Welcome to the first official Wingfeather Tales book club excerpt, from Andrew's own story, "The Prince of Yorsha Doon." Yorsha Doon is an old, rich, colorful place, so foreign from the other parts of Aerwiar that I've lived in or visited, and I hope Andrew keeps writing there. The language and customs and even the smells give me "the most exquisite jigglies," as Oskar would say. But I will let you read those descriptive passages for yourself. What I chose this week is a scene between Safiki and his mamada. His mamada is delightful, but what I love about this excerpt is the last line.
There in the heart of Yorsha Doon, somewhere south of Prince Majah’s palace, a boy in black leggings and a billowy blue patchwork shirt climbed barefoot through the second story window of a pleasant white building and woke a wrinkled old woman from her midday nap.“It’s me,” whispered the boy.“Safiki,” the old woman said as she stirred. “Where have you been?”The boy glanced out the window at the dusty city and the spires of the palace. He wouldn’t know where to begin, and he didn’t want to worry her. “All over,” he said, grateful that today she remembered who he was. Some days she greeted him as a total stranger.“You would tell your grandmother if you were in trouble, wouldn’t you?” She lifted her a trembling hand and touched his face. Her white eyes looked in his direction but he knew they couldn’t see a thing. “Have you bathed?”“Yes, Mamada,” he said. What he didn’t say was that it was four days ago and it was only because he had been hiding from the port warden. Surely, he thought, leaping from the deck of a ship and swimming under the pier with his pockets stuffed with plumyums counted as bathing. He had at least entertained a passing thought about his grandmother’s insistence on cleanliness after he had climbed out of the sea and spread out on the roof of the warden’s
badaan, listening to the gullbirds and the shouts of the shipmates as they searched hopelessly for him among the many ships. The plumyums had been delicious. “That reminds me,” Safiki said, “I have something for you.” His grandmother grinned, revealing her single tooth and her wonderful rumple of tanned wrinkles made deep and soft after years of smiling. “I brought you this.” He removed a plumyum from one of the folds in his shirt and offered it to her with a bow of his head.“Safiki, my dear one, you are so kind to your
mamada!” She took the fruit and smelled it rapturously. “These
umamri only feed me soup,” she grumbled with a glance in the direction of the door. “What they don’t know is that I have the most fearsome tooth in all of Yorsha Doon.” She winked a blind eye at Safiki and reached into her mouth, wrenching the old yellow tooth to and fro a few times before removing it altogether with a crunch that made the boy wince even as he stifled a laugh. She wiped the false tooth on her sheets and held it up to Safiki as if he had never seen it before. The bottom end of the tooth had been ground to a point and its edge was sharpened like a blade. “Hah!” she crowed, then she clapped a hand over her mouth and lowered her voice to a whisper. “Your
mamada could eat a flank of charred tahala rump if she wanted!”“Then next time I will hide a whole rump of tahala in my shirt.” Safiki laughed as he sat on the edge of the bed and watched her arthritic hands make deft work of the plumyum, slicing it into tiny pieces with the tooth and popping them into her mouth. “Will one be enough?”“Yes, my boy.” She sucked noisily on the fruity chunks. “Whatever you bring me is always enough.”
What was your favorite excerpt this week? Post it in the comments below! Then, pop over to the
forum and hang out for awhile. There might be plumyums. :-)
