Leo's Little Less Clumsy

Leo, who had a talent for tripping over his own shoelaces and a knack for accidentally launching himself into hedgehogs, found himself in a rather peculiar state of mind. It wasn’t the usual state of mild panic that accompanied him when he was about to spill something down his front or, worse, when he was attempting to carry more than one object at a time. No, this was a thoughtful, almost contemplative mood, a rare visitor in the whirlwind of his often-unintentional chaos. He was sitting on a moss-covered log, the dappled sunlight filtering through the leaves of the Secret Forest, a place that had, quite frankly, turned his world upside down in the most delightful, and occasionally bone-jarring, way.

He thought back to the very beginning, to the dusty attic and the forgotten chest. Had he not been trying to retrieve a runaway yo-yo that had, with its usual defiance, bounced off a precarious stack of books and then, with a final, audacious wobble, rolled directly into the aforementioned chest? And then, the map. If he hadn’t been so intent on not letting that yo-yo escape his grasp, he might have missed the faded parchment tucked beneath a pile of moth-eaten blankets. His clumsiness, the very thing that caused him so much embarrassment, had been the catalyst for this extraordinary adventure.

He looked at his hands, hands that had a tendency to knock things over, to drop things, to bump into things. They were, by all accounts, perfectly ordinary hands. Yet, they had unfurled a map to a magical forest, they had fumbled with Barnaby the badger’s grumpy pronouncements, and they had, in a moment of pure, unadulterated panic, managed to catch Maya before she tumbled headfirst into a patch of particularly ticklish ferns.