“Well, Fred, I hope you know how to read a blot,” Gogo said irritably. She held up her Topo-Illogical Map of The Land of Impossibility. It was wet from the splashes of the Insult Fish. The ink on the map had run. “All you had to do was keep your mouth closed. But you had to taunt those fish, didn’t you? You had to trade insults.”
Fred opened her mouth to protest, but nothing came out. Gogo was right.
“Um, didn’t you call them jalapeño-sized?” Downer said, defending Fred by attacking Gogo.
Gogo pretended not to hear, sneezed, and took another pickle to calm herself down. Fred wondered briefly how it was that no matter how many pickles they ate, they were never out of pickles.
“Where’s Dogma?” Fred said, trying to change the topic.
Looking out at the water, they saw the growing silhouette of Dogma heading away in the distance. They’d have to manage without him.
Our wayward heroes huddled around to take a closer look at the damp map. It showed purplish ink smudges of different sizes now. They squinted at it. They rotated it. Whichever way it was turned, it still looked like a bunch of blobs.
Fred spoke first: “I see what looks like a lollipop here…. And maybe a peanut butter and pickle sandwich over here…. Weird, this splotch looks like the face of my substitute teacher when my third-grade teacher got pregnant.”
Around them, the palm trees did not comment. No birds chirped useful remarks.
Downer said, “I see my depressed mother. And over here, some of my less nice cousins.”
Fred said, “And this scraggly zone, this looks to me like a cuckoo clock being thrown into a garbage can?”
“Uh-huh. You mean this is a total waste of time,” Gogo said. “And I totally—”
“Hey, wait a minute. Look at this, guys.” Downer pointed to the largest purplish blob on the map.
“A waffle?” offered Fred.
“Cotton candy that fell into a puddle?” suggested Gogo.
“I don’t mean to be an optimist,” Downer said, “but when I look at this, and then look at”—Downer used his trunk to point between two tall palm trees—“that…. You see?”
And there it was: a real-life inky purple smudge. A smudge that looked quite a bit like a tall stable door. Was it only a purplish fog that would soon dissipate? Or was it more than that?
Gogo was muttering, “So you’re trying to tell me that this map somehow knew it would get wet, and had a plan for leaking into a blob shape that would match—” But then she stopped talking. She couldn’t understand it, but the resemblance between the blobs was too strong to dismiss.
The purple blob in the distance didn’t appear to be connected to anything around it. Was it fog? An ectoplasmic goo? A ghost in the form of architecture? As Fred stared, it resembled a neighbor’s cat, then an old xylophone from preschool, then her mother’s veined hand, and then even, briefly, a younger Fred. It changed again, recalling a Lego structure from Fred’s past, one from which the door itself had long been missing and only the doorframe had endured. The doorframe was one of those weirdly un-losable Lego pieces that stayed around, move after move, even as its companions disappeared one by one to wherever it is that lost Lego pieces go. Maybe to the Land of the Ferlings.
As if between a trance and a dream, Fred and her friends walked toward the shape, whose distance from them was difficult to estimate. It seemed to stay the same size even as the friends walked, then jogged, and finally ran to reach it. By the time they arrived, they were sweating and exhausted. The shape, finally up close, had acquired a doorknob. But the doorknob was too high to reach. Then the haze of the shape dissipated. The panting travelers could make out many creatures, which looked like… well… locomoting inkblots. As with the initial blot, it was hard to describe them. They were all different, and yet they shared a distinct non-distinctness. A non-distinctness that was both waxy and woolly. Frumptious and froolly. These blots looked ready for wind and rain, for whatever weather might reach them. Or they might melt away in a moment. The blots also all had short stick legs and wore sneakers. That was their one highly recognizable aspect. Were they a child’s drawings of dark sheep?
Whatever they were, Fred thought, they were definitely not the Fantastically Fearsome Ferlings.
That is what Fred thought. But that was not the case.