by B. B. Wurge
“She’s dead!” Mrs. Sponge wailed, lifting her hands and gripping her sideburns.
Toby threw his arms over his face to block out the horrible sight.
Dr. Sponge leaped to his feet (the whole room shook when he landed) and roared, “What did you do to her! You filthy little girl!” His red wiry hair stuck out fiercely in all directions.
Lobelia started to laugh. She couldn’t help it. She laughed so hard that her chair almost flipped over. “Oh! Toby! Mr. and Mrs. Sponge! It’s ME! I’m Squiggle!” Then she jumped to her feet and rushed at them to hug them all. The octopus was glad it had gotten its tentacles out of the way in time. Everyone danced around the room and shouted and laughed until the whole house shook and the windows rattled and a dozen books fell off the shelves in Dr. Sponge’s study.
She had one more surprise for them. She had been writing messages to the pickfloo, and had worked out a marvelous scheme. “Toby,” she said, “I know how much you wanted to be a monkey, so I’m giving this to you.” She handed him the stuffed monkey. “Whenever you want to, you can switch your mind into this little monkey body, or switch it back into your regular body. Everyone’s entitled to one piece of magic, you know, and that’s yours, if you want it.”
Toby definitely wanted it, though he couldn’t say so at first because his mouth was wide open in astonishment. He was the happiest nine-year-old boy in the city. “Oh Daddy!” he shouted, when he had found his voice. “Can I go with you on your voyage as a monkey, and help you collect specimens?”
And that is exactly what he did. His regular boy’s body stayed at home and his monkey body went on the voyage. Every day after school he would switch instantly from his boy’s body to the monkey body and go on adventures with his father, and then he would switch back again in time to go to school the next day. Since each body was able to sleep half the day, he was always nicely rested.
• • • • •
Lobelia also went to visit Mr. Sclera. He may have been a villain and a nasty old man, but he had helped her in a way, and she felt sorry for him.
She walked into his shop one day and said, “Excuse me, are you Mr. Sclera?”
The old man was sitting on a stool behind the counter. He looked even more terrible and snarly now that she could see him all at once, instead of just a piece at a time through a hole in a briefcase. He leered at her and said, craftily, “I might be, and I might not be. What’s it to you?”
“Oh, I hope you are,” she said, “because somebody told me you were the right person to talk to about eyeballs.”
“Somebody told you right, Darling,” Mr. Sclera said, smiling and rubbing his hands together. “Do you have something for me? Or did you come to buy something? I have the most delightful swimming eyeballs from Peru. They sell fast, Dear, so you’ll want to buy them quick while you have the chance!”
She thanked him but didn’t buy one. Toby had already warned her that they were fake. They were battery operated and overpriced.
“I’m so glad you’re the right person,” she said. “I have the strangest story to tell you. I was just in Paris with my parents. . . .”
Mr. Sclera jumped to his feet and stared at her more closely.
“And one night I was walking around under the Eiffel Tower, sightseeing, you know, when I looked down and saw a little bottle on the ground. It was just sitting there in the shadows, at the edge, away from the crowd.”
Mr. Sclera began to tremble in excitement. “A bottle!” he said. “A little bottle! And nobody seemed to want it? Nobody was nearby, sort of skulking around it?”
“Nobody, Mr. Sclera. I looked around, and I couldn’t see anybody.”
“And . . . and . . . and what did you do? Little Miss? What is your name, delightful little girl? I didn’t catch it at first. My hearing isn’t so good.”
“My name’s Susan,” Lobelia said, smiling. “And Mr. Sclera, I was so curious that I picked up the bottle and brought it to the light to look at it.”
“You did, did you?” Mr. Sclera said. “Sarah! What was in it?”
“Why, a little marble, floating in water. That’s what I thought it was, anyway. And I thought it was very strange that it had been left on the ground, as if on purpose.”
“Strange, yes, very strange,” Mr. Sclera said. “Did you put it back, in case somebody was going to look for it there? Or did you take it?” He peered at her intently, almost fiercely.
“Well Mr. Sclera, I’m afraid I . . . I took it.”
“Good girl!” he burst out. “Excellent, Samantha. Finders keepers, they say. And what exactly did this marble look like, when you got it home and looked it over more carefully?”
“I was shocked, Mr. Sclera! It was an eyeball. A horrible thing, floating in a jar. I was going to flush it down the toilet—”
“Ahhhh!” An expression of horror and pain crossed the old man’s face. He reached over the counter and clutched Lobelia’s hand. “Did you? Sandy, did you flush it?”
“No, a friend of mine said, why, he knew someone who bought and sold eyeballs, and might be interested. So I kept it, you know, and brought it to you.”
“Where is it?” Mr. Sclera said, trembling. He couldn’t keep his hands still. “Do you have it with you? Out with it! Sylvia, where is it?”
“It’s right here, Mr. Sclera,” Lobelia said, taking a little jar out of her purse and setting it on the counter. The old man snatched it up and peered into the jar, turning it one way and the other. An eyeball stared back at him. The truth is, Lobelia had asked the pickfloo to make it for her. It was a perfectly real eyeball, exactly like yours or mine, except that it had a pentagonal pupil.
Mr. Sclera could hardly breathe. He felt dizzy and set the jar back down in case he should faint and drop it. He had to lean on the counter a moment and then said, in a panting voice, “How much do you want for it? My dear, I have a collection in the back room; you can come look and take anything you want. What am I saying? I’ll give you the whole collection. I’ll give you the whole store! I’ll give you my shirt and my eye patch, too, if you want!” He was out of his mind with excitement and forgot all about how to bargain.
“But Mr. Sclera,” Lobelia said, “I don’t want to sell it to you.”
“What’s that?” he said, in a scream. “Show it to me, and not sell it? Torture me with it and not let me—”
“You don’t understand, Mr. Sclera. I’m giving it to you. I certainly don’t want it myself.”
The old man stared at her with his mouth open and his three pointy teeth showing. For a long time he couldn’t say anything. Then, for the first time in his life, a feeling of guilt began to ooze into his stomach like indigestion. “But. . . ,” he said, “But . . . Sandra . . . you can’t be serious . . . you must take something . . . I mean . . . do you know how much it’s worth?”
“More to you than to me,” Lobelia said. “I’m so glad I brought it to you. Goodbye, Mr. Sclera!” She flashed him a brilliant smile and then left in a hurry, before he could say any more.
After the visit from the eyeball fairy (as he called her), Mr. Sclera became a changed person. Maybe he was inspired by Lobelia’s generosity. Then again, with his pentagonal eyeball hidden in a secret vault, maybe he had achieved everything he had ever wanted in life, and so didn’t have any incentive to be greedy. Either way, the effect was a good one. He became positively generous to his friends and customers, and stopped trying to cheat people altogether. His store became a lively place, and friends stopped by every day to sit around and swap stories about the international world of eyeball trading.
• • • • •
Lobelia wanted to clear up any trouble she might have caused, and so a few days later she went to the police station and asked for Officer Poe. He wasn’t in.
“Do you know when he’ll be back?” she asked politely.
“Hard to say,” said the
police officer sitting at the front desk. He shook his head. “Poor Edgar. To be honest, I don’t expect to see him again.”
“Goodness! What happened to him?” Lobelia said.
“Crazy as a caterpillar,” the officer said. “Got this idea in his head that a big nasty goriller was running around the city committing crimes. And I’m not saying it isn’t true. Stranger things have happened. But Edgar, he gets all worked up about it, and has to catch this goriller, and tries everything, and hunts everywhere, and can’t find it. After a while he gets kind of funny, kind of crazy. He won’t talk about anything else but that goriller. So he decides that, to hunt down a goriller, you have to understand the mind of a goriller. You know, the psychology of the individual. So he goes and takes a trip to Africa to study gorillers and find out all about them. Well, after a while I gets a postcard from him, and he’s met a nice girl goriller, and settled down and married her. He lives in the jungle now, and says he’s quit being a police officer. I don’t know; I think he’s gone off his head. That’s what I think.”
• • • • •
Lobelia remains in close touch with the pickfloo. Every few months he adjusts her beautiful doll’s body to make it very slightly older looking, so that she can grow up normally. She doesn’t mind being a doll instead of a real girl, because nobody can tell the difference anyway, and she never catches the flu. But she does have to eat plastic hamburgers and hotdogs. She can’t digest real food. Someday she hopes to marry Toby and open up a toy store. But Toby doesn’t know about that yet.
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.