Ring Ring

When the phone rings, it could mean a number of things. For instance, it could be a "Congratulations! You've won a thousand dollars and a lawn mower!" kind of call, or a "Turn on Channel 9. I'm on TV!" kind of call, or it could be a "Hello? Pizza Hut? Oh. Sorry. Wrong number." kind of call. It could also be a rather less welcome kind of call involving, say, the police, or worse, your angry boy/girlfriend. But we won't get into that, lest we tempt fate.

Yes, there are many possible outcomes when the telephone interrupts your daily life by ringing itself silly.

In fact you could say - as people so foolishly, yet so insistently do - anything's possible. Except, of course, for the unavoidable fact that some things, due to the very reasonable laws of science and, more importantly, plain logic, are just not possible.*

So when young Evelyn Phillips picked up the telephone one sunny Sunday morning, she expected something that was, by said laws, entirely possible. She thought it was most probably her mother, out to the market with her father, calling to tell her (again) not to let the washing get rained on and to water the daisies. This is a very possible kind of call.

What she got, though, was quite completely the opposite.

"Hello?" she said into the mouthpiece, waiting for her mother's voice to answer. But it did not. In fact, there was no voice answering at all.

Now, this in itself is not impossible at all, because sometimes, for reasons unfathomable, people call people and say nothing at all. Maybe they mean to pull a rather weak prank, or accidentally dialed the wrong number. Even so, you'd think they'd have the decency and ever so little amount of intelligence required to say so instead of irritating the person on the other end with ten seconds of silence before hanging up.

Evelyn was just about to put down the phone, frowning, when - and now we get to the impossible bit - it started to smoke. And not just any smoke either. It was purple, tinged with the slightest shade of pink, and smelled of blueberries.

The long tendrils of purple-pink smoke curled into the air, filling the room with its sweet scent. Strangely, the smoke didn't spread throughout the whole room, but seemed to be collecting itself into one thick cloud. Then the cloud started changing sHapE. It began to look like a snowman, or rather a smokeman. It even started to change colour in places and began to look more solid...

Evelyn dropped the receiver (which didn't affect the smoke at all) and stared, and stared, and stared.

The smoke had turned itself into a boy!

The smoke-child looked down at Evelyn, smiled hesitantly and said, "Would you like three wishes?"


* Unless you just happen to be a certain purple dinosaur or creatures of similar naivety with overly cheerful optimism (and rather creepy eyes, come to think of it) then maybe - just maybe - anything could be possible. Even purple dinosaurs.