Invisible Ink - Melody Cryns

“Hey look at this!” I shouted to anyone who would listen holding up a piece of paper that looked like it had nothing on it – just a blank white piece of paper. I was outside on the front marble steps of the wide marble porch or our flat on Second Avenue on a cool, foggy morning. It was one of those deliciously lazy summer days that would start out foggy and most likely end up sunny when we had days stretched before us filled with fun and adventure without the regimen of school. David Hirrell from around the corner sat in his usual perch on the stoop while Ricky Solis, one of the Solis boys from the street and my brother Michael lounged on the steps, and Barry Hirrell and sister Jennifer ran up and down the street in front chasing each other around.

“Okay, so what. It’s a piece of paper,” David said.

“Yes, you may think it’s a piece of paper! But, for real, it’s magical because there are words on this paper!” I said excitedly. I had gotten these magical invisible ink pens from my Dad and tried them out and now I was going to show everyone just how wonderful this was.

No one looked particularly interested. “I don’t see anything” my brother Michael said.

I sat down on a cool, marble step and stared into a crevice in the bricks where a snail we’d put inside it months later resided. We named him Fred the Friend. I think that snail lived in there for at least a year feeding off the damp mildew I guess… we weren’t always that kind to snails which our downstairs neighbors paid us a nickel to catch and kill because they ate up all the vegetation in the back yard, but there was something special about Fred the Friend.

In my other hand, I held a couple of crayons – dark purple and magenta. I was going to show them.

Everyone laughed as I began to color on the page, filling in the page with splashes of color by swirling the crayon around over and over again until words began to magically appear in white right through the coloring.


“Wow!” Michael said, as he saw a word in big letter appear. “That is cool.”

I kept coloring until almost the entire page was colored and the huge printed words appeared mixed in with the purple.

“What does it say? Lemme see,” Ricky said. “The world is your…your what?”

I proudly held up the page. “it says the world is your oyster! That’s the secret message!”

Everyone laughed and David Hirrell grabbed the paper from me. “How stupid! What’s that supposed to mean. But how did you do that?”

“it’s not stupid,” I defended grabbing the paper back. “It’s magic.”

“But what does the world is your oyster mean?” my sister Jennifer asked jumping up and down on one foot. I heard the loud screeching scream that was our signal from up the street and we all instinctively answered the call – our special secret call.

I shrugged. “Not sure – I read it in a book I just read, The Moffett Family.”

“Ohhhh.”

“Let’s write secret messages!” David said.

I ran back in the house to get my magical pens, the box of crayons and a bunch of paper and we all sat around on the front porch before the fog lifted writing secret messages on white paper and coloring them in – there was something fun and special about the words not appearing until we colored them in, as if they HAD to be colored in so that they would come to life. When we first wrote the words they didn’t show up – something had to be done to get them to appear.