Twelve Impossible Things Before Breakfast

  Two feet dry—

  Say good-bye.

  Well, trolls are actually better at stories than poems. You want good poetry, you have to hang out with boggles or sprites.

  Of course the whole thing is a secret and I only tell you this because there are no longer many trolls about. It is a shame, actually. M. Darwin wrote of this disappearing phenomenon, and I, for one, believe it.

  So trolls must wait by a river’s bank for some creature to cross if they want to eat. That’s why trolls and bridges have such an affinity. A bridge means a crossing place, and we are much more stable than fords. Trolls, while not having particularly scientific minds, long ago figured this much out.

  So there we were, Troll and I, he dining on M. de Gruff’s billy goats, large and small and in-between. And after each meal, after he had a round of belching and farting—which trolls consider good form—he favored me with a troll tale.

  He told me about trolls in love and trolls at war—which to the untutored ear can sound much the same.

  He told me a tale about a troll who lived in the waters near Nôtre-Dame, eating fish and fishermen. But that troll conceived an unlikely passion for the cathedral. He desired to talk to the gargoyles, whom he thought must be cousins of his. He began to waste away with longing for just a single word with his stone kin. So he pulled himself up out of the water and started across the land. After three steps he died, of course. The Parisians used his bones for soup and built a monument where he fell. But he died happy—or so Troll said.

  He told me about a troll who had been interviewed by a journalist, and when I asked what paper the piece had appeared in, he giggled, an unlikely sound coming from such a large source. The silly troll, he said, had eaten the man before he wrote the story, not after. We had a good laugh about that!

  And then he told me about his mother, about the good times before his father had given him a shove. We cried together. After all, that’s what friends are for.

  He was so delighted with my company, he tried to compose a troll song to the beauty of my span, but he got lost in rhymes about tans/fans/bans and never did finish it. But he was a good teller of tales.

  And I am the consummate listener.

  I must admit that—except for the day Mme. d’Aulnoy and Mme. le Prince du Beaumont traded stories sitting on the banks of my stream, their petit picnic spread out on a blanket—I was never happier.

  But the sad fact is that trolls are not very smart. Good storytellers, yes. Pleasant companions, quite. Undemanding friends, absolutely. But they lack upstairs what they have elsewhere. Breadth. They are—alas—really quite stupid. They do not have the slightest understanding of diplomatic dissembling. They do not know how to prevaricate—or to put it more succinctly, they cannot tell a he. Even with my coaching, Troll would not move downstream a ways and take goats from different parts of the river just to fool them.

  “I like it here with you,” he said “Besides, this is my place,”

  And not being a troll myself, I couldn’t shove him off.

  So the day came when the goats stopped crossing the bridge because it had become too notably dangerous. For a month not a single one went over my span. And while I was delighted to be rid of that constant, demned trit-trot, trit-trot, it worried me to see my friend grow so thin and wan. It got so one could almost read a book through him. He had not even the energy to tell stories.

  So I did what I could. Bridges are not a flighty tribe. We are solid and stolid. We stay put. But we have our wiles for all that. One does not arch over a river for so many years without learning something.

  I waited until one rather silly young goat strayed a bit too close to my embankments and I called to him.

  “Come here, little goat.”

  He looked about cautiously. “Are you a troll?”

  “A troll? Do I look like a troll?”

  “Well, actually you look like a bridge.”

  “And have you ever seen a troll?”

  He shook his little nubbined head.

  “But you have seen a bridge?”

  He giggled. I knew then that I had him.

  “So if you have never seen a troll, how do you know they exist?”

  "My mother warned me about them.”

  I allowed myself a deprecating little laugh. "Mothers! I bet she also warned you about eating tins and paper products and staying out too late at night.”

  He nodded.

  “I am just a bridge,” I said. “Immobile and proper. And of course, on my other side is...”

  “A green meadow?” he asked.

  “Greener than any you have ever seen,” I said.

  That did it. He upped and started over. Trit-trot, trit-trot.

  Of course, halfway there, Troll came up and grabbed the fool off and had his first good dinner in a month. Well, good dinner is perhaps an exaggeration. It was only a very little goat. Practically a kid.

  If only he had been content with the one. But the next goat I snared for him with my promise of greener pastures was middle sized.

  “Let this one go over,” I whispered to Troll, “and you will soon have the entire herd wanting to follow.” Even though I mentally cringed at the idea of so many trits and so many trots, I did not want my friend to die.

  But that smacked too much of planning, something trolls have no sense about. And lying, which they know nothing of at all.

  “Hungry now!” Troll complained, and ate the middle-sized de Gruff goat right then and there.

  So when the big goat followed, with horns as sharp as gaffing hooks and a sly twist of mind, it is no wonder that my dear Troll was taken in.

  It was not the fall that killed him, of course. It was when the big billy goat of M. de Gruff lifted him out of the water. Troll was dead long before he hit the ground.

  My own fault then, you will say, that I must endure this trit-trot, trit-trot all day long. I do not, myself, accept blame. Life is like a river: forever changing. Sometimes it is at flood stage, and sometimes not.

  But if you should hear of another troll who is looking for a home, tell him there is a Bridge of Slight Consequence placed between two green meadows not far from Avignon. Fish abound in the water, and goats gambol on the hills. And if he is not too greedy a troll, he can make a good living here. Besides, he will have an excellent listener to his tales. What troll could resist that?

  Brandon and the Aliens

  BRANDON SAW THE FIRST ALIEN on Monday, and he stopped for a quick look, but he didn’t tell a soul what he saw. Not at first. He didn’t think anyone would believe him. He hardly believed it himself.

  He had been bicycling home from Freddy’s house and he was late as usual, so he didn’t mean to stop at all. But when he caught a glimpse of the alien squatting partway behind a rhododendron bush next to the bike path, he had to look. Who wouldn’t?

  The alien was gray and rubber-legged, without a visible mouth, and about five feet tall, which was taller than Freddy. It was eating a live robin. Eating it, but not in any ordinary way. And there were these strange juices—as gray as the alien but lumpy, like an old moldy stew someone had forgotten to dean out of the pot—sloshing around its feet. It was pretty disgusting, even to Brandon, and he was the one in his family who liked the movies With the grossest special effects.

  He could smell the alien from where he was, and it didn’t make him want to get any closer. like burnt eggs combined with unwashed hockey socks. He blinked—and the alien was gone. All it left behind were a few robin feathers—and that smell.

  Brandon saw the second alien on Tuesday, and he didn’t tell about that one, either, even though this one was green and was finishing off a squirrel. Brandon figured no one would actually believe him about the aliens, anyway. He had a reputation, after all, and it wasn’t exactly for telling the truth. His father said he stretched things too often and his mother said he had only a nodding acquaintance with reality. His teacher had once called him a name that rhymed with “fire,” and not in a joking way
, either.

  On Wednesday he saw the third alien—a red one—eating a raccoon. By then it was really too late to tell because by Wednesday, everyone knew about them. And the aliens were moving up and down the food chain faster than anyone could imagine, eating all kinds of animals, from birds to squirrels to rabbits to raccoons to cats and dogs.

  The way everyone got to know about the aliens was that Old Lady Montague’s barn cats disappeared in an awful gray slosh while she watched from her kitchen window. She dialed 911 immediately, plaguing the police with stories about three Martians landing. Of course, she’d done that before, so they didn’t really believe her right away. But then Colonel Brighton’s pit bull, the one that had bitten three kids and had to wear a muzzle, was slurped up while the colonel and a neighbor looked on. So this time the police had to listen. However, by the time the police arrived, all that was left of the dog were a couple of toenails, its heavy chain, the muzzle, and that awful smell.

  Hard Copy sent a reporter to cover the invasion, if you can call three aliens an invasion; which of course the reporter did, though only those three—the gray, the green, and the red—were ever seen. Brandon’s science teacher was interviewed, and Captain Covey of the state police was, too. Even the mayor said a few words, because it was an election year, though he was cut off in midsentence by a commercial. But really, all they managed was “We haven’t a due.” A conservative study group blamed satanists, the D&D after-school gaming society, and proponents of the ERA, in that order. Everybody was hoping for Oprah or Rikki Lake, and one group of mothers from a nurs ery play group actually put a call in to Montel. All they got was Hard Copy. Hard Copy had no pictures, except of the townspeople talking, because the three creatures didn’t seem to stay in any one place long enough, unless you counted the smell they left behind. No one could figure out where they’d be next, and you can’t videotape an odor.

  “The reporter should have interviewed me. I could have told him plenty,” Brandon complained to Freddy over the phone. “After all, I saw the aliens first, up close and personal. When they were still working on just the small stuff.” But Freddy was mad at him for not having said anything on Monday, so Freddy wasn’t quite as sympathetic as he could have been.

  Brandon knew the grown-ups were really getting scared when Dad drove him and his sister to school, then picked them up after school and drove them home again. He showed them how to use the pellet gun, the fire extinguisher, and the pepper spray. Mom canceled their piano lessons, Brandon’s hockey practice, Kathy’s ballet class, and the paper. Well, she didn’t exactly cancel the paper. But the paperboy refused to deliver any more.

  In effect, the entire family was grounded.

  Heck—the entire town was grounded.

  “And all just because of three hungry aliens,” Brandon complained to Freddy’s answering machine. Freddy and his family weren’t answering in person. They had gone for a long visit to Freddy’s grandmother, who lived in Miami. They weren’t coming back till the aliens were gone. “At least Miami’s aliens are human,” the machine said with Freddy’s stepdad’s voice.

  By now the aliens had moved on to horses. And cows. CNN came to town and reported that, so it had to be true. But no one knew why the aliens were there, except as a bold new venture in eating out. Going where no aliens had gone before. That kind of stuff. And no one had gotten close enough yet to deal with them directly, since they just ate and ran, leaving behind only their signature odor as a kind of calling card.

  So the sheriff suggested everyone in town move into shelters until the invasion was over. “Until they move to Greener Pastures,” is what Sheriff Cooper actually said. Greener Pastures was a town in the next county. It was an old joke, only nobody was laughing.

  No one could figure out how the aliens went from one place to another, either. For example, one minute they would all be at the town dump, digesting seagulls; the next in the backyard of Dr. Foster’s kennels, munching on guinea pigs and poodles. Each time the state police arrived, the aliens were already gone somewhere else, eating their way through a herd of Holsteins or an entire Morgan horse farm. In a rural county like ours, the police couldn’t possibly stake out all of the animals. And everyone who had been near the aliens was too frightened to describe them accurately, except for the smell. And of course now that they had been seen, everyone knew they were aliens. The sheriff called for the National Guard.

  One farmer had tried unloading a shotgun into the green alien from about thirty paces when it ate his goat herd. The shot bounced off the alien’s body, but the fanner got the alien’s attention, all right, which was not exactly what he was going for. When the Guard got there, he was in his car, the doors locked tight, babbling into his CB radio, calling for a stealth bornber and otherwise making no sense whatever. There was an odd slime on the outside door handle of the car and the burnt egg-hockey socks smell was everywhere. Five biologists came from Atlanta and said the slime was probably some kind of stomach add, though they would have to do some tests to be certain. They set up a lab at the university. Of course no one was sure the aliens even had stomachs "as we know them,” some ET specialist said. The aliens sure didn’t have discernible mouths. Or at least they didn’t have mouths where mouths were supposed to be; this much Brandon knew.

  But still no one could predict where the aliens were going to be, only report where they had been. They jaunted from animal to animal like kids at a wedding buffet. Even the scientists were baffled.

  Brandon had an idea, though, about where the aliens might be found, though his father absolutely refused to believe him or let him call the authorities. When Brandon suggested that having seen the aliens three separate times, he was the town expert on them, his dad gave him the Look. The Look usually preceded the Lecture on "Making Things Up” which is what his father said instead of the other l-word. Brandon backed down at once. After the Look and die Lecture, he was usually sent to bed early. That was not part of his plan.

  But now Brandon knew that he would have to go it alone, without any grown-up help.

  “Me, too,” Kathy pleaded.

  “You’re only eight,” Brandon answered. “I’m eleven.”

  “Not till Thursday,” Kathy said.

  That settled it, of course. There’s nothing like a kid sister to make a boy do something he has hoped to be talked out of.

  “By then the aliens will be long gone,” Brandon promised her. And he meant it. Or at least he hoped he meant it.

  “At least tell me where the aliens are going to be,” Kathy begged.

  “On the bike path,” Brandon said at last. He had to tell someone, and Freddy was still in Miami.

  “Why the bike path?” Kathy asked.

  “Because it’s the only place in town they’ve been spotted three separate times.”

  “So?” Little sisters can be a hard sell.

  “Maybe that’s where the Mother Ship is.”

  “What’s a Mother Ship?”

  He sighed. “The place where all those mothers come from,” he said in a grumbling voice.

  “How do you know they’re mothers? Maybe one of them is a father Or a baby.”

  He turned away. “I’m going to kill Freddy for leaving,” he muttered as he pulled on his goalie’s gear. As usual, the shin pads gave him a moment’s worth of trouble. Then he straightened up and got into the rest. If any aliens tried to eat him, they’d need some pretty strong teeth. He tapped the face mask with his gloves. Riding his bike was going to be hard, especially wearing a cup and skates. And it was hard seeing to the side with the mask. But his gear was almost as good as a suit of armor—and about as expensive! He’d taken many a blade to the shin in practice and in games and hardly felt a thing. Just a bit of bruising. He doubted any alien could eat him through all that leather and plastic. After all, they had not eaten the muzzle, the dogs’ tags, the horses’ halters, or the reins.

  “Shouldn’t you ask Dad if you can go out? Especially in your gear?” Kathy asked.

/>   “Don't...” Brandon said, going over to her and thumping the top of her head with his glove, “even think about telling anyone what I am doing.”

  “Not even Mom?”

  “Especially not Mom,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Because ... well, because she’ll faint.”

  “I’ve never seen her faint. Not even when I cut my finger and there was blood everywhere and Dad had to sit down.”

  “Well, you’ll see her faint if you tell her about this. It’s a secret. Between you and me.”

  “Like the secrets you have with Freddy?” she asked.

  "Only better.”

  She smiled. “Only better,” she said.

  By this he knew she would never tell. She had always been jealous of his secrets with Freddy, which was just as it should be. She was three years younger than he was, after all. He and Freddy were eleven. Almost.

  Actually, riding the bike wasn’t as difficult as Brandon had feared. The hockey stick across the handlebars was awkward, but he could manage it. He couldn’t go very fast, but he wasn’t in that much of a hurry. In fact, the farther along he got, the slower he went, and that had nothing to do with either the hockey stick or the skates. To be honest—and though he wasn’t always truthful with his parents or his sister or his teacher, he was always honest with himself—he was scared.

  Not a little scared.

  A lot scared.

  After all, these aliens were eating horses! And cows! And they had polished off Colonel Brighton’s awful pit bull without so much as a burp. Of course, it had been muzzled. But still...

  With each street, Brandon’s stomach shrank with terror, until by the time he got to the bike path that led to Freddy’s house, there was nothing left in his belly but a small hard rock. Still he pedaled on. He was afraid of the aliens but he was even more afraid that if he turned back now Kathy would tell all her friends at Hawley Elementary that he was scared. So even if he were alive at the end of this, he might as well be dead, with eight-year-old girls laughing at him.