week 1 story: an aesop through trading cards

 

When the trend swept through Van Buren Elementary School, it hit Cory Fillmore’s classmates with fervor: Pokemon cards. Three quarters of the twenty-eight kids in his class could be found trading Shellders for Caterpies on the playground only a week after the cards had begun circulating among the older kids, but Cory couldn’t find the enthusiasm that had infected his friends. Instead, he stayed in the fourth-grade classroom during recess, grappling with a much more mature emotion: bitterness. 

“When I brought booster packs to school, Sharon and Ryan made fun of me,” he complained when questioned by the teacher. “Now they don’t even remember it.” 

A few days passed this way—an eternity for a fourth-grader—before another student caught on. One day, halfway through recess, the classroom door squeaked open and a scarlet-haired head poked through.

“Hi, Cory.”

“Hi, Fay.”

“What are you doing?” Fay asked. 

“Nothing.”

She scooted a chair over to the desk beside him. “What’s that?” she asked, pointing to purple card near the edge of his sorted piles. 

“It’s a Grimer. It’s poison-type. It evolves into this one,” he explained, pointing to a different purple card with a similar monster.

Fey fell silent for a few minutes, watching Cory count, sort, and recount his cards. She spoke again after his cards were completely laid out. “So you know a lot about Pokemon cards?”

“I guess,” he said. “I started collecting them from my older sister three weeks ago.” 

“Wow! You’re like an expert, right?”

Cory nodded, his cheeks heating up. 

“Could you tell me what some of mine are? I just like trading, but I don’t know how rare they are.” Fay fanned her cards out on the desk. There were about two dozen, and several duplicates. “Are any of these good?”

“This one.” Cory pointed to a blue card. “Pidgeot is kind of rare. I have a lot of Pidgeottos, but not a Pidgeot.”

“What about this one?”

He shook his head. “The white ones are normal-type. They’re not as good, because that’s the most common type.”

Fay’s gaze wandered over to his stack. “Like this one?” she asked, pressing her finger to a white card of his. Pictured was a cartoonish dragon-like monster with its paw in its mouth. 

“That’s…”

“Isn’t it a Dragonite?” Fay’s eyes sparked.

“Yeah, it’s a good card.”

“But it can’t be that good. You said white cards aren’t as good as colorful ones, right? I mean, you would know. You got your cards before all of us, we should be the ones trading with you because you have the best collection.”

Cory nodded slowly. “I do have a lot more cards.”

“You said you didn’t have a Pidgeot, right? I’ll trade you mine for it. They you’ll have one.”

Cory agreed. After the trade, Fay ran outside and was greeted with oohs and ahhs. Her classmates clustered around her to look at the new super-rare card they had never seen before. 

Meanwhile, Cory remained inside, tucking his new card in with the rest. He couldn’t wait to show his sister.

~

Author’s Note: This short story is based off of Aesop’s "The Fox & The Crow," where the moral is to never trust a flatterer. The fox (in my story, Fay) sees the crow (Cory) with a piece of cheese (Pokemon card) in its beak. The fox approaches the crow and asks the crow to share her voice, because he thinks the crow’s voice “must surpass that of other birds.” The crow opens her beak to sing, letting the cheese slip, and the fox makes off with it.

I originally set out to write a more straightforward version of the fable with human characters, one of whom uses flattery to steal the other’s watch and cuff links, but it felt flat and boring. Instead, I ended up writing a story about how kids are jerks to each other by using something from my childhood—Pokemon cards. People used to goad me into trading away my good cards. I wasn’t a savvy child.

Bibliography. “The Fox & The Crow” from The Fables of Aesop by Joseph Jacobs. Web Source.

Image: "Fake Pokemon cards from Chinatown" by Matthew Willis. Source.