by Nate
Everyone knows about the grammar garden, right?
No?
Well then, let me tell you a story.
No one knows where the grammar garden is, but everyone can find it if they look. When you walk through the tall gates, the silver gates that shine in the sunlight, you will feel right at home. The grammar garden is the birthplace of all proper sentences. It’s here where they grow up, sprouting from little green plants like daffodils or roses, beautiful and ready to be picked and used. Anyone can pick them, because there is an endless supply of sentences to choose from, all perfect. They come in all the colours of the rainbow.
But one day ...
One fearsome day ...
A dragon came to the grammar garden.
At first you could only hear his footsteps – tromp, tromp, tromp, tromp – as he crashed through the forest outside the gate. You could see the dark smoke rising from the terrible, terrible fires the dragon had left behind him. You could hear him singing to himself in a high, loud voice as he walked: “Luvly 2 C U and luvly 2 burn if U’R not my meal yet it’ll soon B UR turn.” And soon, very soon, you could see his huge head rising above the trees, swaying from side to side as he marched forward, and forward, and to the very gates of the grammar garden with an evil look in his eyes.
He stopped before the silver gates, and puffed smoke from his nose. “Hello!” he cried. “Will no 1 let me in 2 this B-U-tiful garden?”
A small independent clause, the gatekeeper, stood nervously and chewed on his fingernails. “This is the grammar garden, Mr. Dragon. All are welcome within our walls. Our rules of proper sentences must be obeyed.”
“Oh yah,” the dragon said with a mean grin. “I luv proper sentences they R very tasty.”
The independent clause was sweating so much his hair dripped with it, and comma ducks gathered under his feet to swim. “I guess I have to,” he said with a stutter. He opened the gates with a slow creak. “Be careful not to step in the future tense groves. Watch out for the double negatives.”
The dragon tromped into the grammar garden and looked around. “What a luvly place!” he exclaimed. “I think I will N-joy it here. In fact those spelling trees would B good with a few roasted nouns don’t U think?”
“Please don’t do anything rash!” the independent clause cried, but it was no good. The dragon stomped into the middle of the beautiful grammar garden and began to burn things. Left and right, up and down, backward and forward, diagonal and anti-diagonal, he burned in every direction, even the direction your toes point when you cross your legs. He laughed a hearty dragon laugh as the grammar garden was turned to smoke and dirty ashes.
“We were killed!” moaned the past tense.
“We won’t never be different again!” cried a double negative with tears in her eyes.
“Terrible this is,” said the local gang of transposition with a worried frown. “A hero we need.”
“An action hero!” shouted a well-placed fragment.
And because a hero always comes when he is called, the residents of the grammar garden paused to wait. They waited. And they waited. And just when all seemed lost, with the garden burning and the dragon laughing as he munched on the spelling trees, they waited just a little bit more.
Finally, someone in the back of the gathered sentence components, someone small, stepped forward. It was the Verb. “We can’t wait for an action hero,” he said. “We have to save our garden ourselves, or no one will, and it will burn to the ground! Who’s with me?”
The others stepped nervously away, scratching at their necks or shuffling their feet.
“I would love to,” said the conditional tense, “if I didn’t have something on the oven back home.”
“That’s a dragon!” screamed hyperbole. “He’ll stomp on us a million billion times, eat our brains, and digest us for a thousand years!”
“.” said the period, and that was that.
“All right.” The Verb tried to hold himself tall. “I’ll do it myself.”
The dragon paused in his feast as the Verb approached, and the remaining spelling trees all sighed in relief. All around them, fires burned and smoke filled the air. The dragon leaned way, way down to the Verb, and studied him with his large but beady dragon eyes. “What do U want?”
“I want you to leave us alone,” the Verb said, and he tried to keep his voice from shaking. “If you don’t, I will have to make you leave.”
The dragon threw his head back and roared with laughter. “Ahahah! U? Make me leave? Oh U funny little thing. I M going 2 eat all the sentence structures, but first I M going to eat U!”
And with that, the dragon snapped his mouth downward, a mouth filled with flashing teeth and a blood-red tongue, but the Verb was fast. “I avoid!” he shouted, and just like that he dodged the dragon’s jaws with the strength of his verb, which crashed closed on a rock. The dragon whimpered, but turned and tried to attack again.
“I jump!” the Verb cried, and he jumped on top of the dragon’s head. The dragon looked up, confused, but couldn’t see the Verb anymore.
“Fly!” said the Verb, and the dragon started flying, and couldn’t stop himself.
“What R U doing?” the dragon howled.
“Fly!” the Verb said again, and his action words gave him strength. So the dragon flew, higher and higher, out of the grammar garden and away. “Land!” came the call, and land the dragon did, and the Verb hopped off.
“How did U do that?” the dragon asked.
“The imperative,” the little Verb replied. “And verbs are words of action – they get the job done.” And just as the dragon, sneaky and spiteful creature that he is, was ready to attack again, the verb gave his last command: “Stay!”
So the dragon stayed.
And so it was that the dragon was removed from the grammar garden, and the proper sentences could flourish forever. They cleaned up the ashes, fixed the spelling trees, and kept everything clean and in the proper order. Sometimes, however, they could hear the dragon singing to himself in the distance: “Luvly 2 C U and luvly 2 burn if that was a lesson U know I won’t learn.”
And the Verb? He returned an action hero, and he stayed that way ... happily ever after.
(This was a story I wrote in 2004 as an elementary education project, back before I decided I didn't want to be a teacher.)
Warder to starry_nite
Chapterfish — Nate's Writing Blog
http://chapterfish.wordpress.com
Chapterfish — Nate's Writing Blog
http://chapterfish.wordpress.com
This message last edited by Nate on 20/09/2011 at 11:58:50 PM
Today, I am finding the mispronunciation of "asterisk" very amusing.
- 20/09/2011 01:45:02 PM
436 Views
*NM*
What about "asterex", king of typographical glyphs? *NM*
- 20/09/2011 10:58:05 PM
140 Views
I'm picturing a giant grammatical lizard. *NM*
- 20/09/2011 11:16:08 PM
129 Views
You mean something like this?
- 20/09/2011 11:57:42 PM
517 Views
Is it only in Aussie that my ears can barely distinguish between the two?
- 21/09/2011 03:03:30 PM
237 Views
They are pretty similar.
- 21/09/2011 03:44:34 PM
275 Views
*eats popcorn and awaits*
- 21/09/2011 04:01:50 PM
376 Views
Rebecca? Rebecca? Holy moses. You are dead to me, woman.
- 21/09/2011 11:00:13 PM
278 Views
*steals Wongers' popcorn and giggles at the suddent twist in the plot* *NM*
- 21/09/2011 11:16:05 PM
109 Views