Howard The Great by Rebecca Dawn Bowslaugh (top 100 novels .TXT) 📕

To say it all began easily would be a faux pas.
It started abruptly, with shakes and quivers so capricious that it
was hard to say exactly where the act of vitalization really began. 

All that is known is how Howard came into the possession of a boy named Chris.

One afternoon, while skateboarding home, Chris came across Howard quite by mistake. The wheels of his board were turning perpetually as he flew downhill, making a clickity clackity sound that Chris felt deep into his soul. He sighed, wishing the whole world could feel this freedom, this profound sensation of happiness that permeated his whole being as he flew home, cutting through not only the cool breeze, but the lives of all the people he passed. As Chris neared the four-way stop at the corner of his street, he felt his board collide with something on the sidewalk.

“Oh Shh-!” he yelped as the board flew forward and he landed hard on the sidewalk. He looked up in time to see his board fly right under the front of a giant U-haul truck. The driver slowed and leaned out his window at Chris.

“Sorry kid, I didn’t see ya there,” he said, then turned the steering wheel sharply and gunned it around the corner.

Chris sat quietly for a moment. An almost Zen kind of moment. Every day Chris skated this route home, and every day he crossed at the four-way stop without so much as a glance in either direction. If Chris hadn’t fallen, that truck surely would have hit him. In that moment before he stood up, Chris irrefutably believed that this was an honest to goodness, no way around it, miracle.

As Chris stood up, wiping the bits of rock from his palms, he felt his foot roll slightly on something cylindrical. Stooping down, Chris saw what had caught and disoriented his skateboard and his life. A small HB pencil was lying on the sidewalk covered in mud. Chris looked venerably at this pious little pencil. He gently picked it up and carried it home.

Once at home, Chris turned on the tap and watched the water flow over his new talisman. His lucky pencil. After all of the mud was wiped clean, Chris discovered the word HOWARD carved into the side of the pencil. 

“Howard,” he whispered, feeling a strange calm take over his mind as he dropped to his bed and fell into a deep inviolable sleep.

* * * * *

The thing that Chris was completely unaware of, was the fact that Howard was no ordinary pencil. Having, by some anomalous — perhaps even coincidental — miracle, Howard had been given a working, quite responsive and intelligent, brain. 

At first, Howard was quite surprised to find that all the other pencils were simple. He would have entire conversations with elastic bands and ball-point pens before he realized why nothing would answer back. It wasn’t because the elastic bands were haughty, or because the ball-point pens believed pencils to be only lowly proletarians; it was ostensibly clear that he was the only anthropomorphic object on the entire shelf.

Finally, after he was misplaced to a shelf of dictionaries and encyclopedias, he found out the truth. Through hard work and erudition, Howard concluded that pencils, pens, elastics and every other office object were supposedly, completely inanimate.

Howard looked around the store with trepidation. Simian-like creatures strutted past him, unaware of the impending miracle that was upon them. Howard was all alone in this giant world of depots of business. Before he could narcotically jump off the shelf, in hopes that he would crack on impact, he supplanted his masochistic tendencies for an inward look on the problem at hand.

“Maybe,” he muttered to himself, “just maybe, I can do something about this.” After consulting the encyclopedias again, Howard decided he would devote his life to traveling the world, learning everything there is to know, and saving every troubled soul he came across. He would become the first pencil to be a hero. A Super Pencil if you will.

Howard was just beginning to plan his wild adventures across the Savanna, over the Rockies, and through the ruins of ancient Rome when a disoriented bourgeois woman deftly snatched Howard’s case, with him in it, and handed it over to a rather pallor looking young girl.

“Uh oh...” thought Howard. “This could put a damper on things.”

* * * * *

The next morning, Chris woke up feeling refreshed and equanimous. Never had such a calm, undisturbed evenness come over his mind. He suddenly knew where he wanted to go and what he wanted to do. No longer was he plagued with indecision, or the horrible myopia that comes with lack of understanding, or even the boisterous feelings of boredom that Chris was often grappling with.

He climbed out of bed, and looked blithely towards Howard who was lying on the bedside table. Carefully, Chris picked up Howard and started to search him for clues. Chris tried to make an assessment on how important his talisman must be to have acquired a moniker such as Howard. The H and the D seemed to have been carved with special care, made to be just slightly larger than the rest of the letters. The letters were scratched in such a way, that to Chris, they almost appeared like the scars of long ago. 

Again, Chris wondered if this had been done in some surreptitious and purposeful manner. Why on earth had this little pencil been bequeathed with such a name as Howard? Chris perched on the chair that sat at his computer desk and began to imagine. He imagined all of the wonderful places that Howard had been, and the amazing people he had seen. Chris imagined that Howard was created for some deep significant purpose. Maybe, just maybe, Howard had been brought into this world to save Chris from not only certain death, but from what his life had become.

Chris, like Howard, was anything but ordinary. When Chris was in elementary school, and his friends were out playing basketball and dirt biking through construction sites, Chris was reading. He read about everything, from human rights and the history of war to the beautiful and rare plants on the rain forest floor that were being destroyed by flash farming. Chris would argue with his teachers about the meaning of life and creation, and the superficial tendencies of Westerners. Chris told his classmates, “Life is all we have, don’t let it pass you by.” He would begin writing an essay on the Titanic, and end up discussing his views on our patriarchic society that originate from the most primeval times. Chris knew all the statistics on drug rates, teenage pregnancy and the human tendency to use violence to solve all the world’s problems. Chris had the highest respect for human dignity and was on his way to becoming the emblem of a brilliant, educated and wise adult, that only deep thinking and erudition can construct. 

That was, until he made his way into his teenage years and took a fall so great and so far, that even Chris himself thought he might never be able to find his way back home.

* * * * *

After Howard had gotten snatched from his comfortable home at good old Business Depot, his life began to take a serious turn. Howard never did decide whether that turn was for the better or the worse, it was just a turn, and to Howard, a very serious one indeed. Although Howard was upset about his ruined plans to see the world, he knew that everything happens for a reason.

“I was created for a deep significant purpose. I am a miracle,” Howard recited to himself, over and over, as the little girl held tightly to his packaging.

There are some people (and apparently inanimate objects) that cannot seem to believe that everything that happens is completely accidental. There are no miracles, no paths to follow, no ultimate purposes; just a random series of coincidences, that for some reason, create this entirely confusing situation here that we have adorned “life”. 

Of course, Howard could not have known this. Nobody knew this. Had they known this, there would have been chaos in every mind and rioting on every street. It is too inconceivable for the human mind to comprehend that there are no reasons behind actions. Because of this, Howard kept on muttering under his breath (if he had breath, you understand) all the way through Business Depot, over the price scanner, and straight on through to a large, squat, and violently yellow home on Pimlico Drive.

“I am the greatest pencil ever to be put on this earth.” Howard could have made his very own self-help video, or written a book called Ten Ways to Boost your Esteem.

“I am amazing. I am brilliant. I am the super superest,” Howard muttered himself all the way up to the pale little girl’s bedroom, where he was thrown into a pile with a package of three-ring binder paper, a pink notebook that said Kittie on it, and several over-sized markers which, for some reason unknown to Howard, read WASHABLE on their sides. Howard was unsure of why anybody would want a marker that you could wash off. He believed markers were created to leave their, well, their mark on the world. Later, after seeing the pale little girl’s closet walls, he understood. 

Howard was in for a very educating experience. He, in time, would become the most knowledgeable pencil on the subject of children and their behavioral patterns. He was the most knowledgeable pencil on every subject he knew, in fact he was the only knowledgeable pencil in the universe, but that is beside the point.The little girl’s name turned out to be Susie. Howard noticed that she wrote Susie at the top of every piece of paper in her Kittie notebook and came to the conclusion that her name must be Susie. At this point, he may have been the only inanimate object with the ability to think for himself, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that he was a quick learner.

Howard grew quite fond of Susie in their next few months together. Not only was she a polite little girl, but she was always very careful when she handled Howard. Susie loved to draw pictures of flowers and rainfalls, and Howard’s was her favorite pencil for drawing. Howard liked to think that she felt an affiliation with him because she somehow knew, deep down, that he was different than all the other pencils in her pencil case. If you must know, she was actually just a little eccentric, but let’s not burst Howard’s bubble of happiness and self love just yet.