Oscar drew everything, and he meant everything.
He drew the family dog from memory and his lunch from life and the dragon that lived under his bed from imagination. He drew maps of countries that didn't exist and machines that probably couldn't work and at least three different versions of what a proper breakfast-making robot might look like. He drew volcanoes, submarines, ancient temples, and one very detailed cross-section of a cheese sandwich. He drew weather — tornadoes and blizzards and a particularly satisfying lightning storm over a small terrified city.
His first sketchbook was enormous and completely full, so he had started a second one.
On Saturday morning he sat at the kitchen table and drew for two hours straight. He drew a shaggy lion with a magnificent mane. He drew a thundercloud with a scowl and small angry lightning bolts coming off it. He drew a rocket ship with fins and a porthole and the name OSCAR I written along the side in capital letters.
He drew a dog — not the family dog, but a new one, large and enthusiastic and drawn mostly in pencil with a very waggly tail.
Then his mother called him for lunch and he put down his pencil and went.
He was gone for exactly twelve minutes. He had tomato soup and thought about the lion the whole time, because it really was his best lion yet. He'd gotten the mane right for the first time — thick and heavy-looking, not just squiggles. Then he washed his hands and went back.
When he came back, the drawings were gone. The sketchbook was still on the table, but the pages where Oscar had been drawing were blank. The lion, the thundercloud, the rocket, the dog — every single one had vanished off the paper.
Oscar stood very still for a moment. A very specific kind of still, the kind that comes just before something goes either very wrong or very interesting.
Then something crashed in the hallway.
He found the dog first. It was in the hallway, pencil-grey and wagging furiously, leaving smudged paw prints on the floorboards every time it moved. It spotted Oscar and bounded toward him and put its very large drawn paws on his chest. The paws left two perfect grey ovals on his shirt.
"Down, please," said Oscar firmly.
The dog sat, still wagging. It also sneezed, and a puff of pencil-grey dots scattered up the wall behind it. Oscar looked at the dots for a moment. This was going to take some explaining.
Oscar looked around and took stock. The smudged paw prints led from the kitchen to the hallway to the living room and back again. The dog had been very busy in the twelve minutes Oscar was away.
The lion was in the living room.
It was sitting on the sofa, looking extremely satisfied with itself. It had knocked three cushions onto the floor and one of his mother's potted plants. Soil was scattered across the carpet, and Oscar stared at it with the particular feeling of someone who is going to be in a lot of trouble.
"Off the sofa," said Oscar.
The lion looked at him with complete calm and did not move. It lifted one large paw and placed it on the armrest in a way that said, very clearly, that this was its sofa now.
Oscar heard a sound from upstairs like something zooming back and forth very fast.
The rocket was in the upstairs hallway, zipping between the walls at head height, leaving thin silver streak marks on the wallpaper every time it bounced. OSCAR 1 was still visible along its side, which Oscar thought was extremely unfortunate — his name was literally written on the problem.
He ducked as it zoomed past.
That just left the thundercloud — where was that?
He found it in the bathroom, where it had settled near the ceiling and was raining steadily onto the bath mat and towels. His father's library book had been left open on the side of the tub and it was getting very wet. The rain was pencil-grey, and the bath mat was soaked, and the book had begun to wrinkle in a way that was going to require some explaining. The thundercloud had the expression of something that had been waiting a very long time to rain indoors.
Oscar stood in the doorway of the bathroom and assessed the situation.
He had a lion on his sofa, a dog smudging up the floors, a rocket bouncing off his walls, and a raincloud slowly soaking his father's library book. He was eight years old and the only person in the house besides his mother, who was downstairs and did not yet know about any of this.
He could go downstairs and tell her. But then he would have to explain the paw prints and the wall marks and the library book and the cushions and the plant and the raincloud in the bathroom. He would probably be in trouble for a very long time. He was fairly sure this was something he needed to solve himself.
He went back to the kitchen for his sketchbook. That was when he saw the rocket veer downstairs, zip through the kitchen at window height, and head directly toward the fish tank on the shelf above the radiator.
Oscar dropped everything and ran.
He got between the rocket and the fish tank just in time, and the rocket veered upward and bounced off the ceiling instead. The fish in the tank — three of them, named after astronauts — scattered to the corners in alarm.
The rocket was heading back around for another pass.
Oscar grabbed his sketchbook and a pencil and backed against the wall and thought very hard. The fish were still huddled in the corners, watching him. He had the feeling they expected something. He also had the feeling the entire situation was his fault, which was probably fair.
He could draw a cage. But drawing a cage seemed mean, and besides, he would have to draw four of them, and the rocket was already coming around again.
He could draw a lasso and try to catch them one by one. But the lion would not enjoy that, and Oscar had a feeling the lion's opinion on things was best avoided.
He could draw a door back to the sketchbook and hope they all walked through it. But why would any of them do that? They had escaped on purpose. They wanted to be somewhere better than a flat page.
And that was the idea.
They hadn't escaped because they were bad drawings. They had escaped because a flat page had no room in it — no depth, no horizon, no space to actually go anywhere. Oscar could absolutely fix that.
He turned to a fresh double page — the biggest surface in the whole sketchbook — and drew as fast as he had ever drawn anything.
He drew mountains first, because they were quick and impressive-looking, great jagged peaks with snow at the top. He drew a deep forest below the mountains with tall dark trees that went all the way down the page. He drew a wide river cutting through the middle with fish in it, because the lion would like fish. He drew the fish carefully, because a lion's opinion of fish was probably very precise.
He drew a wide open plain on the other side of the river, enormous and golden and full of things for a large enthusiastic dog to chase. He drew a perfect launch pad at the base of the mountains — a proper one with a control tower and a countdown clock already at T-minus ten.
Then he drew a sky.
A big dramatic sky with weather in it — real weather, enormous clouds with proper lightning and two grey curtains of rain sweeping across the mountains. The kind of sky a thundercloud could be proud of. He pressed harder with his pencil for the dark parts.
He put his pencil down and held the sketchbook open.
The dog was the first to notice.
It came bounding in from the hallway, saw the drawing, and stopped. Its pencil-grey head tilted to one side. It looked at the golden plain and its tail began to wag so hard the whole dog blurred.
Then it leapt right onto the page.
It landed and sprinted straight across the drawing toward the plain, getting smaller and smaller as it went. Eventually it was just a tiny pencil-grey speck in the distance, still wagging. Oscar watched until the last grey smudge of it disappeared into the drawing.
After the dog came the lion. It walked in from the living room with great dignity, surveyed the open sketchbook for a long moment, and stepped neatly onto the page. It walked to the forest without hurrying and disappeared between the trees, its tail flicking once before it was gone.
The rocket zipped overhead and did three more laps of the kitchen, then banked sharply and arrowed down toward the launch pad. It hit the pad perfectly and sat there steaming with quiet satisfaction, the countdown clock now reading T-minus zero.
The thundercloud drifted in last, trailing a small puddle of pencil-grey rain across the kitchen floor. It hovered at the edge of the sketchbook, looked at the enormous dramatic sky Oscar had drawn, and then drifted in. It joined the weather system already in progress over the mountains and within seconds was indistinguishable from the other clouds.
Oscar closed the sketchbook gently.
He stood in the kitchen for a moment, listening to the house. It was quiet — the normal Saturday kind of quiet, except for the fish tank filter and the sound of his mother making tea in the other room.
He looked at the kitchen floor, which had pencil-grey rain puddles and paw prints on it. He looked at the living room, where three cushions were on the floor and a plant had been knocked over. He thought about the wallpaper upstairs and the library book in the bathroom.
He opened his sketchbook again and looked at the double page.
In the forest, if he looked carefully, he could see a small golden shape that was definitely a lion being comfortable. On the plain, a grey speck was racing joyfully in circles. The rocket sat on its launch pad, gleaming. The thundercloud patrolled its sky with great importance.
They all looked very happy.
Oscar got a cloth from under the sink and started cleaning the kitchen floor, which took a while. Then he went upstairs and did what he could about the wall marks, which wasn't much. Then he went to the bathroom and rescued the library book by pressing it flat under a heavy dictionary, which he hoped would work.
He sat on the living room floor and looked at the soil still visible between the carpet fibers. He thought about saying the wind did it. He decided he could not.
He was putting the sofa cushions back when his mother came in.
"What happened to the carpet?" she said.
"I knocked over your plant," said Oscar. "I am sorry and I will clean it up."
His mother looked at him for a moment, then at the plant, then at the carpet. "What's that grey smudge on your shirt?"
Oscar looked down at his shirt. The dog's paw prints were still there, two perfect oval smudges on his chest.
"I was drawing," said Oscar, which was absolutely true.
His mother seemed to accept this. Artists, in her experience, were often mysterious about their process.
That night, Oscar opened his sketchbook to the double page one more time before bed. He looked at the mountains and the forest and the wide golden plain and the dramatic sky. He looked at the tiny specks that were the lion and the dog, and the rocket on its pad, and the thundercloud doing important thundercloud things up in the weather.
He thought about the lion, who had been very difficult on the sofa but was now in a forest of its own. He thought about the dog, who was obviously in its element. He thought about the rocket, sitting precisely where it was always supposed to be.
Then he found a small blank corner at the bottom left of the page. He drew a tiny door there — a little brass handle and a welcome mat, just big enough for a lion.
Just in case, he thought, they ever wanted to visit again.
He closed the sketchbook and went to sleep, and in the morning, the welcome mat had a small muddy paw print on it.