The First
Stone.

PiPi had drawn seventeen versions of his palace. Every version had a balcony. Six had a swimming pool. One had a swimming pool on the balcony, which raised questions he preferred to discuss after breakfast.

He lived beside a puddle.

It was an excellent puddle: broad, pink at sunset, and deep enough to swallow criticism. That morning it contained the reflection of a peculiar pig wearing a red beanie and practising his arrival.

“PiPi,” he announced. “The Perspicacious Pink Pepe Pig. Public Protector. Prolific dreamer.”

A bubble broke the surface.

“Yes. There will be paperwork.”

In the legend, God had made him with a heart that felt for all His children. PiPi sometimes wished this gift came with a lid. He could pass a closed window and wonder who was lonely behind it. He could hear laughter down the lane and ache to join in. Even the pig who called his drawings ridiculous received an inconvenient portion of his love.

And when PiPi opened his mouth, out came a koink.

That was difficult to explain at formal occasions.

He folded the newest palace drawing into his pocket. Along its bottom edge he had added a long table, a school, and a room where anybody could sit without having to buy something.

The balcony pool remained. There was no reason everyone should suffer.

By noon the rain had stopped, but the brook was still carrying pieces of the footbridge away.

PiPi discovered this while pulling his machine towards the wagon stop. The road ended in a fresh brown bite. Across the water, a little crowd stood beneath the leaking roof of the old washhouse.

Ada the mason had a bandaged wrist. A potter held a basket of cups. Two children were making a brave game of being cold.

Their homes were on PiPi’s side.

“How long until someone fixes it?” he called.

Ada looked at the broken supports. “Someone’s here. Materials aren’t.”

PiPi glanced behind him. On the ridge the city wagon waited, its pale wheels almost luminous against the wet earth. The driver raised a hoof.

“I can wait until the bell,” she called. “After that, the lower road floods.”

The machine’s canopy trembled in the wind. PiPi imagined it arriving in the city: the brass polished, the cushion turned good-side up, his name spoken in a room that echoed.

He imagined telling the crowd across the brook that he would return with help.

“When?” asked one of the children, though he had not said anything aloud.

PiPi took the palace drawing from his pocket. The long table had blurred in the rain.

“Before supper,” he said.

It was a rash answer. He had intended to sound kingly. Instead, he had made himself responsible.

PiPi’s first plan involved the canopy, a rope and what he called “a very modest amount of flying.”

Ada listened all the way through.

“Can you swim?” she asked.

“Not in a regal manner.”

“Second plan.”

He was reaching for the canopy hinge when the machine rolled into the mud. The cushion slipped free. PiPi lunged after it and landed sitting in the puddle he had been trying to avoid.

For a moment nobody spoke.

Then a child across the brook laughed. PiPi looked down at himself, pink knees protruding from brown water.

“An early test of the swimming pool,” he said.

The potter laughed too. Even Ada smiled.

PiPi stood, dripping. The embarrassment was oddly lighter now that it had company.

“What would work?” he asked her.

She began to describe a lower crossing, where the banks were closer and the ground held firm. He stopped interrupting. The potter knew where spare stone lay. The children knew a path to the lower bank. A neighbour arrived with tools and the observation that PiPi’s magnificent seat was made from remarkably good timber.

PiPi laid a hoof on the brass trim.

Without its housing, his invention would be a tangle of parts in a sack. Nobody in the marble city would mistake that for a throne.

From the ridge came the first note of the bell.

“Mind the little lever,” he said, handing over the tools. “It sticks.”