Kids & Fables

by Scribes Stories · 3 min read · 1 view

The Tortoise Who Painted the Sky Genre: Kids and Fable Long ago, in a valley where the animals still spoke to one another the way neighbors do, there lived a tortoise named Bramble who wanted, more than anything, to paint the sky. The other animals laughed when he told them. "The sky already has a color," said Fennick the fox, quick and clever and always in a hurry. "Blue in the day, black at night, and that is simply how it is." "You'll never even reach it," said Della the deer, bounding off before she'd finished the sentence, the way she did everything. But Bramble was patient in the way only tortoises truly are, and patience, he had noticed, was a kind of quiet courage that nobody ever gave proper credit to. So every morning, while the fox was busy hurrying and the deer was busy bounding, Bramble carried a small pot of paint made from crushed berries up the tallest hill in the valley, one slow step at a time, and dabbed a single stroke of color onto the underside of a passing cloud. It took him one hundred and eleven days to notice any difference at all. On the one hundred and twelfth day, just as the sun was setting, the whole valley looked up and gasped. The sky above Bramble's hill had turned the softest shade of rose gold, streaked through with lavender and deep amber, more beautiful than any sunset the animals could remember. "How did you do that?" Fennick asked, forgetting entirely to hurry for once in his life. "One small stroke every day," Bramble said, setting down his little pot of berry paint. "I never painted the whole sky at once. I only ever painted the part I could reach that day." "But you couldn't have known it would work," Della said, genuinely puzzled. "What if you'd climbed that hill for a hundred and eleven days and nothing had changed at all?" Bramble considered this for a long moment, the way tortoises consider most things. "Then I still would have climbed a hill every day," he said. "And spent each morning making something a little more beautiful than I found it. That part was never wasted, whether the sky noticed or not." The animals of the valley began climbing the hill with him after that, each carrying their own small pot of color, a little dab of paint added by whoever managed to make the journey that day. Some days only Bramble climbed. Some days the whole valley came together, badgers and rabbits and even old Hollis the owl, who normally slept through daylight entirely but made an exception for sunset painting. Years later, when the valley's youngest animals asked how the sunset had become so famously beautiful, so much more vivid than skies in neighboring valleys, the older animals would simply point to the hill and tell them about the tortoise who never once believed he was too slow, or too small, or too unlikely, to spend his days making the world a little more beautiful than he found it. "But how long did it take him?" the young ones always asked. "However long it takes," the old ones always answered, "is exactly how long it was always going to take. The only real mistake would have been never climbing the hill at all." And to this day, if you visit that valley just as the sun begins to set, you will see the sky above it turn the softest shade of rose gold, streaked through with lavender and deep amber, painted patiently, one small stroke at a time, by anyone willing to climb.