Scotty Peanut

Scotty Peanut was standing on his front porch when he heard a far-away voice say, “Don’t go sledding today.” But he did anyway.

Everyone was so concerned with what happened to little Scotty that no one stopped to wonder whether the poor boy was even dead or not. Sure, a man had knelt by his side and put his fat fingers around a thin wrist and declared, “This boy is dead!” and the crowd did hem and haw, which probably wasn’t the correct reaction for them, but eventually the point came across that more or less everybody was upset at the recent turn of events.

In actuality, which is that little place just beyond fantasy where the road to insanity crumbles off into the dull sidewalk of normalcy, Scotty was very much alive and breathing, just a little, but breathing just the same. Nobody noticed except Fat Emily Pratt, who was as skinny as a toothpick both in length and width. Indeed she only came knee-high to an ice cube; a real one, not those half moon types you see in modern ice boxes these days. No, these were the regular cubes, actual cubes! And colder than the half moons. Everything was better back then altogether.