The Night of the Nuggets: Chapters 1-3
The Amazing Miss Pearl Helping to Make the World Better for Chickens and People
As we hinted at last week, we are eager to start on something completely different. Our work with The Dictionary of Curious Words is coming to a close with the performance at Le Palais Garnier. Below is a sample cover showing one of the notebooks that was used to records events and facts about Pearl. The illustrations inside the book strive to be true to real notebook pages and illustrations so that readers can feel that Pearl is real and so are her adventures as a detective.
As this will likely develop into a series about The Amazing Miss Pearl, all of the titles will begin with “The Night of…” because night is a scary time for chickens when they are unable to see things properly. Below is a possible cover, and this is one of my favorite illustrations of my amazing Miss Pearl who is all set with her detective gear and is ready for mystery and adventure. (Take that Scooby-Doo!)
The first three chapters which we will share with you in this week’s newsletter go together to introduce readers to Pearl and to move her towards solving her first mystery.
My name is Pearl, and I am a Maker of Curious Hats. I am also a little white hen. Someone else is writing this down for me because when I write, it looks like chicken scratching, and you’d never be able to read it.
But even someone who can’t read can enjoy looking at my hats made from things that blow out of the trash truck on Trash Truck Tuesdays. Other things are brought to me by the songbirds of The Living Library.
What I have to say needs to be able to be read by as many birds and people as possible. You see, like me, you are creatures of the miraculously magical. That is because you have been hatched or born, which are both miracles journeys for coming into this world of ours. Ask any bird, and it will tell you because it remembers how it broke out of its original shell and also how hatching from an egg is just about the most miraculous thing that can happen to a living creature.
But this miraculous entry into the world does not protect us from what is already happening in the world when we arrive. There is a war going on around us, a war between the good and the evil. Our beautiful world designed for us is being invaded by creatures of self-seeking wishes and magic incantations who want only to destroy us and occupy our world.
These creatures are difficult to spot, but I have trained my eyes to see them. Perhaps you have seen things that appeared to “come and go” like leaves on the ground or food in the bowl. These events happen in the corners of your eyes, the faint regions of your vision where your attention is not focused, and things which were not there appear suddenly or disappear just as suddenly. This is what some call “the shadow world,” but I prefer to call it “the mirror world” because I’ve found that a mirror is a good tool for studying it.
These creatures will try to slip a picture into your mind of something that you will imagine that you want. It will be what you think you truly need to be happy and what will make your life complete—it would be as if you were God and needed nothing. It will all be a deception and a lie to ensnare you. As long as the enemy has you loving the pictures planted in your mind, the stronger they can become. Then those creatures will begin to exist in this real world of flesh and blood through you.
It is ultimately up to each person to refuse these images and the lies they are built upon. I have a talent for making quite memorable and curious hats— or so people and other chickens tell me. I simply enjoy making hats and sometimes costumes to go with them. Some are funny, all are serious and intended to chase the dangerous lying pictures away and replace them with honest, truthful pictures.
Being a Maker of Curious Hats is the most important thing I can think of to say about myself, but there are a few others that you need to know.
Someone else is writing this down for me, and that someone else is my Page who records all the significant events in my life. My Page is a sparrow, the bird least valued by people.
Our Great Gardener’s Son once said, “Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies, and not one of them is forgotten before God?” It is true that I am not any better at math than I am at writing, but is also easy to see that while four of those sparrows are valued at half of a penny, one of those little sparrows is considered worthless by the person selling them. Even so, it is not forgotten by The Great Gardener.
If anyone is looking for my heart, they will find it with those who feel they have been forgotten and who have no worth or value. I know that feeling so well because I was asked day after day, “Why can’t you just be a good, normal chicken?” And then I was pecked on the head.
What I have to say needs to be read by as many people as possible so they can share it with their chickens. You see, like me, you are a creature of the miraculously magical. That is because you have been hatched or born, which are both miraculous ways of coming into this world of ours. But there is a war going on around us. We are being invaded by creatures of self-seeking wishes and magic incantations.
These creatures are difficult to spot, but I have trained my eyes to spot them. Perhaps you have seen things that appeared to “come and go” like leaves on the ground or food in the bowl. These events happen in the corners of your eyes, the faint regions of your vision where your attention is not focused, and things which were not there appear suddenly or disappear just as suddenly.
This is what some call “the shadow world” but I prefer to call “the mirror world” because I’ve found that a mirror is a good tool for studying it. I discovered my own curious shadow self while studying how I looked in a mirror one day.
Even smart chickens like me can be misled by these lies. Often, when out playing in the yard, we may spot one of our neighbors with an earthworm that looks particularly tasty. If we get that picture in our chicken brains, it can make us believe that if we only had that tasty-looking earthworm, then all of our problems would be over and the rest of our life would be perfect.
Then we start imagining ourselves stealing that earthworm, and before we know it, we’ve done exactly that! And if we realize how beautiful and glamorous we look in the world of curious shadows, it’s easy to give in and do what we wish not to do that offends our neighbors.
When we are tempted to be led astray like this, we know without any doubt that it is the work of the Shadow World in the Kingdom of Darkness.
While most baby chicks remember all kinds of details about when they hatched, I did not. I don’t remember if the weather outside that day was bright and sunny or gray and rainy. Most of all, I don’t remember the sweet smell of the straw or my momma hen lying in it, but I do remember the smell of a little chick just like me who must have hatched with me.
Just as we were getting acquainted as friends, I was picked up and put into a carton that had a label on it. I do remember the smell of the label, and it was not pleasant. It did have marks on it that I tried to remember. Later, when I learned to understand those marks, they were “PRL5-BLCH7.”
The carton was jostled quite a bit, then it would remain still before getting jostled again. The carton ended up in a place called “The Post Office,” and I could hear a young boy’s voice saying, “I’m here to pick up a package from “TCNS.” It’s #PRL5-BLCH7” for Nate Elliot. That’s me, and there should be two white chickens inside.”
I heard fingers fumbling to open the lid of the carton, and then light flooded inside the box. Best of all, I could see that my best friend who had hatched with me was there in the box too.
Later I learned that Nate used the letters on the package label to name us with things that were associated with white, like our feathers. As “PRL5,” I was named Pearl, and as “BLCH7,” my new best friend was named Blanche. It’s a good thing that she didn’t start burping until she got older, or she might have been named Belch. Nate felt that the 5 and 7 were lucky numbers for us because they added up to 12, which is a dozen, and that’s what people use when counting eggs. Since we chickens count on our toes the way that children count on their fingers, we count our front, forward-facing toes, and together Blanche had I had 12 of those!
Somehow, these memories came back to me as I began to feel that I needed to know who my Momma Chicken Hen and my Poppa Chicken Rooster were. I needed to find out as much as I could about them because soon I would be laying eggs and raising a family of my own, and those little chicks were sure to ask me as soon as they were able to say “peep” and “cheep.”
My only clue to who my parents were was the mysterious label “Order # PRL5-BLCH7” which came from a place named “TCNS.” I would not rest until I had discovered as much as I could about that label and that place. After calling a songbird from The Living Library to me, I asked the Page to explain what “TCNS” meant. As with the rules of the Library Pages, since it didn’t know, it flew off to find another Page to bring me the answer.
In no time at all, a little wren came back with the answer and warned me to be as careful as possible because those letters were for something named “The Chicken Nugget Syndicate.”
The last thing this little white hen wanted to learn about was how a Chicken Nugget is made. But this was my first mystery to solve as a persistent and determined undercover detective, so I could not let my future family down. I was going to find out what it meant to be half of “Order # PRL5-BLCH7” no matter what!
These three things about Pearl will mix together and become increasingly important throughout Pearl’s adventure as an undercover detective: her hats, the “shadow world,” and “TCNS.”
Until Next Time
If you have any comments—good or bad—please share them on Substack or you can also reach me directly at John.Spiers@yahoo.com. We are looking forward to sharing more about Amazing Miss Pearl with you. Your likes and comments are very valuable and helpful!!!
Our Best Advice for the Days Ahead: Remember that you have great value and certainly far more than a sparrow!
Thank you for reading!
John, Gracie, Bessie, Pearl, Blanche, Emily, and Amelia
As David said,, the Spiervserse is growing! How lucky we are.
Marvelous! I love those illustrations!
The Spiersverse is growing by leaps and bounds. It's amazing to see it develop.
My canine superhero, Cerberus, also has to use "dictation" to tell her own stories (paws are hard to use for writing, even for her), but she tends to use computer software rather than a manual scribe.
And thank you especially for that Jerry Springer-like final thought...