Here’s the first story in my series based on The Mysteries of Harris Burdick. For an explanation of my rules for these stories and some background on who Harris Burdick was (is?), see my original post!

Archie had been asleep for almost five hours.

His stepmother Karen sent him to his room that evening without supper, citing his “outburst” before dinner when he categorically refused to even consider eating his brussel sprouts. When he was sent to his room for the rest of the night, and it happened not infrequently, his only method of passing the time was going to bed early. 

On this particular Monday evening, he’d missed his TV program, Gunsmoke, (the only thing he looked forward to during the school week besides baseball practice) and he was cross about it because Karen knew that the show was his favorite. Archie was sure that she’d made it her goal in life to make his life a living hell. 

Luckily, Archie was an excellent dreamweaver. He could dream about anything he wanted, controlling his dreams from within, and given that he’d been sent to bed early and forbidden from watching his show, he’d decided before falling asleep to make his own cowboy-western episode.

Dorinda and Davy hovered over Archie, the electricity generated by their beating wings causing them to glow, and combed through his past and future dreams, ignoring the cowboys and Indians for the moment; they were looking for something that would tell them their next step. 

“Are you sure, Davy?”

“He’s the one. We’ll find it. We just have to keep looking.”

Some forty or so years ago, children’s book editor Peter Wenders met Harris Burdick, an author and illustrator. Burdick, an unknown at the time, gave Wenders fourteen drawings with accompanying captions. Burdick left with the promise that he would return the next day with fourteen stories to go with the drawings, but never appeared. Wenders tried for awhile to find Harris Burdick, but was unsuccessful.

In 1984, Chris Van Allsburg (The Polar Express and Jumanji, among others) visited Wenders’ office. Wenders showed Van Allsburg Burdick’s manuscript, and Van Allsburg decided to publish the manuscript in hopes of finding Burdick once and for all. While Wenders and Van Allsburg were unsuccessful in finding Harris Burdick, their publication of Burdick’s drawings and captions have become fodder for creative writers all over the world, old and young alike. 

I was first introduced to The Mysteries of Harris Burdick when I was in elementary school. He seemed to follow me throughout my grade school career, first as a picture book that made my little mind run wild, then as fun prompts for creative writing assignments on Halloween. He reappeared in my life a few months ago when I read Stephen King’s Nightmares & Dreamscapes, which included one short story based on one of Burdick’s drawings. 

I always wanted to write a series to go with Burdick’s drawings, and now, being a Creative Writing MFA student, I finally feel like I have some business doing it! I set some rules for myself, just to make things interesting. They are:

• You get 10 sentences to tell the story. No more. No less.
• The pictures and stories must remain in the original order of publication. 
• The stories must riff on the drawing and the caption, but you cannot use the caption as one of your ten sentences. 
• Don’t mire yourself in one genre. Try all of them. 

Harris Burdick’s drawings are strange. Some are unsettling–you understand why Stephen King wanted to write about one of them–while others are perfectly whimsical, like a drawing out of fairy tale. I’ve enjoyed finally writing these stories. I hope you enjoy reading them, but more than that, I hope you feel compelled to create your own.

ARCHIE SMITH, BOY WONDER