Chapter 4 – The Train

Spawning vortices like a Saffir-Simpson cat-five shedding Fujita-fives, the Purple Cat’s winds could bulldoze a building with the indifference of a junkyard crusher welcoming the arrival of a ‘79 burnt-orange Chevy Nova.

Her winds descend upon a tree, whispering “Where is she?” shredding branches bare of green, leaving a midsummer skeleton of petrified wood; along with ships sinking, planes and cars crashing, trains derailing, marbles lost, bubbles popping and people slipping into the abyss—these black funnels under the control of the great evil one.

“She has arrived,” hisses the creature to the vortices in the corner of her castle. “She has arrived. Get her. Bring her. Bring her here. Bring her to me! Bring her to me, now!”

The winds stream out the alcove window, beyond the canyon, over the fjord and toward a little girl who was sleeping on a plane that was rolling toward its arrival gate.

“And what do you mean by that: Drama queen?”

***

Sofia fell from dream’s abyss back into this world—yet again.

“Can we go a little faster and get to the action?”

Sofia clutched something that she had had when her parents had had to wake her. The woman that had sat in the aisle seat had had to dash for a connection that had had her running. When Sofia bent to grab the yellow star that she had had on her belt, she saw a light that had had a glow, a glow that had had that je ne sais quoi that had had her staring.

“We’re not ready for those games, yet. Drive the plot and get the reader to trust you, first. Stay focused and don’t fall off.”

“It must have fallen off,” Sofia thought when she reached for the sparkling earring.

“Mommy, I found a star. From the sky. A little star,” she whispered softly enough so her mother could not hear; loudly enough so she could pretend she did, while she attempted to re-clip her own yellow star to her belt.

She picked up the diamond earring and clasped her hand tightly around it, but as she did, her little yellow star fell beside the seat and the shell of the plane’s fuselage.

Sofia placed the diamond in her pocket, determined that she would see the woman again, certain that she would return it one day, and left the plane, never to see her own little star, again; well, maybe, maybe not, we’ll see, she might. This is going to get complicated, so keep an eye on the star; and on the wormhole that’s about to open.

After a discussion with a ticket agent, a baggage claim officer, a tourist, a police officer, and an airport information agent on which bus to take to the train station, her dad led the family to the bus to which her mom had pointed earlier; and then, a short ride later, they arrived at the train station.

Sofia asked to sit alone, again, one row behind her parents, listing in memories, grinding aspirations into dust within the pressure cooker of prebuescent youth lost in a climate crisis that no one’s doing a thing about. As Sofia’s train buzzed and boarded, people de-boarded from the de-buzzing arrival across the platform.

A horde crossed along the walkway, casting flickering shadows on the window beside Sofia’s seat—dark, light, mirror, glass, dark, light, mirror, glass, dark, light, orange, mirror, glass, dark, purple, light, orange, mirror, raptor, glass, vortex, light, saber-tooth tiger in the grass, alas, alas, a pigeon on the glass, alas, alas.

Sofia studied one mysterious man on the edge of the platform, standing alone, in a whirl of green gas beside a woman slapping herself with a fish. The man was dressed in a tattered pinstripe suit, wearing black horn-rimmed eyeglasses to which he had attached the kind of colorful streamers one would find on the handlebars of a child’s tricycle; all the while picking his nose.

Thus, one more time—for the good times: F-minor, half-step down, half-step up, one-and-a-half steps down; you know the ditty.

In the train on the other track, Sofia noticed a woman sitting alone, not yet having disembarked, still reading a book.

“Do you have the ticket?” a voice intoned. Sofia gripped her seat and tried to sink into the space between herself and the window.

The earth rumbled and the window vibrated.

The woman across the platform, in the train, turned to look at Sofia in a snap, as if knowing she was there, and smiled. Then the woman lifted her book to display its cover of small yellow star. In the window light, the woman resembled her own mother.

“Ticket?” repeated the voice. “I don’t have all day, miss—the hourglass is doing the cha-cha.”

“Earthquake,” Sofia whispered from memories of Southern California, as she twisted her hair and pulled a ticket from her pocket—the one from the park, the day before.

Sofia watched half the platform slide into the past, while the woman’s image remained in the window.

“I’m afraid I can’t accept that,” the conductor insisted.

“I don’t want to go!” Sofia said. “They’re laughing at me. I don’t want to get on the train,” she exclaimed, looking toward the image of the woman in the window for help.

A hand touched her shoulder. She swung around to face the aisle and saw her mom presenting a ticket to the conductor.

“Mom, it was you in the window,” Sofia gasped as she turned to the other train to confirm—the strange woman was gone.

“Daddy had them in his shirt pocket,” her mother said to Sofia as she turned to her husband, adding to him, “You could put your cell phone down sometimes,” then turning back to Sofia, palming her cheek, “Just rest, Sofia, it’s still a couple of more hours,” before returning to her seat.

“I told you; I don’t know how they got there,” Sofia’s dad insisted as he flared his fingers like fireworks, “I thought you had them.”

“Maybe a baboon put them there,” she said to her husband who turned to look out the window.

“Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi. You’re my only hope,” Dad said to his reflection, as he closed Candy Crush, put the cell phone into his pocket and extracted his laptop, replacing one distraction with another, because looking busy mitigates the friendly fire, and gives one time to think-up a colorful excuse when forgetting to mow the lawn.

Just outside the left side of the train, the raptor and the saber-tooth tiger prepared for war. Raptor and tiger, in disguise, pretended to search for breadcrumbs and mice amidst the pigeons on the tracks, alas, alas; the enigmatic man with the eyeglasses streaming color, still standing alone, still digging it out, with now a fish at his feet. A life-altering outcome for this little girl, pending, as the predators stalked in stealth; and one of them—both, possibly—knew how the tickets got in dad’s pocket.

“And where are you going today, young lady?” The conductor asked as he clipped the real ticket.

Wide shoulders and a thick neck supported his soft complexion, no wrinkles except for the crow’s feet of his smile. His mouth was framed by a beard and a gunslinger mustache ending in an upturned spiral that made you want to take out your comb, leave your Colt 45 in your holster, and say, “Howdy, pard’ner.” Eyes as blue as the sky, the horizon in him—a Viking, even with the bifocals; the age, up in years, yet a soothing voice and soft smile that could calve a glacier, leaving a snowflake in sunglasses to sunbathe on an iceberg.

“Perhaps, I was a bit too stern, my regrets, young lady,” he added forward to Sofia’s mother, nodding at her, then turning back to Sofia, still holding the first ticket from the amusement ride, adding, “And I can see where you get your beautiful face, little girl.”

“Is that the best he can do for his wife?”

“To a new school; no, to my Nanny’s,” Sofia answered. “It was just my mom’s reflection in the window,” she said to herself as the train accelerated. “You can have this ticket if you want to meet a real conductor in San Diego—she transitioned,” Sofia added to the conductor.

“Very good then, very good; welcome to Norway,” the conductor said, adding, “With this precious ticket you gave me, I will return later and tell you about the magical transitions you’ll see beyond the windows.”

“There’s more?” Sofia asked.

“You sure she’s ready for more?”

"Absolutely," the conductor replied, his voice rich with quiet wisdom. "When you see, truly see, beauty—it's as though you drift into a moment that stretches into eternity, where all stories unfold at once."

With a delicate motion, he slid the clipper back into the clear plastic tube that dangled from a frayed knot around his neck. He paused, his gaze distant, as if listening to something beyond the present.

"The magic will come soon," he added softly, his words a promise woven with time. "Just a little patience, and it will all unfold."

“The magic will happen soon. Just be patient for a bit longer. He keeps repeating that, but when are we going to get to the action?”

“Fly me to the moon,” the conductor sang as he moved toward the next carriage of the train.

Sofia’s mother, hearing the song, lowered her head in acquiescence as Dad took it up a notch, “Let me see what spring is like…,” as the conductor turned back to dad, finger-fired his hand-pistol, and blew away the smoke from his index finger.

“Two of them,” Mom whispered.

Sofia turned to look out the window and exhaled as the train entered a tunnel lined with red lights. A passenger, walking through the aisle, stumbled in the darkness and the lights ignited her blonde hair, ablaze in orange. The passenger flailed her arms and dropped her newspaper and it opened to a headline of a baboon escaping from the Kistiansand Zoo.

Sofia paid no mind to the headline; and neither should have any of the passengers, because sometimes, shit happens—coincidences, if it please you; and this thing about baboons has no bearing on the story, so everyone on the train must stop thinking about baboons, right now because there are no baboons in Norway (and that means you).

“Could’a been a contender,” her father muttered, as he opened his laptop, and then a new word document, and stared at the screen.

“May I ask, what?” Sofia’s mom said, pointing toward the blank page.

“My first novel,” her dad answered, in a solid, steady voice that he imagined he would use when accepting his Pulitzer Prize.

“I see; and what is it about?”

“I don’t know yet,” dad replied as he shrugged his shoulders.

“I see,” his wife answered as she studied the background of the laptop screen—a picture of her husband and a younger Sofia, finger painting. “Sofia said she wants to become a writer, too.”

“A writer?” her dad asked, smiling. “OK; but she better go to college, first.”

“Yes, yes, yes, don’t worry. I thought we agreed on a gap year when the time comes. Anyway, she has an idea for a children’s book; a kind of graphic novel coloring book about a shooting star that falls from the sky to save the color in the world—she told me about it when you were playing with the toys in San Diego.”

Dad looked up and said, “Oh, yes, I forgot—mind the gap year; don’t want to fall into the gap. This also might be a book for kids, all about color and light.”

“But you just said, you…”

“Or maybe it could be about my own struggle in life,” he added with the transparent modesty of a self-satisfied Pulitzer Prize winner.

“But,” her mother began, then added in lip-sync, “Never mind. I should have let him buy the whatchamacallit.”

The train surged from the tunnel, bursting into a world set ablaze by the morning sun. The rush of light was so sudden, so all-encompassing, that Sofia's sense of sight faltered, leaving her other senses to take over. She breathed in the wild fragrance of Nordic antler-horns, heard the triumphant chorus of late summer roses, and glimpsed snowflakes spinning like windmills beyond the window.

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“Do you ever consider you use your wit to mask your pain?” Sofia’s mom asked her husband, as she casually flipped a page of her magazine.

Rows of homes in hues of olive, gold, burgundy, and marigold adorned the seven mountains of Bergen, greeting Sofia with a vibrant tapestry woven against the sky. As she emerged from the tunnel, the bright primary colors of California’s blue, yellow, and red faded into memory, giving way to a symphony of muted tones and textures. Gone were the steel, glass, and concrete she knew so well, replaced by a harmonious blend of stone, wood, and brick, each building drenched in warm shades of orange, amber, auburn, and crimson. The scent of the ocean mingled with the briny fragrance of fresh fish and pine trees soaked by the sea breeze, filling the train’s cabin as brilliant sunlight poured through the windows. Yes, it rains in Bergen, but on days like this, the city is blessed—so stow the objections.

The majestic fjords of the North Sea rose to greet her with open arms. “Press the button, and seek shelter,” Dad muttered to himself, as his wife’s words—“Shield’s up.”—drifted ashore.

As the train passed through this new, older city, Sofia imagined each blushed house to be a player in a fjord’s brass band. She, a horn player like her mother, flipped her fingers to press imagined valves, as each building’s cubist color rose octaves.

“You need to feel it and come home.”

Rows of homes in shades of olive, gold, burgundy, and marigold clung to the seven mountains of Bergen, greeting Sofia with a tapestry of color woven against the sky. As she emerged from the tunnel, the bright primary colors of California’s blue, yellow, and red faded into memory, replaced by a symphony of softer, more intimate tones and textures. Gone were the steel, glass, and concrete she knew so well, now replaced by a warm blend of stone, wood, and brick, each building bathed in rich hues of orange, amber, auburn, and crimson. The scent of the ocean mingled with the briny fragrance of fresh fish and pine trees, all carried in by the sea breeze, filling the cabin as sunlight streamed in with dazzling brilliance. Yes, Bergen is known for its rain, but on days like this, the city is blessed—so save your objections.

“I don’t know,” Dad replied after a silence, “Maybe one day I will feel the pain, hold my hands to my face, and scream on a bridge.”

For this is the land of endless nights, at whose origin, that proto-expressionist Norwegian painting erupts—that famous one of a man with a distorted face, mouth agape in a silent scream in advance of two shadowy figures on a bridge beneath s spiral of orange and red flames of a Cypress tree’s silhouette standing sentinel as seen from an asylum window in Saint-Rémy under a starry night searing in the sweltering heat of a Louisiana Bayou while he looks up to apartment window in New Orleans, screaming, “Stella!”

***

He sits alone on the edge of the fjord, with his orange feet cooling in the water. No one, had there been anyone other than a pissed-off Purple Cat, would have noticed him. He merges with the surrounding aquatic life. He studies the surface of the fjord, transfixed by a light beneath the surface.

A soft light blossoms from below, and the surface of the fjord glows. The glow rolls just beneath the surface, reaching both shores. The sky, above, and the sea, below, merging.

They listen to each other—the duck and the glowing forms from below the sea. The duck hears the light of their color and sees the scent of their vibrations in the water. They know the time has come.

He moves quietly along the shore, pushing aside the reeds, and covers a small canoe with branches, to hide it. A small white mouse pops out of a knot in the tree’s bark, and scurries away.

He turns up to look toward the heavens. A star loses its grip and falls across the sky, leaving a brilliant trail of light in its wake. He moves into the water to view its descent.

“What is this?” he thinks. “Has assistance arrived? We need all the help we can find.”

On seeing these meteoric filaments of light, medieval knights must have wondered if the gods had had enough with this world and were slashing it open like a seamstress who had finally accepted that her tapestry could never display the beauty her soul imagined.

This time, it is a friend falling from the heavens.

It descends with a soft swoosh and alights near the shore without a sound.

They study each other from opposite sides of the fjord. A starry visitor from another world bathed in its luminescence, has come to join the battle.

One might call it a Mexican standoff—him, the little star and that other one nearby, eavesdropping in the purple light.

Let’s call this one a water gun standoff—that kind.

Together, the two will merge forces to help our Sofia—memory and her imagination, meshing like gears turning nature’s drive train.

They lingered in the quiescent darkness.

“Said the bloviating bag of feathers. You are getting on my nerves.”

***

Translating on a locally flat sub-manifold of the earth’s sphere in space, taxis traverse the plains. Planes, though, rise to a third dimension, while trains link space and time with rails of unrelenting exactitude.

Sofia shook her head as she rose from slumber, thinking, “There he goes again! Talking, talking, and talking.”

The train raced along the shore of a fjord, straddled by a dark pine forest rolling down a mountain. The fjords twilight blue water greeting the green. Had the train been moving faster, flow separation would have lifted it from its tracks, and it would have sailed through the night.

Atop the mountain, two silhouettes, both occluding the stars, a girl and a duck, watched the train’s window lights softly weaving through the pines—a yellow stream of gold flowing through Earth’s crucible.

Sofia woke from reverie as a fjord rolled into view. She was now on the other side that was on the other side of the land that was on the other side of the park that was on the other side of time.

Masts of small sailboats and silhouettes pitched and rolled against an orange sunset as the train soared. The boats genuflected in the waves rolling in from the North Sea; beneath them: a few fleeping sish.

“Please do not ever write anything like that again.”

However, Sofia did not see the Viking ghosts safeguarding gold and silver jewelry below the surface, hidden from any archaeologist's grasp. There, they would remain to glow, beside runes carved into the submerged rocks, never again to see the light of day above a rising tide’s global warming.

“Too many clouds in the sky to see the Green Flash tonight,” she heard the conductor say. He had just returned to ticket new arrivals yet took a moment to glance out the window beside Sofia. “I am sorry, little one, perhaps not tonight.”

“What’s the Green Flash?” Sofia asked.

Her father, overhearing this, turned around and began, “Sofia, I told you…”

“Drop the gun,” Sofia’s mother said, handing her husband a cannoli. “They are about eight hours, but still safe to eat.”

“Nice,” dad replied, as he accepted the cannoli and leaned back, nodding “OK” to the conductor to proceed, passing the baton.

The conductor smiled, nodded to the father, and then leaned closer toward Sofia, turning his gaze past her, to the small harbor beyond the window.

“It’s an optical effect,” the conductor told Sofia, who turned to look out the window. “The Green Flash is best to see at sea level, but sometimes you can see when the sun sets behind a mountain.”

“How does it work?”

***

At that moment, elsewhere-when in the space-time continuum, an elegant woman in a blue dress, pearls, and red Jimmy Choo’s, sitting alone on a small propeller plane—a local flight to Trondheim, and after that, a local bus to Hell—thought to herself, “I could have explained the how the Green Flash works. Mansplaining by the patriarchy again.”

***

“Imagine a single ray of light streaming directly at you. Here look,” replied the conductor as he took the tube off his neck and held it against the window, while he glanced at Dad.

Dad nodded, but no one could see dad’s approval of the conductor’s explanation because the seat backs were high. With no audience to impress with his approval, Dad turned to the window, made a gun-shape with his hand, winked at his reflection, shot himself a kiss, blew the spirits away from his finger, and thought about the Pulitzer he would win for his novel that he had yet to start.

“Just as the sun sets beneath the horizon, its very tip sends a single ray of light—one long, thin, beam of light, right at you. And it’s called seniority, lady, not patriarchy, capisce?”

“What?” Sofia replied, perplexed by what appeared to be another towering collapse.

“Never-mind—just got a bit dizzy from leaning over the bluffs,” the conductor said, before muttering, “Gotta lay off the ganja.”

Her father nodded as he repositioned himself. “But may I add…” he began, like the Pope about to sign and encyclical.

Sofia’s mother handed her dad an empty cup and said, “Hold it and I’ll pour.”

The conductor held one end of the tube against the window and continued and Dad leaned back, “like this tube: one thin filament of light, shooting at your eyes from the single tip of the sun.”

“You know,” Sofia’s mom said to her husband, “I know why you are holding the cannoli like a telescope against the window, but other people on this train don't.”

“Yes, like a single beam of light coming at you through the window,” agreed the Conductor with a smile that curled his mustache, “One thin beam from the sun. On a clear, dry day, this single ray strikes the earth’s atmosphere. The atmosphere is like a prism and it bends the blue light up toward the sky.”

“Yes, he fell; some damage to the brain,” Sofia’s mom said to a passing traveler, “and we’re medicating him; so sad, such a brilliant mind—such a loss. He thinks the cannoli is a wormhole to another universe,” she added to the passenger, passing.

The passenger clicked her tongue in compassion as she watched Sofia’s father peering into the cannoli.

“What did you say to her?” Dad, overhearing some words leaned over, and asked his wife.

“It’s not a cannoli?”

“It’s a wormhole.”

“It’s a wormhole?”

“Yes.”

“Put on your hearing aids.”

The conductor flared his fingers to mimic the rainbow. “The yellow, orange red, my thumb and pointer, the blue, my pinky and ring finger, as he tigthned all his fingers; but the green—this finger—comes right at you,” he said, with a smile toward Sofia’s mom as he extended his middle finger to Sofia.

“Like a laser?” Sofia asked rhetorically, and with a smile which evaporated when she saw the conductor flipping her the bird.

“Exactly,” shouted the conductor with a gasp when he noticed himself flipping Sofia the bird, “Oops! I’m sorry young lady, I didn’t mean to flip that finger that way. That middle finger is the green light.”

“You know…” began her father. “I once saw it…”

“Let me have your cup again,” her mother interrupted her husband.

As her husband held out his cup, the cannoli on the window fell from his grip. It split in two and Dad tossed both pieces into the air.

“When the entire face of the sun is visible, an infinite array of parallel light beams stream. Please excuse me; that was an accident—that bird. The atmosphere bends some colors up, some down; many crisscrossing and mixing, all flipping, flying, you still see white light. That looked like a bird-flip but was just the Green Flash—I used the middle finger. However, the moment the tip of the sun disappears below the horizon, there is only one tiny filament of light—emerging from the top tip of the sun—one beam, like this tube. I didn’t mean it that way, young lady, please. With one beam, one ray coming at you, the atmosphere bends blue up, the red orange and yellow down, and a flash of green light flies straight into your eyes—but not like a bird; not like that way I did just now.”

“Why were you juggling the cannoli?” Sofia’s mom asked her husband.

“I can’t see it?” Sofia asked the conductor, as she turned to look out the window.

“It slipped and I didn’t want to drop it,” her father replied.

“Too much water in the air fractures the beams,” the conductor answered.

“And if they fell on the floor?” Mom asked.

“That’s bum chowder for me,” Sofia said.

“I’d eat ‘em anyway,” replied Dad.

“Maybe it fell on your head.”

“Sorry,” answered the conductor, “Too many clouds.” the conductor said, “It will happen in a flash—seeing it; when you see it in yourself: the green flash will erase the line.”

“What line?”

“The separation. Call it the horizon—the sky from the sea. The moment beauty flashes, shimmers, separations dissolve and you feel one with the fabric of the universe.”

“I feel lonely,” Sofia whispered, hearing these words, as she reversed her smile, “Like I am swimming in an endless sea and there is only darkness.”

“Me too,” mouthed her dad with stuffed cheeks, as his smile inverted, too, “Shit happens.”

Sofia’s honesty rattled the conductor.

“It happens. You look back in time and you regret not looking. The more you look at beautiful things, the more you can see beauty in others,” he continued. “Those who have taken the time to find the green flash, even if they’ve never seen it, have learned to search for beauty in others, or maybe you’ll find a time tunnel in a galaxy beneath a mushroom,” he added as he put the vial back on the string around his neck. “Don't judge the rose by its bud, but by the beauty of its bloom. Be patient.”

“I get it, but I want the action.”

Her father nodded and his wife handed him another cannoli.

He offered the canoli to the conductor, as he daydreamed about his Pulitzer.

The conductor reached to accept it.

“Pull it, sir,” Sofia’s dad whispered.

The conductor pulled and accepted the cannoli as he moved into the next car, softly singing, “On Jupiter and Mars,”—jazz hands, of course.

“It’s a brotherhood,” Dad said to his wife, “He gets it.”

The conductor turned to fire another round at Dad with his pretended pistol, his new homeboy, but when he turned back around, the automatic door had prematurely closed and he slammed into it with the elastic energy driven of the ego with which he imagined accepting a Grammy for his rendition of old blue eyes, and he fell back on his ass; but saved the canoli.

The train raced into a darker world, turned the east and entered a valley. The reds and oranges which had yielded to the yellows and the greens of the forest took another step back as blue displayed its royal pose.

The train rolled to a stop. The family gathered up their luggage and Sofia saw, at her feet, the plastic container that had hung from the conductor’s neck.

“The frayed knot unraveled,” Sofia muttered.

She scooped it up, not knowing why she wanted it, and placed the tube around her neck. Just for safekeeping? A voice told her to save it? She’s a boon collector? The plot demands it? Who knows and who cares? Sometimes, there are no answers, just gaps.

The family disembarked and after the train had left the station, they were alone on a desolate platform in the middle of nowhere. In the distance, two yellow lights appeared, their beams flickering through the dark brown trunks at twilight.

They entered the car for the final part of the trip, up, across and over, and down one last mountain, as darker, thicker clouds began rolling in.

Sofia studied the driver’s neck. No tattoos.

The family arrived at Nanny’s in a delirious fatigue.

Nanny, an energetic woman, wanted this trip to be perfect. She had been cleaning the three-bedroom house for about six months. She even considered mowing the grass growing on top of the roof—common in this part of the country to insulate houses—but she couldn’t get the lawn mower up on the roof and had left a ladder leaning against the rain gutters. She vacuumed and then she vacuumed again; and then when most people would be exhausted, she was so excited about seeing her granddaughter that she vacuumed, again.

“I love the smell of the cut grass,” Sofia said as she rushed into the house while asking her dad about the fragrance of grass.

“Let me explain the fragrance of grass,” dad began.

However, Nanny had just finished baking the waffles and set them down on a table adorned with yellow and white daisies, which were her favorite, and was about to start vacuuming again as the spectacular scent of cinnamon, sugar, and strawberry jam, jammed dad’s mansplaining about the physical-chemistry of why cut grass smells so sweet—for now.

***

The scent of the warm cinnamon-sprinkled waffles spirited away Sofia’s fears and dad lost his focus. Sofia continued relaxing as she ate them. Relaxation becoming fatigue, becoming the need for sleep—that she resisted, just to continue eating the waffles.

Just outside the house, hiding in the rose bushes, the raptor waited, patiently; the sabered one having fled the scene.

Sofia asked if she could take the waffles to her room. Nanny removed her apron and set it down. She cleaned up a few more things; and the two best friends entered the bedroom with a tray of goodies. Nanny set the tray down, bringing the fragrance of the waffles into the bedroom.

“Tell me the story of the Little Star,” Sofia asked.

Nanny sat by Sofia’s bed and as Sofia entered the dream world, whispered the words, famous throughout the world for all of time.

“It’s about time! Once upon a time.”