The morning air smelled like pancakes baking and about to burn, and his father sang in his melodic and slightly hoarse voice. Frodo grinned into his still warm pillow before he sat up, taking huge gulps of the sugary air. Slowly and silently, he slithered out of his bed and onto the floor, where he stretched out flat on his tummy and reached for a box hidden under his bedside table. The wooden box was small and brown and smelled sweet as pines; it was filled with Frodo’s most beautiful treasures:
A few blue feathers – a jaybird’s most likely, a large snail-shell that would murmur and whisper if you put it close to your ear, a picture of a lady who was half bird and half human, her face slightly pointy like that of a petulant elf. There also were two dead cabbage butterflies, their wings pale petals, and an equally dead dragonfly. Sometimes Frodo dreamed they came to life and flew out of the box again, fluttering just beneath the ceiling and covering him with velvety pollen that would turn him into something fast, dark, and wise.
An empty, bluish green eggshell that might have been a baby dragon’s just as well as a whinchat’s and a carved cat completed Frodo’s collection. Bits of dried mud covered the bottom of the box and reminded him of how he had lain in the garden one rainy day, face pressed down into the wet earth, pretending he were a seed buried deep.
His tiny fingers rummaged through the box until they curled around the snail-shell. He then closed the box carefully and pushed it back under the bedside table, before he got to his feet and hurried over into his parents’ bedroom.
As he approached the large and comfortable bed, he caught a glimpse of himself in the egg-shaped mirror on the opposite wall and thought he was too naked, too hobbity in his short nightgown. He wanted a beak, and hooves, and feathers, claws and dark blue wings. His father always told him to stop daydreaming, but his mother said it was all right – and that she used to keep crimson fairies in her closet when she was a child.
Frodo was small and chubby, and tanned from the long summer; and his mother, still buried under blankets and half-asleep, smiled at him when he climbed into her bed. He breathed a kiss on her brow and let the snail-shell slip into her hand.
“For you,” he whispered, already jumping out of the bed again. He headed for the kitchen, where he helped his father eat and burn more pancakes.
It was his fifth birthday.
ooooo
The hobbit looked at the dark beauty of the moon-iced river water closely, as if he could see phantom ships or forgotten shores somewhere beneath the surface. He wanted to go in, longing for the feel of water so badly his skin began to tingle and his mouth became dry. More than this, he whished he could see the place where the river opened out into the sea.
He thought of how his father would build him houses of shells by the riverbank. Shell halls, he used to call them, and how he taught him that the shell’s brilliant colour always came back when you put them into the water.
Frodo walked in, and a myriad of broken mirrors scattered on the water sparkled all around him.
Stones rolled over and tumbled, stinging his ankles. Night air, sweet with the scent of fading flowers and freshly mown grass, filled his quivering nostrils. The air was cold on his bare white arms. He skimmed his palms over the water. He sank. The water only chuckled, mocking, languorous.
It was Frodo’s twenty-third birthday.
ooooo
“There now,” said a strangely familiar voice, “we know you are awake, sweetheart, just open your eyes for us, will you?”
A cup was brought to his lips, steam hitting his face like warm breath, and Frodo opened his stinging eyes, slowly and reluctantly. Somebody had wrapped him into several layers of blankets and a towel had been draped around his head. He almost spit out a mouthful of tea when he realized he was naked under the blankets.
