Ride the Wild Drop Chariots on Fire Enter the Dragonfly Pondhawks PART 3 The Return Home AUTHOR’S NOTE ACKNOWLEDGMENTS MOSQUITO QUIZ
PART 1 Home City
The Parking Lot HE WAS BORN in a puddle at the back row of the parking lot of the Lakeside Drive-In Theater along with his four hundred brothers and sisters His name was Dinnn Dinnn Needles His mother decided to spell his name with three Ns She already had another child named Dinn with two Ns and she was tired of thinking up new names When he was four seconds old Dinnn flew away from the small egg raft he shared with his brothers and sisters and fell sideways into the water He almost drowned His mother saw the little splash he made and flew down She brushed him with her wings so he floated up to the cloud of other hatched mosquitoes hovering above the wide and dirty puddle For two long seconds Dinnn tried to stay amid his
hundreds of siblings But he was unusually skinny even for a mosquito In all the commotion he was jostled and bumped and couldn’t see where he was going Scared of falling underwater again he elbowed his way through the swarm and tumbled onto the ground rolling into the dust just beyond the edge of the puddle From that second onward Dinnn gave up trying to fly He was not good at flying he told himself So he decided to walk wherever he had to go (cid:3)
