A short snort interrupted the man’s snoring before, with a cough and a fit, Principal Maddox awoke from his long, bean-bag nap.
“Oh, Hudson,” Principal Maddox’s face blushed with embarrassment amid the performer’s melodies. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. How long was I asleep? Did I miss the show?”
Hudson giggled. “You missed everything.”
Principal Maddox squinted. He thought there seemed something very different in Hudson’s smiling face, something that made him too want to grin.
“Then how was the show?”
“I was everything I dreamed it to be,” Hudson answered, “everything and more.”
The performers all bowed and shared secret, knowing handshakes with Hudson before that first pair of guests stepped out from their magical tent. Outside, the gymnasium’s decorations had not changed in the slightest way, and the clock fastened to the wall told Hudson that not an hour had passed since the hurdy-gurdy melody had welcomed him. Hudson marveled at that tent another time, fascinated by its power to travel so far in such a short span of the morning.
Hudson’s classmates met him in the hallway beyond the gymnasium’s double doors. They stared at Hudson as he waved at them, suspicious that Hudson had for some reason been granted some boon they had not. Hudson paid little mind to their glares; for on that morning, he had seen dreams more fantastic than any of his classmates might know. On that morning, he had faced a monster more terrible than anything Amy Zerlinger could scribble upon a piece of paper. Hudson had found an uncle he had feared had been lost, and in the end, he knew that was the only thing that mattered.
Still, Clay Jenner couldn’t resist a shot as Hudson strolled back towards Mrs. Wheelan’s classroom. “What’s wrong this time? You running away again?”
Hudson didn’t respond. He didn’t even look back. He felt that alien knife hidden in his right sneaker and knew that the barbs of his classmates were nothing like the monsters that had met his blade.
Hudson’s mother later believed that Hudson’s private tent performance helped her son turn a corner for the better. She noticed how Hudson better attended to his chores, how he better organized the homework he now completed on time, how his mind better focussed upon the world around him. Hudson no longer drifted. She was so moved as to publicly commend Principal Maddox and all of Hudson’s teachers before the school board.
Hudson still found ample time to dream, and to draw, covering his bedroom walls with one incredible landscape after another, each more magnificent than the one created before as the artist’s technique grew. Each month, an envelope from Hudson’s pen-pal arrived in the mailbox, and Hudson’s mother never broke her promise to her son that she would never peek at the writing upon any of those letters, no matter how sorely she may have been tempted to learn the origins of the alien and exotic stamps pasted upon the upper, left-hand corner of each envelope.