The Mysterious Telescope
A short children's story about a girl with a new telescope
Welcome back to The Little Island🏝️. I’m Charlie Shifflett, the sole proprietor and sometime resident of this, here, clod of dirt in an imaginary ocean. In this edition, I’m sharing an illustrated short story I concocted with my daughter Ellie in mind.
A lot of my parental storytelling, nowadays, unfurls amid meltdowns and sibling fights — hardly the most optimal conditions for crafting unforgettable, timeless tales. I sometimes have to lean heavily into action in order to keep my kids’ attention. Karate kicks to the groin, knife fights that result in lost fingers, and booby traps that cripple unsuspecting villains are the devices I often resort to shamelessly so that I can keep the twins from bonking each other on the head. (“Let’s save that for the bad guys,” I’ll interject dryly before quickly pivoting back to the story.)
Another trick I have is to survey the (tough) crowd (a population of two since our teen is more interested in online chess and Chinese dramas at the moment) for an interesting object and then to build a story around it that includes a dash of magic. “The Mysterious Telescope” is one such story. I hope you (or a child in your life) enjoy this little diversion from reality. Thanks as always for reading!
-Charlie
Elliana didn’t bother to lace her shoes before she shot out of the house like a cheetah, slowing only to make sure the storm door didn’t slam-bam shut (otherwise Mom would have had her head).
The 7-year-old could feel the new telescope bouncing around in the canvas bag that hung from her shoulder.
Sure, Elliana could have tried it out in the backyard, from the top of the slide or perched a few feet up in the spider pine, but somehow she knew the telescope should first be used on the hillside field overlooking the valley.
Elliana sprinted off the pavement of the road that passed her house and cut onto a gravel trail that led up two hills to the field. As she reached the top of the first hill, though, she skidded to a stop and nearly jumped out of her shoes: She had almost collided with an elderly lady carrying a pink grocery sack and a long walking stick.
“I’m sorry,” Elliana mumbled, pausing to eye the woman’s walking stick. It was mostly white with red at the bottom.
“Oh, no need to apologize, dear,” the woman replied. “But you might want to tie those shoes of yours. I could hear the laces flopping away as you ran up the trail.”
Elliana was eager to blow past the woman, but the advice about the shoe laces had caught her off-guard.
After a brief pause, Elliana squatted to tie her shoe laces. The woman had tight gray curls and appeared to be blind — or at least partly blind. But what she lacked in eyesight was seemingly offset by a powerful set of ears.
“By the way,” continued the woman, “where are you going? There’s not much to see on that end of the trail — or is there?”
“Up the hill, to the field, um, to try out my new telescope.”
“A new telescope!” the woman replied, adding with a childlike voice, “May I hold it?”
In fact, Elliana was eager to show it off, but as she reached into her bag and gripped the cold, metal cylinder, she paused to consider why a blind woman would want to use a telescope.
“It’s okay if you don’t want to show it to me. I suppose I haven’t much use for it,” the woman added with a giggle — again in that childlike voice.
“Oh, it’s fine,” Elliana mumbled and stepped closer to place the telescope in the woman’s extended hand that also held the pink grocery sack.
The woman then deftly collapsed the walking stick, stowing it deep in her armpit, and then hefted the telescope up with her newly freed hand.
“I can tell this is quite the telescope.” She proceeded to finger the aluminum body and touch the glass lenses. “Oops, dear, I probably just dirtied up your lenses. Let me wipe them clean for you.”
The old woman pulled a small yellow cloth out of her grocery bag and used it to wipe down the telescope and polish its lenses.
“There you go", she said, handing it back. “I bet you’ll get quite the view with this special piece.”
And with that she unfurled her walking stick with a quick flip of her wrist and turned to continue on her way.
“Thank you — bye,” Elliana said, before pivoting and running off, her neatly tied shoes now equipping her to make up for lost time.
In a few minutes, Elliana was neck-deep in thorny brown stalks, green leaves as big as playground slides, and tiny yellow and purple flowers — some of which hung over her head like constellations of stars. The prickly thorns, for their part, tugged at her sweater but they couldn’t much slow her.
Upon reaching the second and highest hill, Elliana climbed atop a big gray rock.
It was her favorite spot in all the world. When she wasn’t perched on the rock to think and draw, she liked to pretend she was queen of a fortified city at the top of a big mountain.
Now, her fortress had a telescope.
She pulled the cylinder out again and was struck by how warm it felt, despite the chilly weather. Odd — it hadn’t been this warm when she first handed it to the elderly lady.
Quickly setting those thoughts aside, Elliana extended the scope and — while holding her breath — lifted it to her right eye.
She was initially met with a blurry collage of greens, yellows and whites, but details began to emerge as Elliana slowly turned the dial to focus the lens on the valley below.
The view that had — prior to this — often been hazy and (if she was honest) mundane, suddenly exploded into great detail. She spotted a black bird pulling at a berry bush. She could see a squirrel poking his head out from inside a nest built high up in a tree. Beyond these she saw a girl walking with a dog in the woods. The girl wore a pink coat, blue jeans, and a knit cap decorated with dangling cloth balls.
Strange. As many hours as Elliana had spent up here on this hilltop, she had never once seen another child her age — let alone a girl with a dog.
Dropping the telescope from her eye, Elliana squinted and squeezed her eyes ten different ways but no matter how hard she tried the girl and her dog were nowhere to be found in the distance. In fact, there was no movement at all.
She lifted the telescope back up to her eye, again looking in the same direction, and there the girl was, a few meters north of where she had been before.
Elliana repeated this exercise five or six more times. Each time that she looked with her naked eyes, the girl and her dog disappeared. Each time she looked through the telescope, the girl and her dog were there.
Biting her lip, Elliana suddenly had another thought: Other details were different, too, between the two views. As far as she could tell, the tree that held the squirrel’s nest was not where it should be when she looked with her naked eyes. In its place appeared to be brush — perhaps a stump, but it was hard to tell. Same with the black bird; perhaps it had just flown away, but when she looked with her naked eyes there was not a winged creature in sight.
Elliana, on a whim, then turned 180 degrees and tried to spot the blind woman walking on the gravel trail behind her. After a few moments and some adjustments to the dial, she spotted someone, but it wasn’t the elderly woman. The person, a woman, was clearly younger and carried no walking stick or grocery sack.
Where had the blind woman gone?
Elliana sat down on the big rock to process this strange experience. Here she was, a queen sitting in her fortified city, overlooking not one but two different kingdoms — the one she has always known with her naked eyes; and the other a similar but distinct one seemingly teeming with life.
As Elliana twisted the dial absentmindedly, she suddenly realized that she had stumbled upon something very big — and also a little scary.
The queen in her determined that she had discovered a new kingdom with the mysterious new telescope. To experience this new kingdom, Elliana realized, she would need to explore beyond the refuge and comfort of her fortified city.
A truly magical tale, Charlie — I loved how Elliana’s world unfolded through the telescope!