by B. B. Wurge
The book isn’t published yet. My mother says that when it comes out, lots of other people will try to pester the birdfrogs. To protect them, she wrote in the book that the hole leading to them is in southern Madagascar.
• • • • •
The birdfrogs really had stolen my grandmother’s kitchen knives. My mother asked them, and they told her all about it. When they first came up out of the hole they were naturally curious about people, and did some Web surfing to find out what we were like. When they found the Web page on how to cook a person, they were horrified and thought that humans must be awful animals that ate each other all the time. They took away my grandmother’s knives so that she wouldn’t be able to cut me up. They also borrowed my grandmother’s digital camera to take pictures of the Christo exhibit in Central Park. But the birdfrog who was holding the camera got mugged and the camera was stolen, so they were never able to give it back.
• • • • •
According to the birdfrogs, Mr. Earpicker and Miss Pointy fell all the way down to the big glowing cavern. A birdfrog saw them land in a heap, still tangled up in the net. When the two people spotted the birdfrog they were so frightened that they ran screaming and hopping and struggling down one of the tunnels and nobody ever saw them again. The tunnels go for hundreds of miles and even the birdfrogs don’t have a complete map. They are probably still down there, running around and trying to get their arms free of the rope net. My grandmother says that as long as they find enough cave funguses to eat, they’ll be able to stay alive.
• • • • •
Mr. Earpicker had stolen all of Mr. Jubber’s money and hidden it in secret bank accounts. There was nothing Mr. Jubber could do. He couldn’t get it back.
Since he had nowhere else to go, no money, and no job, he stayed in our house. At night, he slept on the living room couch. During the day, he was our secretary. Every new skeleton that we brought out of the hole had to be labeled, photographed, and described in writing, and all the papers and photos had to be put in a file and arranged in order in a big file cabinet. That was Mr. Jubber’s job. He seemed to like it. He said that when you are rich, everyone wants to take your money away and so you are always worried about it. But now that he was poor, he had nothing to worry about. He did look more cheerful and he stopped drinking whole bottles of wine.
• • • • •
I didn’t have to go to school. Everyone at the Department of Social Services turned out to be very nice and helpful, and none of them minded my home schooling. Miss Pointy had never worked for them after all. She had worked for the Office of Misinformation.
When I wasn’t doing schoolwork I helped my mother with her expeditions. We installed a metal ladder in the hole and went down once a week. My mother usually climbed all the way down to study the birdfrogs. She had gotten to be good friends with them. As for me, I was more interested in the extinct skeletons, so my mother handed over to me that part of the work. I was in charge of digging them out of the rock and hauling them up, one bone at a time. Right now I am working on T29, and have gotten out all of his tailbones and most of the bones of his left front foot. So I am making very good progress. Next, I am going to work on the saber-toothed tiger.
• • • • •
The Whingles had been nice to me in their own way, especially Mrs. Whingle, so I wanted to be nice to them in return. I invited them to come over and help dig out the wooly mammoth. When I knocked on the door, Mrs. Whingle opened it and was very surprised to see me. She thought I had run away and had only just come back, so she wanted to bring me inside at once and put me to bed again. But then she saw my grandmother standing on the doorstep next to me, and she fainted. We carried her inside, sat her on her living room couch, and when she woke up we explained the situation to her.
Now, Candy and Dennis come over every day after school to help dig out fossilized bones. They still giggle all the time, but my grandmother says that it is okay. She says that if you are going to have a bad habit, then giggling is a good one to have. They seem to like me better now that they know I’m not crazy.
Sometimes other children from the same row of houses also come over to help with the dinosaur bones. They don’t bother coming to our front door; they just run through the attic and get directly into our house. We never close the attic door. We never lock the front door, and we keep all the windows open all the time, even in the middle of winter. It is nice to live in a house where nothing is locked.
• • • • •
Once a month we have a huge dinner. Nine people sit around the table in our kitchen: Mr. and Mrs. Whingle, Dennis and Candy Whingle, Mr. Jubber, my grandmother, my mother, and me. That adds up to eight people. The ninth is a young birdfrog named Jerry who is less shy than the others, and who comes to visit us. He has to sit on the tabletop because he is too small to sit on a chair. We give him a dessert plate with a slice of banana dipped in chocolate. He also likes strawberries in chocolate. The rest of us eat spaghetti covered in my grandmother’s delicious sauce, cooked with tennis balls.
But we don’t eat the tennis balls.
The Author
B. B. Wurge began writing children’s books after leaving his first career as an entertainer in a primate house. He says, “I’ve been told the world is crazy, more now than ever. That may be true, but children should know they can navigate successfully through our crazy world if they stick to fundamental principles: loyalty to family and friends, compassion, and an open imagination.” Wurge holds degrees in hair growth and zoology. He lives in an elevator in Manhattan.