David Makes a Fly

Shae Sveniker, June 2009

It was unusual for Davey to stay in his room more than two days on end. For those two days, though, usually he spent the time talking to himself or drawing on the walls with crayons or doing math in his head. He loved doing math it was his favorite thing. He loved doing math while listening to the same clip from Scooby Doo over and over until he stumbled upon a better, more brilliant Scooby Doo. Right now though, he was listening to the part where Shaggy says "Zoinks, Scoob!" and Scooby goes "Ruh Roh!" and then there is laughter.

Oh god, that laugh track was brilliant, David just couldn't let it go, he played it over and over.

In the meantime, there was math to be done, but not just ordinary math, David had a brilliant idea. The Mom had bought colored tissue paper. the kind for wrapping presents with. It was slightly red on one side and slightly white on the other and it was slightly translucent and there was a lot of it. The minute the Mom had brought the stuff home from the store, David saw it in the hallway and pointedly said "This smells like a job for the mystery gang. Let's split up!" and snatched up the tissue paper and took it to his room. The Mom followed him and was making a lot of noise but David wasn't listening. There was indeed a mystery afoot. He shut the door quickly and the Mom banged on it a for a little while and made more noise. It would go away soon, it always ended in exasperated sighs and then silence outside David's door.

-oinks Scoob! Ruh Roh! HaHa--

David had seen a video of Satoshi Kamiya folding an eastern dragon out of paper just like the paper that the Mom had brought home. He thought the Mom had brought it home for him, because of the video. It was very nice of her to do that. He watched the video on his computer while the Scooby Doo track played over and over. It was complicated but before the end of the first day, David could fold it. Satoshi Kamiya called the thing a "divine dragon" and so David thought it would be good to call it that too. David took out his masking tape from behind his bed and taped the thing to the cieling. He wrote next to it "divine dragon" in red crayon. There was plenty of tissue-paper left, and David thought it would be a good idea to start trying to make his own, now that he'd had a small introduction to this strangely mathmatical art.

-ruh roh hahahahaha--

By the end of the second day the Scooby Doo track had been switched to the same dialogue but at a different place. The sounds were totally different and David liked this one more anyway. It kept playing and playing as David kept folding and folding. The long roll of Tissue was about halfway gone and he'd made several more dragons, a great dane, a Shaggy, and a Daphne but he felt awkward makeing Daphne with such a short skirt so he made her with a longer skirt instead. He'd read that origami art had to be made out of only one piece of paper and there was no cutting allowed and so that's what he did.

-ruh roh ha ha ha ha--

On the third day he noticed that he was running out of the 25 ft roll of paper. He'd made more than fifteen items including a giant beattle, a monster from Scooby Doo, and a twelve-inch tall replica of the Mom complete with whiskey bottle and cigarette in her hands, all folding, no cutting, only one piece of paper each. There was no wasted paper in the room and now he was down to his last six square inches. David knew that there would be more paper but it would be a few days and so David decided to make something really special, but he did not know how to do it so he lifted the blinds in the room and it was bright outisde. He looked out and saw a butterfly flying through the grape-vines in the back yard and closed the blinds again. "Ok gang," he said "It seems like it was old man Peterson all along!"

-ruh roh ha ha ha ha--

The Mom was outside his door making noise and banging on his door. David didn't like it when she did that and didn't know or care what she wanted. There was a mystery afoot! David was hungry, but that didn't matter. He kept folding. Six square inches is not a lot of paper, so David had to get really close to the desktop to see what he was doing. The Mom had brought guests over at around nightfall on the third day, but something was not right. The Mom never had guests over on the wrong days, but now there were guests on the wrong day!

...ruh roh ha ha ha ha...

David opened the door and there were people in white coats in the living room. "It's the wrong day!" David said. The Mom looked began to yell but David was ignatious. "The wrong day! The wrong day!" he said and began to attack the people in the white coats. They had to leave! There was no reason for them to be there! It was wrong of them to be there! But they grabbed onto him and pulled him out of the house. "the Wrong Day!" David had no idea what they wanted and fought really hard but the people in the white coats overpowered him and threw him into the back of a mini-van.

It was quiet in the mini-van and so David sat down and opened his hand and there, the thing he'd been folding for the past twelve hours, no bigger than the eraser of a pencil. "Zoinks Scoob!" He said. The people in the white coats were making noises at him but he wasn't listening. "Ruh Roh!" he said. The people in white coats began to drive the mini-van someplace David had never been. "It's a mystery," he said "Let's split up, gang!" The van drove onto the freeway and David wondered where the Mom was. He said "You meddling kids!" and held out his hand to show the people in white coats what he had made, and in it there was an origami fly, fluttering it's wings, looking around, buzzing in terrified confusion at being alive.