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)
In M
Dinnn spent the first few sunny days of spring walking around the empty parking lot He learned on his own how to lean and sip sweet water from trampled candy wrappers bottle caps and flowers in the flat grass near the garbage cans One morning he woke up before dawn That way he could get a head start to wherever his siblings were flying that day For the first hour or so Dinnn walked in darkness By the time he reached the road the sun was up Moving slowly on his six legs he felt the warm sun on his back Suddenly he heard his brothers and sisters coming up behind him They buzzed overhead A few hundred of them quickly passed A couple of the slower ones called down Hey weirdo Crawl back home They never slowed down to be with him and they pretended not to know him when other bugs were around His siblings were embarrassed to have a brother who walked everywhere But Dinnn didn’t mind having to walk in the dust or make his way around puddles
