The Mysteries of Dia Van-Burdick

A speculative CNF piece-slash-love letter to Chris Van Allsburg’s The Mysteries of Harris Burdick. All true except for the parts that aren’t.

Dia VanGunten focuses on intimate, character-centered storytelling. Sometimes that character is herself.

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Boy Wonder(s)

Behind the big house, the river was a brown ribbon, and in front, the street was wide and gray at the top of a bend, so sometimes, at this hour, a car would come up too fast and crash into the yard. Sirens and blue-red flashing. But not tonight. Tonight, two bubbles of pale light merge and separate with a pop. They bounce in the breeze and float in the trees. They peer into the window at the sleeping child beneath the pink gingham comforter. They’d never seen her small before. They’d never needed her to be small, so they never thought that way about her. She was merely a world, like Mother Nature, and so it was natural to take her for granted. But then the writer abandoned them in the middle of an apocalypse, and suddenly she mattered very much. They’d hopped dimensions and traveled through time to cement the destiny of a child, who, in all truth, was the two of them and everything they loved and the entirety of their world. 

In some miniature feminine form. 

A voice asked — Is she the one? But she’s so small. 

A matching voice said: A very small girl child. How do WE come outta her?

The Lyre 

In her pretend classroom, she schooled neighborhood children on facts she’d collected from the Encyclopedia Britannica. The dodo is dead. Forever. Dodo is done, done, done. The pupils clamored to a clearing — no, a ratty ravine, so steep it swallowed kids. They came upon a stand of chewing gum trees. She fed them bark like book pages. They remember puffy clouds and leafy boughs. They recall concentric circles in the placid water, where no stone was skipped.  

Uninvited Guests 

On the basement stairs, she was promised school clothes if only she would swallow Effluvium slugs of unknown consequence, a lasting poison. A leprechaun stomped her into those steps. She’d once followed the stairs after hearing the honk of blue herons; she’d wandered through the labyrinth to find Dad in the basement garage with his head on the horn — home, just barely. 

A knob turned on a tiny door. Uninvited guests left an unsolicited gift. The accordion file held a sheath of mysterious drawings. Harris Burdick promised to return with the rest, but he never came back, the bastard. She felt bad for these untold stories, so she started with that tiny door: it opened to the clearing in the forest, where a UFO hovered in the leaves, a goat-god and a babbling brook. A golden lyre. Bleeding deer with an arrow. A lavender snake engraved with an alphabet. Buzzub.

Twin Fuzz 

She was soft still, with little flyaway hairs that popped out of her skull. Her mother combed it back from her brow, into a braid that was French, like a tongue kiss. She was sweet-cheeked in purple sneakers. She was a small girl child with an open palm and two wriggling caterpillars, but she understood, already, that writing would be an abduction. UFOs always stalled cars and fried televisions. Aliens took over. A new world was built overtop of the first, and to her, those Lego worlds would be more real and immediate than imaginary worlds ought to be. But these two were too much for her; she was a child still. She had to send them back. As two fuzzy wiggles of light, caterpillar-like, the twins spelled out goodbye. Not in English, but in buzzub.

Captain Tom 

At twelve, her first novel: 500 pages, typed, double spaced, formatted for publication. Devy VanHuyzen’s braces are tightened in a timely fashion. She has a big brother named Brad — a bother! — but he looks out for her. Devy has lipgloss and a green-eyed boyfriend. She’s terrified of her first French kiss. Devy thinks that it must be gross, which makes it really exciting. The writer scratched Devy into a series of Mead notebooks. When she finished one, she donned her yellow slicker and got in a wooden boat, rowing and rowing through the fog until she spotted Captain Tom. The lantern swung three times, and slowly her grandpa appeared, a shining face in the mist. He called it a “manuscript.” He typed it up and sent it back to her in a silver schooner.

Missing VanGunten

She could not rewrite reality. She couldn't pull that ocean liner out of the canal. She threw the engines into reverse, but the ship crushed forward, wrecking the city of Venice, taking Dad with it.  

Under the Rug

She swept writing under the rug because it was a futile, toothless thing, just the weightless wishes of a child, just a kid on her knees in her lover’s punk rock bedroom praying to a God she didn’t trust to please, please, save Venice. What would Italy do without Venice? So she choked writing out, got it round the throat, til it shrieked, a deflating balloon. It flew away like a fart, because that’s what fiction is, after all, and real life too. Damn if that purple balloon didn't find air someplace else and turn into a lavender technicolor snake and creep back, a lump under the rug, and no matter how many times she tried to obliterate it, the thing wouldn’t die. 

Just Desert 

She lowered the knife and it grew even brighter — a giant throbbing Yayoi Kusama pumpkin, snake in a slithering skin of purple neon. If she killed it, the creature would come for her harder. If she ignored it, it would wither inside her and tar her guts with decay. It would take its toll: a  palm of glinting coins. Invisible pantaloons. Cold, sharp blade to separate her from polite society.

The House on Jubilee Lane

She could not be a contributing member. Coyote pisses on the couch. Kitsune has seven shedding foxtails, leaving a furred nest. The writer is Tanuki with a parachute nutsack — a perfect lift off. She isn’t bound by gender, by manners, or by reality. She lives in the glowing house on the imaginary street in the city limits of her past. 

Strange Day In July

Which July? An artist exists in a timeless mucus — an eternally cracking egg. 

The past is a regurgitating dog, and the writer is leaping from bed. Which bed? The velvet soul sister quilt surrounded by green walls. Creature from the Black Lagoon:  the color of a plastic action figure with translucent fins. She loved the creature enough to live inside its troubled skin, but she’d never seen the film. Why should she? That movie monster could never matter as much as the toy. Is it the waterbed with the blue silk sheets on the fourth floor walkup? Okay, that bed. That July. Go there. Heat rises. She’s at the top of the building. The sun comes through that skylight. Twin fans blow those silk sheets. She slips free of a nap and walks through the apartment as Stretch Armstrong, with arms that reach the ceiling. Her fingers leave rainbow fingerprints on the glass skylight. A discarded instrument has music still, in its molecules, in the turning atoms. The writer can fly to the shores of Lake Erie for yet another July. She tosses a stone, but it boomerangs back, returning as sea glass she once collected from the murk. These Julys are piling up. The sun sparkles on the water’s surface. She is that skipped rock, that always coming around thing, a loop of being.   

Seven Chairs

She is one of the flying sisters. She mostly floats in a cathedral of light. She pulls up a chair, tucks into a desk, and suddenly she’s in France. She’s in Detroit in 1984. She’s in BC Greece.  

Another Place, Another Time 

All at once, all of Earth is like her, untethered from the machine, but the amateurs are stir-crazy. They bake sourdough bread or stretch their buttholes. The writer survives the global threat. She walks to the end of Luna Pier, that long concrete arm that reaches into Lake Erie, and she waits for the train with the bedsheet sail. Bumpity bump over the tracks, built on the rocks, snaking stones in the lake. The train comes through the fogs, like Captain Tom, and her sister’s face in the mist, inquiring after a manuscript. 

Lichen’s Library 

Seedlings poked up from the binding, popping the threads and breaking the spine. Leaves unfurled from the open V and quickly climbed over the pages. She’d been warned about the book, but now it was too late. It overtook the bed linens. It bloomed in her nostrils. Her mind was overtaken by rabid roses, pink and bright and ravenous.  

The Fourth Floor Bedroom 

Wind slipped in through an open window. The breeze rustled the flock of white birds, stirring their feathers, that hollow straw at the heart of the fluff. Once, one bird lifted one wing and peeled off the wallpaper, well, all the wings lifted, all the pages. An airborne novel. An unleashed contagion. Her sister’s voice on the telephone: “Dee, promise you’ll let this one fly.”

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