Which is quite possibly the weirdest sentence a son will ever hear his father say I couldn’t wait my prairie dog mother says spinning around and hunching over in her furry little body It was too exciting But Sharon my squirrel father says desperately don’t you see what this means Before my squirrel father can explain what it means we hear a terrible thundering noise The bodies of P and M now with the brains of a terrified squirrel and a baffled prairie dog come tearing down the hall They are squeaking and shrieking and looking for the nearest tree to climb And that’s when I always wake up I wake up in a cold sweat usually with a cowboy novel on my chest and a bellyache from my late night snack I’m terrified but after a few deep breaths I look around my bedroom and I realize that everything is alright My parents are not squirrels or prairie dogs Their weird scientific-inventor brains are still in their weird scientific-inventor bodies My Aunt Dorcas is still annoying and sings all the time but that’s alright I suppose Everything is normal or at least as normal as it can be here at the Baron Estate which is the name of our home The Baron Estate is located just a few miles outside of the town of Pitchfork which is in the heart of Arizona Territory Pitchfork is one of the wilder
towns in the new American frontier which I like It’s also one of the hottest which I don’t like I suppose you could say I’m sort of a heavyset kid so I don’t do very well in the heat When I wake up in the morning I like to look out the window at the quiet desert that surrounds our home and dream about the heroic gunfights that are happening over in Pitchfork There’s a legendary sheriff there by the name of Sheriff Hoyt Graham who is said to be one of the bravest men in the world He singlehandedly captured a gang of fifty armed bandits led by the dastardly bank robber Benedict Blackwood No one had ever been able to capture Benedict Blackwood before but Sheriff Hoyt Graham had made it look easy There have been hundreds of short stories and novels written about Sheriff Graham’s adventures and I’ve read each and every one of them Even though it makes me sound like a bad person there are times when I wish I was his kid instead of M and P’s At least Sheriff Graham makes sense to me On that particular morning I was feeling excited because I suddenly remembered what was happening in Pitchfork later that day Sheriff Hoyt Graham and his deputies were going to put on a show for everyone in town with wild stunts and rope and horse tricks The sheriff was also going to tell the crowd about some of his greatest adventures including the ones that haven’t been written in books yet I’d been looking forward to seeing him
for months But on that very morning when I looked out my bedroom window I did not see the quiet desert or the hills that lead to Pitchfork In fact I saw nothing but blue Blue and more blue surrounding a lot of bluish blue with bluey blueness I rubbed my eyes and pinched myself to make sure that I wasn’t still dreaming I stuck my head all the way out the window looked down and gasped I finally saw the desert It was hundreds and hundreds of feet below us The Baron Estate was floating in the sky like a hot air balloon W B I heard M call from downstairs Come here We’ve got a wonderful surprise for you I pinched myself again Nope Still awake It was just one of those times in life when real life is stranger than a talking squirrel dream
Magnus Kicked Aunt Dorcas in the Knee After recovering from the dizzying sight of the earth being several hundred feet below me I rushed out of my bedroom and made my way down the staircase When I reached the living room I found M P and Aunt Dorcas sitting together on the sofa M was comforting my aunt who was weeping hysterically P was unfolding a large blueprint of our home with a lot of extra squiggles letters and numbers written on it What’s happening I cried The house is flying No it isn’t my father said without looking up from his blueprint I went to the front door and opened it I looked down and almost threw up Our house was now so high up in the sky that I could barely see through the clouds to the ground P I’m pretty sure that we’re flying I said You’re wrong He went back to his plans making a note on the blueprint with his fountain pen Sometimes he can be a very frustrating man
