Page 23 - Jeremiah Lollipop
P. 23
concrete doorway. He looked up at it, and saw the stars behind it. He had
never been this close to the house and for a moment he felt like he was
about to enter a museum, or a mausoleum. He half expected a man in a
hooded dressing gown to come out of the shadows.
“Jeremy!”
He groaned as he heard his mother calling to him.
“She would want me now!” he grumbled, as he walked back home, “I
was just about to have a brilliant, amazing, extraordinary adventure!
Who invented mothers anyway?!”
He came towards her from the side, so it looked like he had been
walking along the road, and his mother never suspected a thing.
“Dishes.” She said.
It sounded like a death sentence.
He went to the kitchen and started into the enormous pile. Where did
all these dishes come from, he wondered. Was there a rugby team
secretly hiding in his house?
As he scrubbed and washed he thought about a story he had heard in
Mrs. MacCreadle’s class. It was the one about the wind and the sun, and
how they had had a bet to see who could get a man to take his coat off.
In the story, the wind had tried to blow the coat off, but this made the
man hug it more tightly to himself. The sun had won the competition by
gently warming the man, till he gladly shed his coat. Jeremiah had
another ending. He imagined he was the wind.
