when I was 10.

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The 20th Century Dinosaur

One day, a boy found an egg in his back yard. It was as big as his hand. He decided to take it to the dairy.

He took it there the next day. In a week, it was gone. The boy couldn't find it. He looked at the place where he had put it last.

There he found a baby dinosaur.

He ate leaves, grain, and fruit.

Pretty soon, he was as big as a cereal box. He grew every day.

One time, he got as big as an elephant.

The boy put him in a room of the 2-room shed. He put blankets in the room. Winter came pretty soon.

The dinosaur ate up to a refrigetar of food a day.

His dad told him to take him to a national zoo. He told him he could see him every year; but the dinosaur might live 150 or 200 more years.

So he took him to the zoo nearby.

In 2180, a boy was at the zoo, looking at the dinosaur. His grandfather told him, "my great-grandfather said that when he was real little his grandfather told him this was his dinosaur."