Fiction “It seems to me that almost everything is a waste of time,” Milo remarks as he walks dejectedly home from school. Until for no logical or predictable reason he is transported to a strange world of words, numbers and confusion. ‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ gasped Milo. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ answered a strange voice. ‘It all depends on how you look at things.’ ‘I beg your pardon?’ said Milo, for he didn’t see who had spoken. ‘I said it depends how you look at things,’ repeated the voice. Milo turned around and found himself staring at two very neatly polished brown shoes, for standing directly in front of him (if you can use the word ‘standing’ for someone suspended in mid-air) was another boy just about his age, whose feet were easily three feet off the ground. ‘For instance,’ continued the boy, ‘if you happen to like deserts, you might not think this was beautiful at all.’ ‘For instance,’ said the boy again, ‘if Christmas trees were people and people were Christmas trees, we’d all be chopped down, put up in the living room, and covered with tinsel, while the trees opened our presents.’ ‘What does that have to do with it?’ asked Milo. 83 Year 6, Sequence 11 ‘Nothing at all,’ he answered, ‘but it’s an interesting possibility, don’t you think?’ ‘How do you manage to stand up there?’ for this was the subject that most interested him. ‘I was about to ask you a similar question,’ answered the boy, ‘for you must be much older than you look to be standing on the ground.’ ‘What do you mean?’ Milo asked. ‘Well,’ said the boy, ‘in my family everyone is born in the air, with his head at exactly the height it’s going to be when he’s an adult, and then we all grow towards the ground. When we’re fully grown up, or as you can see, grown down, our feet finally touch. Of course, there are a few of us whose feet never reach the ground, no matter how old we get, but I suppose it is the same in every family.’ He hopped a few steps in the air, skipped back to where he started, and then began again. ‘You certainly must be very old to have reached the ground already.’ ‘Oh no,’ said Milo seriously, ‘in my family we all start on the ground and grow up, and we never know how far until we actually get there.’ ‘What a silly system,’ the boy laughed. ‘Then your head keeps changing its height and you always see things in a different way? Why, when you’re fifteen things won’t look at all the way they did when you were ten, and at twenty everything will change again.’ ‘I suppose so,’ said Milo, for he had never really thought about the matter. ‘We always see things from the same angle,’ the boy continued. ‘It’s much less trouble that way. Besides it makes more sense to grow down and not up. When you’re very young, you can never hurt yourself from falling down if you’re in mid-air, and you certainly can’t get into trouble for scuffing your shoes or marking the floor if there’s nothing to scuff them on and the floor is three feet away
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