Try Looking Ahead: Golly Gump Swallowed a Nanobot
I will be premiering TRY LOOKING AHEAD at the Gaithersburg Book Festival THIS Saturday. I will have close to 100 copies with me, but five of them will have original, handwritten stories inserted inside of them. These stories will be just for you, complete with your name written on it and everything (I’ll fill that part in if you happen to get one). The stories include things like a tortoise and a hare talking about the theory of relativity, a person who can’t count to ten without thinking of Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time,” and a guy named Golly Gump who wanted to swallow a spider to eat the fly in his stomach. I’m publishing the Golly Gump story below, just to give a little taste of what some folks will be getting (the story is an homage to Joanna Cole’s wonderful Golly Gump Swallowed a Fly). I’ll be selling the books for $5 at the show, so it’s kind of a real steal. Can’t make it? Get it on Amazon! Or enter the GoodReads giveaway, which will also have an original story inserted inside! Ok, story after the cut.
Golly Gump swallowed a fly.
He felt the fly zipping around in his stomach, buzzing and diving and stopping to crawl along the walls of his belly to eat little bits of pizza crust and drink little bits of milk. The fly was making him feel sick. Nauseous over the very idea of a fly in his stomach. Maybe the fly will have fly babies who will have more fly babies and, before long, Golly Gump’s stomach would be filled with flies to the point that they won’t even be able to fly. They’ll just all be packed in, making more fly babies until Golly Gump explodes.
“That sounds terrible!” Golly Gump exclaims. “Maybe I should swallow a spider to eat the fly?”
“Wait a minute, Golly,” Golly’s sister Gloria says, “Then your belly would be filled with spiders. That sounds much worse.”
“Well…I can eat a toad to swallow the spider,” Golly replies, pleased with himself.
“That’s not any better, your belly would be filled with toads!”
“I can swallow a cat to eat the toad!”
“Golly,” Gloria says with a sigh, “I don’t even think you can swallow a cat!”
“I’ll swallow a dog to eat the cat!”
“Golly, stop, you’re not thinking this through.”
“I’ll swallow a…a…what eats dogs?”
“GOLLY!” Gloria yells, “STOP. You’re not going to swallow a spider or a toad or a cat or a dog or whatever else. Hold on.” Gloria goes into the house for a few minutes before returning to Golly who is getting more and more sick with the fly buzzing around in his stomach. “Swallow this.”
Gloria hands Golly the tiniest of pills. “What’s this?” Golly asks.
“It’s a nanobot. Well, there’s a nanobot in the pill somewhere.”
“A what?”
“A nanobot, a robot so small that you can’t see it. The nanobot with kill the fly and then shut down. It won’t make nanobot babies.”
“You made a tiny robot? Just now?”
“Yes, I made a tiny robot. Just now.”
Golly believes his sister because she’s so much smarter than him. He swallows the nanobot. After a couple of minutes, he can no longer feel the fly. “It worked! I can’t believe you made a tiny robot that can kill flies in your belly! It even tasted good!”
Gloria smiles at her brother and heads back to the house. She hides her package of Tic Tacs in her desk draw so that Golly doesn’t stumble across the evidence. She then goes back to her biology homework, reading about the amino acids in a person’s stomach and how they destroy almost anything we swallow.
Tomorrow, she’ll convince Golly that she made a nanobot that can eat his brain if he doesn’t do the dishes.
