Ignatius MacFarland, page 4
When I got to the trees, I turned sideways and started to push my way through them like a knife cutting through a loaf of bread. The teeth scraping on the sides of the garbage cans sounded like a hundred people were scratching their nails on a chalkboard and I got the shivers so badly I almost peed my pants. I was also sweating like a pig because it was hot inside the cans and I was working so hard to push through the trees that it felt like I was mowing twenty lawns all at once using a lawn mower that didn’t have any wheels.
I stopped and tried to catch my breath. It was so tight inside the cans that I couldn’t move my arms to wipe off my forehead, which was pouring sweat into my eyes. I felt really trapped and was trying not to freak out.
Just keep going, I told myself.
I took a deep breath and pushed on. All of a sudden, I hit something. I tried to push past but couldn’t. I pushed again and moved another couple of inches as the sides of the garbage cans squeezed me like a nutcracker. What if I die? I thought to myself. What if I push again and the cans squeeze me so hard that my heart pops out of my mouth and I croak and then hundreds of years from now when somebody finally cuts down these stupid trees they’ll find these two flattened garbage cans with my skeleton inside and say, “Huh . . . I wonder who this kid was and why he was trying to squeeze through these weird trees inside two garbage cans?” And then they’ll probably have a good laugh at my expense and toss my bones onto a garbage heap and then tell their friends at dinner that night about the idiot from a hundred years ago who got himself wedged in a bunch of trees for no apparent reason. The thought of this made me so angry that I pushed the garbage cans forward with all my might.
POP!
The next thing I knew, I was tumbling head over heels down a hill, my garbage can suit of armor rolling between the trees and banging so hard each time a corner hit the ground that I thought my brains were going to fall out of my head.
Man, am I going to be sore tonight, I thought.
9
DATS AND COGS
BAM! . . . BAM! . . . . . . . . BAM! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . BAM! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . BOOM!
That was what it sounded like inside the garbage cans when I finally slowed and then stopped rolling down the hill. My rocket, which was now more like a square pizza cutter, fell over onto its side with a loud thud. After a few moments of lying there with my head spinning, I grabbed my backpack and pulled myself out.
Nothing looked familiar. Again. Just more weird looking plants and trees. Big things that looked like fat bushes but that had purple leaves and big pointy arms sticking ten feet up in the air. Trees that were growing sideways across the ground with leaves that were about five feet wide and shaped like potato chips. Grass that was orange, with blades that looked more like tongues. And right in the middle of it all was something that looked like a big pile of dirt but that was covered with what appeared to be hundreds of little red watermelons.
I couldn’t figure it out. Was I on another planet? I had to be.
And that was when I saw the mouse ears.
The mouse ears were what we all called the two hills that were on the north edge of our town. They were really big, so big that when I was a little kid I used to call them mountains. There was always some rich guy or another coming to our town and looking at the mouse ears because he wanted to turn them into a ski resort in the winter. But then the city council would vote against it because they didn’t want tons of ski bums clogging up the streets and having parties all night. Well, according to the position of the mouse ears and the dead field behind me, my neighborhood should have been straight ahead.
But it wasn’t.
There wasn’t anything except more weird-looking plants as far as I could see.
I spent the next few hours walking through what I was certain used to be my neighborhood, but every place where I knew a house or store or building should have been no longer had a house or store or building there. Just more weird plants and trees and nothing even remotely resembling the town in which I grew up. I kept checking my cell phone but there was still no signal, only an X where it normally showed how strong the reception was. Cellular technology was clearly not going to be of any use to me here.
Now, I don’t want to make it sound like I was just walking around going, “Oh, that’s interesting. Hmm. My hometown is no longer here. What a funny thing.” I wasn’t tapping my chin thoughtfully with my finger while pondering the disappearance of everything I had ever known, talking to myself like some English guy in one of those movies about the old British colonies in India, going, “I say, that’s a bit odd, all my friends and family nowhere to be seen. I think I’ll have a spot of tea and think about this for a while.” No, I was really freaking out.
Like, if you could see a picture of me during all this, my mouth was probably hanging open so wide that a vast assortment of bugs and birds could have flown in and built several nests and laid mountains of eggs in my teeth. I don’t want to say that I started to cry at one point, because that would be kind of embarrassing. So let’s just say that I was in shock.
Thank you for your discretion.
When I got to the river that ran through what used to be the middle of town, I heard a weird noise. I turned around and saw this strange-looking dog sitting up in a tall tree. First of all, the dog had a really wide nose, like he had gotten two noses for the price of one. Next, his coat was made of really long brown fur that was striped with white lines. And finally, he was licking his paw and wiping his face with it over and over, the same way Gary’s cat always did. And the fact that the dog was sitting way up in a tree seemed a bit, well . . . odd.
As I was staring at it, the dog looked down at me for a few seconds, and then went back to licking its paws, as if I didn’t exist.
Dogs usually like me. I’m always the person who gets jumped on and has his face licked. My mom says it’s because I’m a nice person, but then my dad tells her that dogs just lick people to get the salt off them. But even with all the sweating I had just done getting those garbage cans through the trees and then walking for two hours while I dealt with the fact that everything I knew no longer existed, I apparently still wasn’t sweaty enough to motivate a weird looking dog to come out of a tree and say hello.
As I stared at the dog, I heard a really loud and deep meow. I turned around to see a cat running toward me. It wasn’t much bigger than a normal house cat, but it had ears that were really long and pointy and eyes that were way bigger than usual. I didn’t know if the cat was going to attack me or not. But it was coming so fast, all I could do was stand there.
The cat jumped against my leg and stood on its back feet, its tail wagging wildly and its tongue hanging out like a dog’s. I reached down to pet it and it started licking my hand like crazy. And then, before I even knew what was happening, the cat spotted the dog sitting up in the tree. It meowed like it wanted to kill the dog and raced over. It started jumping up and down, meowing louder and louder as the dog stood up and arched its back and began hissing at the cat.
All I could do was stand there and wonder what I’d gotten myself into when I built that rocket.
Well, you wanted to escape, I told myself.
Mission accomplished.
If only I knew what the fudge was going on. (Yes, I said “fudge.” What’s it to you?)
10
GALLONS OF PEE
I figured I should keep walking along the river, since I had learned in social studies class that all towns and cities are built where there’s water.
And so I walked. For miles.
The cat who thought it was a dog ran along beside me. It kept stopping and lifting its leg to pee on pretty much every plant we passed and, quite frankly, it was starting to make me feel like barfing. It’s not that seeing animals go to the bathroom makes me sick, but this cat seemed to let loose with about a gallon of pee every time it went. It sounded like someone was shooting a garden hose into the ground every five seconds. I kept trying to get away from the cat but as soon as I started to leave it would come tearing after me through the grass so fast you would have thought my pockets were filled with catnip or fish or something.
Up one hill, down another. Up another hill, down yet another. Hours passed. I’d never walked so much in my life. I was hungry, I was tired, and I felt completely lost. So when the cat unloaded another truckload of pee onto a bush, I suddenly lost it and yelled, “STOP PEEING ON EVERYTHING! YOU’RE MAKING ME SICK!”
The cat stopped and looked at me. Did it understand what I said? Maybe it was smarter than I thought.
“Um . . . is there a town around here?” I asked it, immediately feeling like a moron for talking to a cat.
The cat suddenly started jumping up and down, its tongue hanging so far out of its mouth that it looked like it was choking on a big pink stick of chewing gum.
“Am I going the right way?”
The cat jumped up and down again, then spun in a circle. Maybe it does understand me, I thought.
“A town?” I asked, getting excited because the cat was getting excited. “A town with people?”
The cat looked like its head was going to explode, and then it suddenly tore off into a dense wall of trees. Is the town through there? I wondered. And am I going to have to go back and put on those stupid, hot, sweaty garbage cans again?
Before I could ponder this too long, the cat burst out of the trees with a big stick in its mouth. It ran up and dropped the stick at my feet, then looked up at me to see if I would throw it.
Great. Stupid cat.
I picked up the stick and threw it over the hill as hard as I could. The cat tore after it as if it were trying to make the game-winning catch in the final inning of the Feline World Series.
After a few seconds, I heard tons of angry meowing, as if some sort of cats-who-think-they’re-dogs fight had just broken out. I ran up the hill to see what was going on and there, spreading out before me in the valley below, was a huge city. It was way bigger than any city I had ever seen and definitely bigger than any city that existed anywhere near where I lived.
I couldn’t really stare at the city too long, though, because the cat-who-thought-it-was-a-dog was in a huge fight with a bunch of other cats-who-thought-they-were-dogs because they all wanted that stupid stick I had just thrown. I suddenly got nervous that the cat who had been following me was actually going to get hurt. It’s not that I liked the cat or anything. But since it was I who had thrown the stick, I sort of felt responsible for it.
I ran down to where the cats were fighting and started yelling and clapping my hands to scare them away. “HEY! KNOCK IT OFF!” I yelled as the cats all scattered. I picked up my cat to see if it was hurt, which proved to be a bad idea because it immediately peed all down the front of my shirt.
I don’t think it meant to do it, because it then started licking my face like crazy, like it was saying thank you or something. And fortunately it seemed like cat pee in this weird place didn’t really stink the way it usually does in my grandma’s house. But the fact of the matter was I now had a shirt that was soaked with cat pee.
This has not been a good day so far, I thought. But at least I found a city with people in it who can tell me what’s going on.
Well, I was sorta right.
11
WELCOME TO LESTERVILLE. NOW GO HOME.
The minute the cat and I came down toward the city, I could tell things were not going to get any more normal.
The first thing that happened was I almost killed myself. I was walking and looked back to see if the cat was still following me, and I fell right into a hole. I’m not talking about a small hole, either. I mean a big hole, about three feet wide. Fortunately, there was some sort of ancient-looking door about two feet down inside it that kept me from going into the bowels of the earth. I crawled out and noticed that there were tons of holes all over the place. From the way the plants and trees had grown around them, they looked like they had been there forever.
The cat and I walked through the neighborhood of holes and eventually came to the actual city. “Welcome to Lesterville!” a big sign read.
At first, the buildings were very old and odd. They all looked like different-sized igloos that were made out of weathered clay and stone, with some kind of see-through material covering the windows. There were colorful heavy cloth awnings sticking out over the windows and some of the buildings had big windmills on top of them. The doors and windows on the buildings were round, too, and so were the ancient-looking decorations that were painted on the sides of everything.
The streets also seemed to be based on circles, since they all curved around, making it hard to look very far down any road without seeing more buildings. It was a bit nerve-racking because I couldn’t see if anyone was heading down a street toward me. For some reason, though, everything seemed to be deserted. The only sound I could hear was the breeze making the awnings flap and the windmills squeak as they turned. Lesterville is a pretty boring old place, I thought.
The cat and I kept walking through the winding streets, seeing every size and style of round building that Lesterville had to offer. Some were really big, and some were so small, only one person could fit inside at a time. I started to wonder if maybe the small ones were like little bathrooms. And the more I thought about bathrooms, the more I had to go to the bathroom. I mean, like, really bad.
I thought about maybe just finding an alley and sneaking into it and doing a number one without a toilet, but there were no alleys and I didn’t want to just go in the street. But pretty soon, I knew I was either going to have to go to the bathroom in a place where I might be seen, or go in my pants. And since my shirt was already covered with cat pee, the thought of then having my pants soaked with my own pee was not really an attractive option.
And that was when I saw it.
A coffee shop!
I almost fainted. It was a Starbucks, and yet it wasn’t a Starbucks. It was called Artbucks, even though it had the exact same sign and logo that a Starbucks has. It even looked like a Starbucks, except that it was . . . well . . . really terrible.
I don’t mean it was dirty or scary or run-down. It looked really new. But it also looked like somebody who didn’t know how to build a Starbucks had built it. It wasn’t round like all the other buildings I had seen so far. It was square, just like the Starbucks in my hometown. It had the same Starbucks windows and doors and tables and chairs, but it looked like the people who built it didn’t have a clue what they were doing. The windows and doors were all crooked, the tables looked really wobbly, and the legs on the chairs were all different lengths. The writing on the sign was uneven, and the logo looked like a five-year-old had drawn it.
Still, the place looked like paradise to me, because I knew that there had to be a bathroom inside. I started to head toward it but realized that the cat had stopped. Not that I needed a cat with me to take a number one, but since it had followed me everywhere else so far, it made me nervous that it was just sitting there.
“Are you coming or not?” I asked it.
The cat meowed and then took off running down the street.
Either the cat was afraid of coffee or else it knew something I didn’t. However, since it had the luxury of being able to pee anywhere it pleased and I didn’t, I ran to the Artbucks and went in.
And that’s when things got reeeeeeeeeeeally weird.
How weird?
Well, let’s just say the second I was in, I completely forgot that I had to go to the bathroom, because there in front of me was the weirdest scene I had ever witnessed in my life.
The place was packed. But it wasn’t packed with people. It was filled with the strangest assortment of creatures I had ever laid eyes on in my life.
Closest to me, there were two creatures that kind of looked like huge six-foot-tall moles with flippers sticking out of their chests and backs. They had two really thick legs that looked like hairy logs, and instead of their legs being side by side like normal legs are, they were front and back. So when they walked their front leg would extend out and their back leg would push off. And this meant that they walked really slowly, like their bodies had never been intended to move this way in the first place.
Their flippers each had a big super sharp-looking claw on the end, and their faces, which were on top of their heads, had long black noses that stuck straight into the air. They didn’t have any eyes that I could see, and their bodies were covered with thick, tough-looking brown hair.
Well, that is, the parts of their bodies that weren’t covered by their clothes.
As weird as it sounds, they were wearing big polo shirts and flowery Hawaiian shorts, with what I think were supposed to be flip-flops on their feet. However, since they didn’t really have toes, the flip-flops were barely hanging on to the little claws around each foot. So every time they’d step forward, they’d have to bring their foot back and retrieve their flip-flop, since it kept falling off.
One of them was trying to carry a cup of coffee it had just bought, but its flippers weren’t able to come together enough to get a good grip on it. And so it was having a really hard time keeping the cup steady, which meant that coffee was spilling all down the front of its shirt as it tried to walk. The other mole creature grabbed its cup off the counter, but its claw went through the side of the cup and hot coffee squirted out all over the floor. They were like some otherworldly comedy team, although I don’t think either of them found the situation funny.
