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.

Fat Emily Pratt was standing at the top of the hill watching the commotion at the bottom and in fact had been playing with Scotty Peanut not twelve short minutes prior, digging a hole into the side of the mountain under a snow drift. When she saw Scotty’s red and white sled embedded in a chain link fence ten feet off the ground, she immediately started down the hill on her tube-sled, sitting in the mesh her dad had stitched into the opening, trailing a piece of cardboard behind her to use as a spoiler so she wouldn’t get airborne. That had only happened once, by the way.

Scotty Peanut took off down the hill in his sled after climbing out of an ice hole where Fat Emily Pratt had kissed him and struck the ground in angry little punches that propelled him much too quickly over the snow and into the launch chute. Rule number zero of sledding down Suicide Hill was never to get caught up in the launch chute because that’s where the big kids had carved out a rut and packed it down using water bottles that froze the ice in place. It was slicker than the kids with oily hair and cigarettes that Scotty thought would inevitably set their heads on fire if the thing ever flared up. But now he was in the tube and peaches if the thing wasn’t fast.