Chapter 3

“A few seasons ago, shall we say, a legendary magpie lived in the forest and the meadow. Napaleen I believe her name was, and she was an unloved bird. Napaleen felt that because she was an unloved bird, that indeed she wasn’t worth loving. The more she thought this way, the more upset she became. Being upset, upset Napaleen, so she took to collecting things she stumbled across which she thought nice. These things all seemed to be shiny as it happened, so that when Napaleen put all her shiny pieces in the one place, a glow of light unimaginable became imaginables.

One day as Napaleen soared through the air she saw a shiny white blip in the meadow and she flew to it. She landed in the grass beside the shiny piece, which was also beside a hole in the ground. She took the piece and no notice of the hole, and made her way back to her nest here.

As she flew away, a white rabbit came out of the hole wondering where his mirror had gone. Damn those children, he muttered under his breath. Anyhow Napaleen came back here and put the mirror at the top of the shiny pile, and she stood back and looked at the pile. For the first time, she saw herself. Or more correctly, what she looked like to the naked eye. “Oh” she said to herself, “I’m all black with white bits, or is it all white with black bits.