The Mozart Flute
Amir, 4th grade
The carriage pulled up to the driveway of 65th Theater. It slowed down and went to a halt. “Tis we here!” The driver announced, brushing his beard. He was in a purple tuxedo, and (to himself) he was looking very fine on this misty Thursday evening. “Twa! Twa! For you is missing la show.”
The people in the back of the carriage were named Treuilgta’e, O’Hare and Renoir. O’Hare was dressed in an emerald dress with crimson polka dots. She was a lady, with pristine blond hair. She walked with a cane with a falcon on the top and a rat on the bottom. Treuilgta’e, on the other hand, was in the rattiest of clothes, sloppy, and all of his mess was an excuse not to come to the Los Slopes Opera that night. “I’m too sloppy,” he told O’Hare at the house, “I’ll be throwing food right before your eyes.” But, nonetheless O’Hare dragged him into the carriage. Renoir however, was dressed in rags and aged towels and tissues. She had spooky black cat hair. Nobody cared about her. O’Hare and Treuilgta’e called her “slave” and “orphan” (because she really was one). She had just come here to spare a whipping. Everyone piled out of the carriage and trotted towards the theater to see The Magic Flute, but they were really starting on an adventure of a lifetime.
The theater was bustling with people, some briskly walking into the auditorium some calling their husbands, some conferring with each other. After a few moments the lights dimmed and the people all clapped. Instead of an announcer coming out, a screaming girl carrying a flute, all dressed in violet, with a falcon mask on her head ran on stage and tripped.
“I forgot my lines. The original script Mozart used is gone! Gone! Gone!” she sang and ran backstage.
Renoir wanted to jump out of her seat and join all the actors in looking for Mozart’s original script. Just as she stood up, O’Hare pushed her down with the rat side of her cane.
“That makes three whippings!” O’Hare hissed, “You are too dimwitted to find it anyway! Treuilgta’e, tut, tut, we’re leaving!”
Despite O’Hare’s hissed words, Renoir was determined to find Mozart’s original script. She told O’Hare these words, “I’ll be along, I, um, was just going to clean up the mess Treuilgta’e made.” O’Hare made a wave of her finger and a nod of her head. She grabbed Treuilgta’e by the arm and headed towards the wooden doors of the auditorium.
As soon as the tail of O’Hare’s emerald dress went out the wooden doors, Renoir got out of isle D8, ran down the walkway of the theater, and climbed up to the stage and ran backstage.
Renoir was looking pretty shabby in her patched rags and her pillowcase bonnet. All the actors gasped when a young girl in such poor clothing came trotting backstage.
“What are you doing here girl? You should be gasping with all the other people in the audience!” the falcon-headed masked girl said, “Out! Out!”
But yet again, despite the girl’s words, Renoir strode over to the chair where they put make-up on the actors and sat on a handle. “I’m here to help you find it! Now who last had Moe’s script?” inquired Renoir.
A trembling man with a mustache dressed in a dark green vest and sliver boots put up his hand. “I w-was p-peering o-over it one more t-time and I p-put it in the d-drawer u-under Rebecca’s f-falcon costume.” He pointed to a dresser with five drawers. His finger had darted to the third drawer.
“Well let’s team up and qegla’e the room” suggested Renoir.
“Q`egla`e” is a word that means search; and reader, is not in the dictionary. The dictionary is just a book of tedious grammar and has no poetic license.
After the room had been searched corner to corner and no results had been found, the cast and Renoir sat hopelessly down again once more. A few moments of silence went by, broken by a cry of “Fire!” Everyone’s heart gave a sharp jolt. Rebecca (the teenage girl in the falcon costume) said, “The escape route.”
She got up and pushed a green button. The whole room shook. Two curtains closed on the east and west sides of the room and the candles went out making the room covered in black cat’s fur. There was a crack as the floor shattered, and the backstage of 65th Theater went toppling down 400 feet into the ground.
“Are we going to Oz?” Renoir asked Rebecca after about half an hour.
“No,” she replied, “peer over here!” The curtains had suddenly been pulled back. The candles did not get lit back on, but three torch holders on each wall where the curtains had been were puffing out purple smoke.
The backstage room of 65th Theater was now not rolling on dirt, but gliding on a glistening river which Rebecca said was in Florence, Italy. Occasionally, a school of fish would pass by the open floor of the backstage and maybe a dolphin or two would jump out of the water.
A monstrous castle rose out from the water, hidden at first by rocky cliffs which were serving as the walls of the moat. The room though, despite this beauty took a sharp left turn away from the castle.
“Those rocks will pull us underwater if we hit them,” Rebecca explained “so we are taking a bypass.” The bypass was not as scenic as the route they had been traveling on. The water was thicker and murky strange echoes passed over the travelers heads.
The backstage room started sinking and in about five minutes the room split apart.
“No! Someone has enchanted the boat to fall! Cry to the world! My pulse is dropping. You all will face the same fate as I if you don’t…rush. Goodbye…I’ll be resting in heaven!” Rebecca cried in anger. That was the last of Rebecca.
“She’s gone!” Renoir wailed so hard that the water level rose, “Gone!”
“Yes,” said an actor, “but let’s get out of here.”
“How?” asked the man in the green vest floating on the other end of the room.
“The golden glass,” the actor replied. A piece of glass was bobbing up above the actor and he grabbed on to it. Instantly the actor rose out of the water and higher and higher, until he was no more than a tiny dot in the blackish-blue sky. The glass dropped from his hands into the water, but amazingly, he was still sustained in the sky.
Next, the man in the green vest grabbed hold of glass and the same thing happened to him. It operated this way until only Renoir was left on sandy river’s floor. She picked up Rebecca’s body from the rock it was lying on, for it was a sin to not bury her on land. With that, Renoir put her sweaty hands on the golden glass. Abruptly, Renoir lifted up off the rocky ground. The glass swerved and swayed her hand making her swerve and sway too. Then, the glass shot up and deliberately brought Renoir out of the water and into the sky. Once she was sustained in the air, the glass slipped out of Renoir’s sweaty hands and fell very rapidly into the water.
“Renoir,” the man in the green vest said soothingly, “you must take off your bonnet and hold it close to you to keep the wind from blowing you away.”
Renoir did this with her pillowcase bonnet and in none but ten minutes they were floating over the gleaming castle. “Actor, whoever-you-are,” Renoir inquired politely, “we are going over our destination, The Castle. How do we break the enchantment of the golden glass?”
“I’ve done this many times,” the actor replied, “just touch the knob of your foot.”
The whole cast and crew obeyed, and as each one of them touched the knob of their foot they came down sluggishly to the door of The Castle. Renoir touched the knob of her foot and the corpse’s too and they came down to The Castle’s door.
Within moments the door had swung open and the theater workers went inside. Torches lit corridor after corridor. Twist after turn they crossed until they came to a large ballroom. A mountainous chandelier hung from the ceiling and dome-shaped windows engulfed the walls. There was a small bunch of filing cabinets in one corner and… a shadow…
Renoir noticed. She pointed it out to her comrades and very steadily approached it. The shadow had a long orange beard and was wearing a purple tuxedo. In his hand he had a file titled:
The Magic Flute
By Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
The thief…the crook! Renoir knew him as the carriage driver!
“Why! Why!” Renoir barked at him, “Why did you steal Mozart’s original script!”
He trembled and shivered and then spoke. “Because, because,” he said, his tone moving to a snarl, “she was a fairy!” He pointed to Rebecca’s corpse. “For proof in her pocket she has a flute that can take you anywhere if you draw it! She was planning to….”
“I don’t care what she planned to do,” Renoir interrupted him, “Kill you right?”
The Carriage Driver nodded his head.
“Well, this person I hold in my hands named Rebecca would never kill a living soul whether she was a fairy or not! Now hand over the script!”
The man’s hands forced him to shake the script off his trembling hands.
“Now, what we need is the flute! Where is it!” Renoir demanded of the Carriage Driver.
“In her left pocket,” the Carriage Driver yelled.
Hidden in the left pocket of Rebecca’s dress lay an ancient, musty flute.
“Now what do we do with it?” questioned the man in the green vest.
“Oh, blow on it and imagine where you want to go. That’s how I got here myself,” said the carriage driver.
“Take us back to 65th Theater!” said the actor and Renoir at once obeyed.
She blew in the flute, which produced a squeaking sound at first and then a soothing one and very carefully it drew the archways of 65th Theater.
As the drawing neared completion, the ballroom faded from their sights and in a few seconds they saw complete darkness. They almost lost consciousness and forgot themselves…. ….
Thump! They had landed in the orchestra pit. The crowd was cheering. As Renoir pulled herself up the pit walls she saw Treuilgta’e and O’Hara standing at the end of the long carpet looking more gruesome than ever. Nonetheless, Renoir was proud of her job in finding the script.
“I will write a book, Renoir said silently to herself,” about my ventures with the cast and crew. I will call it…..The Mozart Flute. Yes, that’s a perfect title.”
Just guess what happened next.
Back to Creative Writing Home Page