The present

Monday

He had been waiting several weeks for this instant. He went into the little toy store carefully pushing the door, which offered quite a strong resistance for his small arms. He felt like the door was trying to keep him away from the small treasures that were beyond it. 

He silently walked to the clerk’s desk, where an odd-looking man whose age he could not imagine was filling some paper forms. He knew that the clerk would remember him, since he had been at this store every afternoon, visiting it in his daily walk to home after school. Week after week he had been saving every cent he could, sometimes by avoiding lunch at school, others by getting paid for small chores or just by carefully exploring the floor around the bus stop where, with some luck, he could find the small change that some passengers had accidentally dropped while taking the bus. 

Step by step, he approached the clerk and, after a few seconds that felt eternal, asked him for the Airfix made 1/72 scale model of a white Angel Interceptor. He had not figured out yet how he was going to get the money to pay for the enamel paints and brushes. He just had enough for the model and the glue. 

He felt like his heart was being crushed when the clerk told him with an emotionless tone that the store had run out of stock of that item. He left the shop without looking back, and went home in the windy afternoon, a lonely tear running down his right cheek. 

Some months before

He had few pleasant moments at home, his father was still looking for a job after the coal mines had been closed. Most of his time was spent at the little town’s bar, drinking cheap beer with other miners who had also been fired in the last months. His mother had gotten a job in a small business in the city, taking advantage of the afterhours accounting classes that she had stubbornly assisted after the mine was closed. His father looked at her while leaving every night with contempt, feeling unsure whether she was doing that to help keeping the family afloat or just trying to escape from her grim reality by pretending to learn a trade. 

They had a black and white TV, where he could watch the shows his parents choose every night after dinner. But for the time between he came back from school until cooking was done, the TV was his possession. He carefully arranged the weekly schedule of shows that he liked. Most of them were either horror or sci-fi. And the ones he treasured the most were those slightly disturbing Gerry Anderson’s series. 

He dreamed about having adventures along the characters that those series featured.

Landing on the Moon to visit the SHADO Interceptors’ facilities, visiting Spectrum’s Cloudbase to check the Angel’s combat readiness. Driving a SHADO mobile unit through a dense pine forest in the darkness to intercept an alien flying saucer shot down by a SHADO Skydiver. 

He really enjoyed those episodes, even after watching them in reruns. Some of them had plenty of adventure, others could become scary. But they were becoming his own small private universe, with its own variety of ambiguous heroes, that were curiously affected by some of the same problems that were part of his own life. Those characters somehow were able to face hazards and risks even while having to face issues like troublesome families or tragic losses. On second thought, he realized that those issues, were in fact, the reason that enabled them to face those dangers. By doing so, the real-life problems became less relevant, less important.

When Autumn arrived, he walked in front of the local toy store, and he saw small die cast replicas of the vehicles that were featured in both of those Anderson’s shows and in his own adventure filled dreams. They were quite expensive, at least for him. He could not imagine asking his mother for any of those models, even less doing so to his father. 

One day, on his visit to the store, he discovered a small box containing his favorite Anderson’s vehicle, laying behind a glass display with shiny metallic borders: it was a sleek, needle like, white jet plane, with small delta wings and a T shaped tail. He fell in love with it at first sight, his heart pounding wildly in his chest. After many weeks of saving efforts, one Sunday he reached the required amount of money. His dreams seemed closer to become real on the next day.

Monday, afterward

After that awkward Monday in the toy store, he had ditched the goal of getting that model. He knew that he could get one by ordering it to the store. He just did not feel himself worthy of it. Guilt had replaced desire; he could not be able to get home with his coveted model with all the ongoing income troubles. He spent his hard-earned savings getting a couple of small presents for his parents. 

This action made him feel better, but the wild adventures of the last months seemed to have vanished from his dreams, which now were either dull or impossible to be remembered in the morning.

The unexpected boxes

Two weeks before Christmas a telegram arrived, delivering the news of the passing away of a far relative of his father, who could not remember exactly what the actual nature of the relationship was. The telegram described some sort of inheritance passed on to his father. A set of boxes were already on their way.

The boxes arrived a couple of weeks later. He had decided to avoid much use of his imagination when he thought about the boxes and their contents. Whatever was inside them could not be worthy of his interest. Old cotton made clothes, maybe. Perhaps some ancient crockery. Yellow tinged photo albums. Worn out shoes or a set of rust covered tools.

The boxes arrived on a cold Friday afternoon, after he had his last school day before Christmas. Some snow had fallen the day before, covering the streets with white patches of ice stained with dirt. The small red brick houses of his neighborhood felt cold and looked discolored under the gray sky. Vapor condensed from his mouth with every breath while he walked his way home.

A surprise waited for him in the last box. The previous ones were filled with what he already expected: the dull belongings of a seemingly dull man.

The last box contained books. 

Wear torn books, dog eared books, with old book’s smell. The sleeves featured fantastic images: sleek spaceships blasting through space with unknown destinations, men wearing spacesuits visiting strange looking worlds, funny looking alien creatures, vessels involved in vast battles among unknown stars, humanoid figures featuring mechanical body parts. 

His father was going to throw the box away. He asked if he could keep it. Surprisingly, his father accepted. His mother did not say anything. 

After dinner he was in his small bedroom whit his eyes focused on his treasure. He still could not believe what he now owned: 123 books, each one featuring a different story or, even better, a set of stories. And each book offered a brief resume in the back as a hint of its contents. Each resume promised more adventures than the whole TV series he had coveted so much. Not exactly better, but different. They promised the discovery of a larger and more complex universe than the one slightly suggested by the Gerry Anderson’s series. 

The first book that he started to read featured an unrevealing cover: the bent shape of a man, apparently trying to pass unnoticed in front of an alien looking red colored eye which had a star shaped pupil. 

The book had a short but intriguing title written in plain bold black characters, it simply said “Childhood’s End”. 

Later that night he finally fell deeply asleep for the first time since that fateful Monday.

He woke up next morning, with the fresh memories of a vivid dream slowly dissolving in his growing consciousness. He remembered himself piloting a spaceship, blasting fast through space, among unknown stars. 

This story was inspired by a discussion thread in a sci-fi Facebook group.