An entry into the NTT Anniversary Thanx Kevin for the challenges and fun.

When I was a child I thought childish things. I would dream of going to another dimension or that I was a super hero saving Gotham on a daily basis. Mother was strick about not getting dirty after school and Lord forbid if I tried to hang out with the cool kids.

One day while mother was shopping she let me go down by the canal only if I promised not to get to close to the water and STAY CLEAN!! I was really excited and hurried down to the waters edge to look for ships coming in. Of course there wouldn’t be any as the canal was to small for that but my imagination ran wild anyway.

I found an old bottle half buried in the muddy banks and after digging it out and cleaning it in the dirty water I saw a town inside the bottle. It was perfect! I ran back to the car and gently placed it on the back seat and then tried to clean the mud off my trousers.

Mom was pretty upset when she came out of the store and noticed my darkened knees from where I knelt while digging for the bottle and had a fit. I was grounded for life. No more Sunday trips to the Ice Cream parlor, I would come straight home from school. It seemed like a good trade to me.

Mom had married shortly after I found that bottle and we moved to a grazing farm where chores took away the time for innocent dreams. It was years later that I came across that bottle again. I had stuffed it at the top of my closet and promptly forgot it as life spun into years and turned in different directions.

I pulled the bottle down and sat on the edge of my bed staring at it for a long time. Eventually I realized that I was homesick and decided that it was time to be city bound.

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