A Contrary Case Of BEING AFOOT IN SMALL PRINT

An unfortunate twist has rendered Aurora Widdershin adrift on Neptune’s Belly. Alone, she is beguiled by nameless, friendless memories. Hitching a ride in a flamboyant sidecar, attached to no ordinary Penny Farthing, she is whisked along evolving chipboard streets, where senseless words run into one another.

Aurora knew she was dreaming because the door to the bungalow yawned, before changing colour. Reds, greens, blues and yellows faded around her and their saturation ran into a nearby gutter. Beyond black and white, the charcoal sky huffed and puffed as Aurora stood quietly in a grey area that was neither a city nor a town. It was the in-between place between a capital and its neighbouring lower case.

Aurora’s guide, Stumple Bumpkin, takes her to other members of his tribe of headless legs and shoes. The bluestockings, as they are known, cycle intuitively on the spinning wheels of their velocipedes. Challenged by the future uncertainty of traditions past, they risk losing their grip on the story.

Navigating a long-winded soliloquy along textured nooks and unknown crannies, Stumple’s adroit pedal-pushing toes introduce Aurora to acquaintances of no definite origin: Kuu, who peddles words, and Trig, a bouncy three-wheeler, who escorts two competing versions of a future chapter to a parting of ways.

Within the ensuing quagmire of confusion, Aurora’s four school friends, Hum, Jeth, Lourdes and Scooter, seek to decipher the unfolding mystery from the safety of their buckled seatbelts on Jitney, an impudent school bus. The heat is on to excavate the bones of the baffled story in a race to the finishing line. The mounting question is: what will they find along the way?