Noisy Outlaws, Unfriendly Blobs, and Some Other Things That Aren't As Scary

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  This book is dedicated to General Wilson, a lonely oak tree, who donated his bark, branches, and heartwood to form the pulp that made this paper so you could have a few hours of reading pleasure. No, no—don’t feel bad. He was happy to do it for you. Of course, he was very much looking forward to producing acorns next spring, but he’s sure the sacrifice was worth your entertainment. And besides, this dedication more than makes up for the loss of his trunk, branches, leaves—everything he once proudly displayed skyward. But no, he’s more than happy to be a stump now, as long as it makes you happy. He doesn’t want to bring your spirits down with his sad-sack stories. Please, enjoy the book.

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION Lemony Snicket

  SMALL COUNTRY Nick Hornby

  LARS FARF, EXCESSIVELY FEARFUL FATHER AND HUSBAND George Saunders

  MONSTER Kelly Link

  EACH SOLD SEPARATELY Jon Scieszka

  SEYMOUR’S LAST WISH Sam Swope

  GRIMBLE Clement Freud

  SPOONY-E & SPANDY-3 VS. THE PURPLE HORDES James Kochalka

  SUNBIRD Neil Gaiman

  THE ACES PHONE Jeanne DuPrau

  THE SIXTH BOROUGH Jonathan Safran Foer

  SNICKET STARTS. YOU FINISH

  INTRODUCTION

  BY LEMONY SNICKET

  Illustrated by Brett Helquist

  An introduction to a book of stories is like a warning printed on a bottle in a medicine cabinet, because few people bother to read such things, and by the time they learn that there’s something dangerous inside they may already be dead. There are plenty of very dangerous things in this book, which is bad news for the characters in the stories but good news for the reader. Without dangerous things, a story tends to be tedious, a word which here means “something you may have to read in school,” and although there are many kinds of stories in this book, some you might like and some you might not, none of them are tedious.

  It may be, however, that you are the sort of person who likes tedious stories. Perhaps you lead a life of danger, and like to unwind at the end of the day with a tedious story, the way some people like a glass of warm milk before bedtime, or perhaps you once fell in love with a tedious man or woman and you like to read tedious stories to remind you of your romantic past. If this is the case, you will not enjoy the stories in this book, but you might enjoy the remainder of this introduction. As a courtesy, I have printed a few excerpts from tedious stories, so that the tedious reader does not feel left out. If you enjoy tedious stories, you may read the following paragraphs for your tedious enoyment, and if you don’t, don’t.

  “I have an adorable announcement!” cried the King of Teddy Bear Land. “In honor of Princess Buttercup’s marriage to Prince Appletree, we will have a Teddy Bear parade throughout the Town Square, which happens to be made of candy!”

  It was another heartbreaking day for Mark, who lived with his abusive father in a run-down shack by the railroad tracks which were crawling with both poisonous and regular spiders. Coughing in pain as he eased himself into his wheelchair, he wondered how he had become addicted to various drugs, when he had only a few dirty pennies to buy them with.

  There had been talk in the village all week—something about a “revolution,” I reckon. But I was too busy workin’ all day and sleepin’ all night as an apprentice to a blacksmith, which was a very common occupation in 1776. But then one day my life changed when a man walked into the shop dressed in the appropriate clothing of the 18th century. His name was Paul Revere.

  “But if you’re a wizard,” asked Henry, “why can’t you just defeat the Shadow Lord and his army of vicious porcupines with a wave of your wand?” “That’s a good question, young Henry,” replied Thistlewing. “You’d better sit down, because I’m going to take the next nine pages to explain what wizards can and cannot do in this particular magical land.”

  No Girls Allowed. Those words rang in my ears as I raced across the soccer field, my cleats glinting in the afternoon sun which beat down on McGilly Field here in the city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where I had been living for all twelve of my years with my dad Horace and my mom Cindy, who were both veterinarians. No Girls Allowed! It was so unfair!

  “But Grandmother said never to open this small box made of shiny wood,” said Shirley. “I’m as curious as you are about these mysterious carvings, but we’d better not disobey Grandmother.”

  “You’re right,” Billy said, and the two children put the box away and never, ever opened it.

  “But how can we rescue an enchanted pony?” asked Timmy, brushing tears out of his eyes with his grubby palms. “We’re only little kids.”

  “Little kids can do anything in the whole world,” said the Dark Pink Fairy, “as long as they close their eyes.”

  “Don’t be silly!” cried the Long Division Worm. “Math is fun! Come with me and I’ll show you!”

  Ma gave me a mysterious smile and tied her apron around her waist. Then she went to the henhouse and got two eggs, which she beat in a bowl with an eggbeater until they were the color of sunshine, assuming sunshine is light yellow. Then she got a sack of flour and sifted it into the egg mixture. Then she went to the old barn and came back with a bucket of milk which she dribbled into the bowl, humming as she did so. Then she went to town and came back with a small packet of cinnamon. It made the whole house smell like a Christmas dream come true. She sprinkled the cinnamon into the bowl, and then went back into town and came back with a small packet of nutmeg. This, strangely, also smelled like a Christmas dream come true. Then she went back into town, humming all the way, and came back with a packet of baking soda which didn’t smell like anything. “Only seventy more ingredients,” she hummed to herself, as she walked back out to town.

  “You can talk!” Betsy cried. “Golly! I knew it wasn’t my imagination! I heard you with my own ears! I can’t believe it! Goodness gracious! And yet it’s true! Yippity skip! You’re a real live talking paperweight!”

  The sun rose over the half-built pyramids, and Anano the slave boy scurried out to tie his Master’s barge to the banks of the Nile, which is the biggest river in Egypt. He ran his fingers along the letters carved on the side of the barge, which were called hieroglyphics back then in case you didn’t know, and wondered if he might ever learn how to—what was the word the High Priest used? Read.

  “HELP!” screamed the King of Teddy Bear Land. “Paul Revere is hitting me with a small box made of shiny wood!”

  I’m sorry. That last excerpt might not be tedious after all.

  SMALL COUNTRY

  BY NICK HORNBY

  Illustrated by David Heatley

  I was six or seven when I found out how small our country was. I was the last one to know in my class. The teacher pinned a big map of Europe up on the wall and showed us the countries around us—France, Switzerland, Italy. And I put my hand up and said, “Where are we? Where’s Champina on the map?” And everyone, even the teacher, laughed at me.

  “You can’t see Champina on the map, Stefan,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because we’re too small.”

  “But we must be there somewhere.”

  “Of course we are. But you can’t see us,” the teacher said.

  “How can you not see a whole country on a map?” I asked her.

  I could feel my ears getting red. The other kids knew something I didn’t, I could tell.

  “Do you know why we’re called Champina?” the teacher
asked me.

  I shrugged. “No. I thought it was because we were champions of something.”

  All the other kids laughed again.

  “And what would we be champions of?” said the teacher. “No. Champ is French for field. We’re called Champina because our whole country is no bigger than a field. Champina used to be a field, until we built the village on it.”

  “You mean we’re the only village in the country?” I couldn’t believe it. Our village is tiny.

  “The other side of the stream is France. Italy is behind the fence at the back of the village shop. And Monsieur Petit’s garden is half in Champina and half in Switzerland,” the teacher said.

  You could walk across our country in less than a minute. You could do it while holding your breath, if you wanted to. You could even throw a stone across it, so long as you threw high and didn’t hit Monsieur Petit’s bedroom window.

  “Why didn’t you tell me we lived in the smallest country in the world?” I asked my mum when I got home.

  “I thought you knew,” she said.

  “How am I supposed to know?” I asked her. “If no one tells me?”

  “What difference does it make, anyway?” she said.

  “I know everyone who lives in our whole country,” I said. “There’s no one who lives in Champina who I don’t know.”

  “That’s nice, isn’t it?” my mother asked me. “It’s nice to live in a country with no strangers in it.”

  I wasn’t sure about that. I thought I might get bored of looking at the same faces if I lived in this country all my life.

  “Anyway, don’t countries have presidents and prime ministers and things?”

  “Of course,” said my mother. “We’re no different.”

  “Okay. So who’s the president of Champina?”

  “I am,” she said.

  I looked at her face to see if she was joking, but she wasn’t.

  “You’re the president of Champina? You?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I thought you knew that, too.”

  “You don’t … You don’t do anything. You just make our sandwiches and do the washing.”

  “I go to a meeting once a month in Monsieur Grimandi’s bar,” she said.

  I knew about these meetings. They still have them. All the grown-ups in the village talk about litter and mending the fences so that the cows don’t wander into the road.

  “But what about saluting soldiers?” I asked her. You have to remember that I was very young.

  “We don’t have any soldiers,” she said.

  “What about putting people in prison?”

  “We don’t have a prison,” she said.

  And we went on like that for a little while, until I understood that Champina isn’t really a country in the same way that Italy is a country, or France, or America. It doesn’t have its own stamps, or money, or television, or prisons, or soldiers, or air force, or navy. Anyone could invade us tomorrow, if they wanted to, but no one wants to. There wouldn’t be any point. No big countries need an extra field, a shop, and a café.

  But even though we didn’t have most things you’d find in normal countries, we did have our own football team.

  My dad broke his leg because of football. He wasn’t playing, though. What happened was that he was watching a game of football on TV, and the TV suddenly started flickering, and then smoke came out of it and the screen went black. I wasn’t watching. I was reading on the sofa. I hate all sports, especially football, because football is the one that people talk about the most.

  He was really annoyed that the TV was broken. He stood up and he kicked his chair.

  “What about the old one?” my mother said. “The little one? It worked perfectly well.”

  She was angry when my father bought a new TV. She said we didn’t need a big screen, but that’s because she only watches programs where people talk. She doesn’t watch sports. If you need to see a tennis ball or a football, then a small TV is no good.

  “Where is it?” my father asked grumpily.

  “It’s in the attic,” said my mother.

  He was in too much of a hurry because he didn’t want to miss any of the game. He got the ladder, climbed into the attic, and then fell when he was trying to carry the TV down. We all heard the crack. We knew straightaway that he’d broken something.

  Three days later, when he was pushing himself into the kitchen on his crutches at breakfast, he said to me, “You know what this means, don’t you?” And I pretended I didn’t, but I did. It was the first thing I thought of the moment he fell down. I couldn’t tell him that, though. He would have been upset with me.

  “What does it mean?” I asked him.

  “It means you have to play,” he said.

  I didn’t say anything.

  “You have to,” he said again.

  “I don’t,” I said. “There’s no law that says so.”

  Including my dad, there are exactly eleven men and boys in Champina who can run up and down a football pitch, and they all play for the national team. No one has ever refused, even though it’s torture. We should be playing against other villages, but because we are a country, we play against other countries. They’re not big countries—we play against San Marino, and the Vatican, and places like that—but all these places have more than eleven players to choose from, and they all beat us hollow. San Marino, for example, usually lose their games against Italy or France by nine or ten goals, but when they play Champina, they beat us thirty–nil.

  No one seems to care, though. Some people in Champina—not the people who actually play, but some of the older people—even seem to like it that way. It gets us some attention, because once or twice a year a sports journalist from another country comes to watch our team and then writes a funny piece about how bad we are. Everyone always makes the same joke when they see one of these newspaper articles. “That will put us on the map,” someone will say. But of course nothing can put us on the map.

  The truth is, though, that even people who love the game are getting sick of playing for Champina. It’s no fun being beaten like that all the time. My dad came back from the last game complaining that he hadn’t even kicked the ball. Not once, in the entire game. He said the other team had more or less kept the ball to themselves, and there was nothing he or his teammates could do about it.

  No one had ever asked me to play before, because I was too young, and because I wasn’t any good at sports anyway. And, I’ll admit it—I was a little bit fat. Not gross, just … chubby, I suppose you’d call it. I spent a lot of time reading books and playing chess, and not so much time running around like a lunatic, which is how the other kids around here behave. But now I was fourteen, and I knew that if anything happened to any of the other players, I was the next in line. And now something had happened—to my dad, of all people.

  “How many kids of your age can say they’ve played football for their country?” my dad asked.

  “It’s not really much to boast about, is it?” I said. “You’re only asking me because there’s no one else. If there was one other boy or man of the right age in the whole of Champina, you wouldn’t be asking me.”

  “Everyone plays,” said Dad. “Nobody has ever said no. It’s your duty, Stefan. Your duty as a citizen of Champina.”

  “You always have to have eleven players in a football team?” I asked him. “I mean, everybody does?”

  Dad looked up at the ceiling and rolled his eyes.

  “God help us,” he said. “Yes.”

  “Why not play with ten? Just for a few months? I’m not going to make any difference. And your leg will be better soon.”

  “I can’t play again,” he said. “I’m forty-four. I’m too old already. And it’ll be a year or so before I can run properly.” “I can’t do it, Dad,” I said. “I’ll just make an idiot of myself.” “But if you don’t, none of us will be allowed to play,” he said. “There are rules about this sort of thing. Anyway, we’d look bad. We’d be t
he country that didn’t have enough players for a football team.”

  “We’re already the country that didn’t have enough players for a football team. I’m not a player.”

  “Play as a favor to me,” he said. “To make me feel proud of you.”

  “But that’s just the thing,” I said. “If I play, you’ll be ashamed of me.”

  And then I went into my bedroom and shut the door and read a book.

  A few days later, I was at home watching TV when there was a knock at the door. Mum and Dad were in the café, having one of their meetings, but in Champina it’s safe to leave your kids at home without a babysitter, and it’s safe to answer the door. You’ll always know the person standing on the other side.

  It was Monsieur Grimandi.

  “The President wants to see you,” he said.

  My mum was still the president. No one else wanted the job, so people kept voting for her. There didn’t seem to be any rules about how long you could stay president.

  I laughed. “I’ll see the president later,” I said.

  “It’s not funny,” he said. “She wants you to come to the café. Immediately.”

  “She could have talked to me before she went. And she can talk to me when she comes home.”

  “She’d be your mother then,” Grimandi said. “This is presidential business, not family business.”

  “And what happens if I refuse?”

  “Then I will have to take you there by force. The president has given me permission to do so. She was worried that you’d be unhelpful.”

  I didn’t want to be dragged down to the café by Monsieur Grimandi, so I put my shoes on.

  All the grown-ups were in the café. My mother was sitting on her own in the middle of the room, like the teacher used to do in kindergarten when she read us a story, with everyone else arranged around her.

  “Ah,” she said. “Stefan. Take a seat.”