Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Copyright Page
For Jakob, Max, and Toby
The little general drank the last gulp of tea out of his teacup and turned off the television. He had been watching his favorite nature show, Order in the Wilderness. Today’s episode was about lemmings, little animals that look like fluffy mice and live in the Arctic. The little general had been admiring them over his tea and biscuits because the announcer had said that they would follow anything anywhere.
But it was four o’clock. Time for battle.The troops would be waiting.
The little general put his teacup and saucer in the sink, closed the biscuit tin with a sharp snap, slung his blue jacket over his arm (the jacket was really much too heavy because he had a lot of medals pinned to it and also because he was a small general, not a big one), and opened the door.
He noted with pleasure that the petunias along his pathway formed a perfect line. His prize flowerbed was also looking particularly good—the little general had made a map of the country out of moss and planted a miniature rosebush for each city. The little general smiled. Then his smile froze.
Right outside his garden gate, hanging from a fir tree, was a giant snowflake. It was three little generals tall and three little generals wide. It sparkled and shimmered and then it floated into the little general’s garden and landed on his prize flowerbed.
The little general drew his sword. “Get off my flowers!” shouted the general. In his fury, he forgot that he didn’t believe in giant snowflakes. But the snowflake seemed to understand. It floated off the flowerbed and came to rest (balancing on one of its points) in front of him. It really was quite pretty. The little bit right in front of the general’s nose (which was somewhere near the bottom half of the snowflake) looked like it was made out of sugar and glitter.
The little general looked at his watch. 4:02. He didn’t have time to deal with a giant snowflake that didn’t exist. So he did what any self-respecting general would do: he walked around the snowflake and trotted off down the hill. When he stood on his tiptoes and peered over the hedge, he could see his men in perfect formation. They always knelt when they waited for him so that he could get a view of the battlefield behind them over their heads.
“Sergeant Samantha,” barked the little general. “What are we fighting about today?” Sergeant Samantha got up from her kneeling position and saluted the general. Her cheeks were the color of the little general’s roses.
“I believe we’re fighting about the imagination again,” said Sergeant Samantha.
“The usual position I assume?” asked the general.
“Yes. We don’t believe in it. They do.” Sergeant Samantha was a tall lady. Whenever she was around the general she slouched so that she would seem shorter, and as a result she always went home from battle with a very sore neck.
Lieutenant Lyle echoed her words, “We don’t believe in it. They do.” Lieutenant Lyle had a bad habit of doing that. He was one of the worst soldiers in the Realist Army. In fact, he wasn’t a lieutenant at all—the others just called him that as a joke. Lieutenant Lyle had only once remembered to bring his sword to battle practice, and then it had had mayonnaise on it (he had used it earlier that day to cut his salami sandwich in half). The feather in his helmet was always bedraggled and no matter what he did his black boots never shone.
The little general was always having to think up new punishments for Lieutenant Lyle. Once he sentenced him to catch all the rabbits in the meadow and wash and comb them (the little general hated a dirty rabbit). Another time he made Lieutenant Lyle take an ironing class at the local college, where Lyle learned to iron perfectly, but backward. Nothing seemed to help. Lieutenant Lyle just wasn’t a good solider, and the little general’s collection of punishment Polaroids just kept getting larger.
“All right then, soldiers, get into formation #167,” shouted the little general.
The soldiers shuffled around. A few of them consulted tiny notebooks in which they had drawn diagrams of all three hundred formations. #167 was a hard one. The little general only made them do #167 when he was in a very bad mood.
Across the way from the Realists was the other army, the Dreamers, though perhaps the word army was not completely accurate. They didn’t wear uniforms. They didn’t practice formations and they were always playing games. One of their favorites was “The Bee Game,” where half the army pretended to be flowers and the other half came and tickled them, pretending to get nectar from under their armpits.
Today they seemed to be pretending to have imaginary pets. The commander was holding an imaginary toucan on his finger—he yelped whenever he imagined it had bitten him—and his second-in-command appeared to be riding an imaginary whale and shouting “Whoa!” in a most annoying manner.
Today, as usual, there would be no battle. The armies had never actually fought. The Dreamers were always too busy playing games. But the little general thought it best to be prepared. Suddenly the battlefield rang with laughter, and from the pointing and shouting it seemed that someone’s imaginary monkey had run across the field and pinched the little general’s nose. The little general looked at the empty space in front of his nose with distaste.
“Formation #259!” he shouted, as he turned away from the Dreamers.
“Formation #259!” echoed Lieutenant Lyle, giggling softly.
When the sun set two hours later, the little general dismissed the soldiers and walked back uphill with Sergeant Samantha, who kept rubbing her neck. Actually, he didn’t walk, he marched. In front of his house he took a sharp right turn (spinning on his heel) and opened the gate. The snowflake was still there. The little general studied Sergeant Samantha to see if she was looking at the snowflake, but her eyes seemed to be focused on the doorway.
(Sergeant Samantha was wishing that the little general’s house wasn’t quite as little as he was, because the little general looked very sweet in his small uniform, and she would have liked to have gone inside to have tea and biscuits with him.)
“Good night,” said the little general with a salute. He watched as she walked away. She seemed to get taller with every step.
Once Sergeant Samantha was out of sight, the little general came closer to the snowflake. He rubbed his eyes. He felt his head to see if he had a fever. But he wasn’t tired and he wasn’t sick. He put his hand out. The snowflake was cold. A few bits of ice stayed on his fingers. Then the snowflake began to rotate slowly like a wheel. The general turned very pale. What was going on? He ran into his house and shut the door.
To calm down, he made himself his favorite dinner—four sausages, two potatoes, and twenty-five peas—and sat down at the table. He was on his second sausage, his first potato, and his fifteenth pea, when he looked up. The giant snowflake was at the window. Where the moon hit it, it sent sparkles into his kitchen that then danced over the four forks and two saucepans in the dish rack. The little general went to the window and pulled the curtains shut. But he didn’t eat his third and fourth sausage, his second potato, or the remaining ten peas on his plate. Instead he left the plate on the table (highly irregular!), didn’t brush his teeth (unthinkable!), and got into bed two hours and five minutes early.
While the little general dreamt, Sergeant Samantha was at home measuring herself again. She was still six feet tall today. When she slouched she sometimes managed to be five feet and ten inches. She happened to know that the little general was only three feet and two inches tall and that was with his boots on.
She looked at herself and around the room. The floor seemed a bit slanted—was it adding an inch to her height?
And didn’t her fuzzy slippers have the slightest bit of a heel? Well, you never knew. Maybe tomorrow she would be shorter.
That night, the general, who prided himself on never dreaming, had three dreams. First he dreamt he was marching over a hill with a battalion of brave and unusually large lemmings behind him. He was singing a jaunty battle song, and the lemmings were squeaking along. But when they got over the hill, it suddenly became clear that they weren’t going into battle. Instead, the lemmings formed a circle around the little general, and he began to dance a most undignified dance that included some hopping, some pirouetting, and some snapping of his little fingers.
In the second dream, the general had two snowflakes for wings, and he swooped around the countryside putting sugar cubes in every lemming family’s sugar bowl. The lemmings looked up at him eagerly, noses twitching slightly, as he let the cubes of sugar tumble gently and precisely into their waiting sugar bowl. It seemed he had arrived just in time to save their afternoon tea.
Most shamefully of all, in the third dream the little general dreamt that he was holding a baby lemming in his arms, scratching its ears and calling it “my little Snowflake.” At six in the morning, the little general woke with a start, clutching his pillow in his arms.
“Arrrggh!” shouted the general. “What is happening to me?”
Without realizing it, he put on his Wednesday slippers instead of his Thursday slippers and went downstairs and straight to his bookshelf. With trembling hands, he opened his medical book, The Realist’s Complete Guide to Diseases of the Imagination. He turned to “S” and there it was.
Snowflake, Giant: Two reported cases. Individuals suffer from hallucinations of a snowflake that is approximately three times their size. Other symptoms include dancing and laughing. No cure exists.
The general sat down suddenly on the floor. “No cure exists.” Well, that was that. He, who had always prided himself on being a complete realist, was suffering from a rare and shameful imaginary ailment for which there was no cure. But the little general wasn’t going to give up.
“All right then,” he thought. “I’ll just ignore it and I won’t tell anyone about it, and that way no one will know the difference.”
Three streets away, past an oak and down an untidy path, lived Lieutenant Lyle, who (unlike the little general) was having his usual kind of morning. He got up and went to the mirror and began to comb his hair. Even after he had used two tins of wax pomade, it refused to lie flat on his head. “Never mind,” he said and started to skip down the stairs. As he skipped however, he remembered he wasn’t supposed to skip (he’d been ticketed for it twice by people who’d seen him through his window), so he tried to turn his skip into a dignified trot and in the process tripped over his feet and fell down the stairs. After that he decided that today was a bad day for following the rules, so he made himself a sandwich in the shape of an elephant, glued one of his gold buttons onto the center of his daisy plant’s biggest flower, and began to feel much better. While he waited for the kettle to boil, he danced around his kitchen, singing a little song:
Today marshmallows will fall from the sky,
Today I’ll eat a hat and wear a pie,
O la doodle doodle o la doodle dee,
Imagine how funny all that will be!
Meanwhile, the little general, trying very hard not to see the snowflake that was twirling about on his front lawn, drew all the curtains in his house, picked his favorite book, So You Want to Alphabetize Your Attic, from his bookshelf, sat down in his armchair, and pretended to read until lunchtime. For lunch he had two hardboiled eggs on two pieces of toast and one and a half glasses of milk. He washed the dishes, made sure that the kitchen chair was at a right angle to the table, put on his Thursday jacket, and marched outside. The snowflake was nowhere to be seen.
“Aha!” said the little general. “Just as I thought. I must have had a fever. I’m perfectly all right.” And he marched briskly and happily down the hill to the battlefield.
He was in the middle of barking out formation orders (in his good mood he was ordering the soldiers to change from formation to formation much too quickly, so they were all running around, panting) when suddenly he found himself standing in a star-shaped shadow. He looked up and there it was—the giant snowflake—hovering one inch over his head.
The little general was horrified. But then he looked at his troops and saw that no one else seemed to see the snowflake. The little general squared his shoulders. “221, 300, 102” he barked.
Lieutenant Lyle was doing a particularly bad job of getting in formation today. He crashed into another soldier twice, tripped over his shoelaces, and his shirt was definitely not ironed.
“Lieutenant Lyle!” shouted the general. “What is the matter with you?”
“What is the matter with you?” repeated the lieutenant.
“Why, there’s nothing the matter with me…” blurted out the little general defensively, before he realized that Lieutenant Lyle was simply repeating his words as usual. For a moment, the little general thought he saw Lieutenant Lyle smile, so he ordered him to stay after practice to wash and polish every leaf on the ten holly bushes by the fence.
The little general walked home without waiting for Sergeant Samantha. He was eager to get indoors.
That night, Sergeant Samantha was on her usual evening walk (during which she always looked wistfully at the light in the little window of the little general’s house) when she heard a sniffling sound from behind the holly bushes. There was Lieutenant Lyle, who was on his tenth holly bush. He had been working on this one for an hour because he kept staining the glossy green leaves with tears and having to start all over again.
“Lieutenant Lyle, what’s the matter?” asked Sergeant Samantha.
“I saw it. I’m the only one who saw it,” sobbed Lieutenant Lyle.
Sergeant Samantha suddenly looked very serious. “I think it’s time that the army met without the little general. Go and get the others. Tell them it’s important.”
Meanwhile, the little general, tucked in his bed, was having another night of scandalous dreams: he was at the top of a tower and Sergeant Samantha was climbing up a rope of lemmings to rescue him. When she grabbed the lemmings, they squeaked.
That morning there was a knock on his door. It was Sergeant Samantha. “Sir,” she said, “the troops would like to have a morning meeting if you don’t mind.”
The little general looked at her, stunned. “A morning meeting? It’s never been done!”
“I know, sir,” said Sergeant Samantha, “but they’re already on the field waiting.”
“Well, I suppose…can’t keep them waiting…but really… highly irregular…” muttered the little general as he took his Friday jacket from the coatrack and walked out the door. The giant snowflake swooped down from the sky the minute he opened the door and hovered over his head as he walked.
When Sergeant Samantha and the little general reached the battlefield, the soldiers stood up, saluted, and then they did an unimaginable thing: they took off their helmets. And even more unimaginable (never in his wildest dreams would the little general have thought this could be possible), hovering over each of their heads was a tiny snowflake.
“Oh no,” cried the little general. “I’ve infected you all! I’m so terribly, terribly sorry.” And for the first time in his life he burst into tears.
“No, not at all,” said Samantha. “Here, look, we got this from the Dreamers,” and she handed him a book, The Dreamer’s Guide to the Diseases of the Imagination. She pointed to two entries that were facing each other.
Snowflake, Giant: A rare variant of Snowflake, Small. Sufferers tend to have completely banished the imagination from their lives. These people may see a giant snowflake (proportional to their denial) in their gardens, or above their heads. Cure: large amounts of imagination.
Snowflake, Small: A common disease amongst Realists. People who try to quench their imagination will often see a small snowflake ov
er their heads. Cure: large amounts of imagination.
“It’s all right!” said Lieutenant Lyle. “It’s all right to use your imagination!” And then he sang a little song:
I believe in wishing wells, I believe in love,
I believe there are crazy things worth dreaming of,
Someday I’ll meet a swan who speaks a kind of French,
Someday I’ll meet a chair that ate a bench,
The Little General and the Giant Snowflake Page 1