Final Friday Fiction - A Spoon Story (Part I)

 A Spoon Story

Could there be a spoon so big that a lake and island would nestle in its bowl? Of course there could.  The size of the spoon in this story can only be limited by the boundaries of your imagination.  So how big does the spoon have to be?  Or how small the lake and island?

Well….try it out a breakfast time. Can you get an island of porridge in the middle of a lake of milk in a spoon you can fit in your mouth?  Now imagine how big that island would seem to a tiny beetle drowning in the lake of milk.

On the other hand if our story is about a lake we can row a boat in, and an island we could pitch a tent and light a campfire on, the spoon would have to be the size of Wembley Stadium (at least), with a big curving handle that extends out to the reservoir in Neasdon.  That is still human sized – sort of – we could build it if we really tried. So let’s imagine even bigger, bigger, bigger even than that….. A spoon so big its handle goes out into space, is leaning on the moon, and goes a bit further yet.  Maybe THIS spoon is so big the whole earth and all its seas can rest in the bowl; an enormous soup ladle.

The enormous soup ladle that has scooped the earth out of a soup of space dust and ice particles.

In this world where the earth sits in a huge soup ladle, you could walk and sail to the underneath side of the world, where it sits in the bottom of the ladle, and slowly, slowly climb your way up the handle until you could view the earth from space; standing on the very outer end of the handle.

As this earth in its soup ladles bumps along in space, orbiting a bright, electric blue sun, space ships from other worlds arrive at the inter-galactic docking station in the loop at the outer end of the handle.  From there it is an exciting slide ride down the handle to an exotic holiday on planet earth.  The earth in this story is a Cosmic Holiday destination for the very wealthiest space travelers.  Earth is no package holiday resort, only the most intrepid of independent travelers make it to this distant corner of this galaxy.  None of them look like the earth inhabitants, and many cannot even breathe earth’s air, so they wear SCUBA equipment (Self-Contained Universal Breathing Apparatus).  They dive down into earth’s atmosphere, sliding down the handle in capsules that hover in a special force field, just above the handle slide. Swoosh.  They always go swoosh.  That is what everyone expects, so a special machine makes a swoosh noise for the right effect.  In reality the hover capsules are completely silent.

So now this story has the biggest spoon ever, and the biggest slide ever.  If you have been standing on the top of the handle watching all this you need to slide back down yourself and join us all back on earth.

Down here it still looks a lot like the things that you see around your home and outside your window today.  Everything is human-sized: buildings, buses, bicycles, chairs and tables.  The only difference is that around and about us, like underwater divers, space visitors hover in the air; swimming in the air and riding about on atomic-fusion-energy-propelled anti-gravity air-skis.  They have all come to look at us, just the way we might dive on a reef to look at the colourful fish and other sea creatures.  The visitors are taking pictures to put in their travel diaries.  They have been told that this earth is a special conservation area and that the species here live in a special protected eco-system.  Before they could ride the hover slide to earth, they had to empty their travel bags of all space food and leave their rubbish at the space junk recycling station so that they would not pollute the delicate balance of the place that they travelled all this way to experience..... (more next month)

fff-rulez - linking to "My Take; doses of Wild YAM" - Final Friday Fiction