Mark Dunn - The Age Altertron

Sometimes Jackie replaced the milk that the milkman left on the porch with milk bottles filled with soapy water. He was always careful to cover his tracks and pretended never to know anything when it was time to get to the bottom of something bad that he had caused. Once he slipped away from school and disguised his voice and called Principal Kelsey on a pay phone to tell him that he had better hurry home because his wife had left the faucet running in her bathtub before she left the house and there was a cascade of water coming out of his upstairs bathroom window. The absentminded principal was halfway home before he realized that there was no upstairs floor to his house.

And that he did not even have a wife.

But Jackie Stovall reserved his most illustrious acts of mischief for Rodney and Wayne, because he was envious of the boys and all the good things they had done for the town through their work with Professor Johnson. Sometimes it would be a little thing like replacing the boys’ bologna sandwiches with mud sandwiches. But sometimes Jackie’s stunts were of a far more serious nature — like the time he put itch powder in the boys’ costumes when they played Pilgrims in the school Thanksgiving pageant. Several people in the audience had watched the twins jumping and wriggling around on the stage and had pointed at them and laughed in a way that Miss Lyttle (who had written the Thanksgiving pageant herself) had not intended. One woman had said in a loud voice, “Those two Pilgrim men must have to go to the bathroom! Take those Pilgrim men to the bathroom, Chief Wahunsunacock!”

All went well for so many days that the citizens of Pitcherville began to wonder if the calamities had stopped altogether. “Wouldn’t that be marvelous!” exclaimed Aunt Mildred, who was working late in her kitchen to make cinnamon fudge for Professor Johnson. (Aunt Mildred, you see, was quite fond of the bachelor professor and he liked her too, during those occasional moments when he could think of something other than his work.)

Then it happened: it was early in October when the mornings had gotten a little cooler and the leaves on the trees were just starting to show a little color that was not green.

Rodney woke, as he usually did, without opening his eyes, and knew that this was going to be one of those days. How did he know this? Because his arms and legs felt funny. They felt somehow smaller than usual. How could such a thing be? he asked himself, and do I dare to open my eyes to find out? Not only did his arms and legs feel funny, but his pajamas felt several sizes larger than they did when he went to bed. And where was his pillow? He reached about his head and could not feel it.

This is terrible, Rodney thought. I have been shrunk to a miniature size! Rodney had wondered when this might happen. Only a few weeks before, he and Wayne had sat down and made a list of all the different bad things that had yet to happen to the town of Pitcherville, and Rodney, remembering the problems of Alice in Wonderland, added to the list the possibility of everyone in the town being made very tiny. “And now it’s happened!” he said aloud, his eyes still squeezed tight.

“Now what’s happened?” Rodney had never heard this voice before — it was very high and very squeaky. And yet there was something a little familiar about it.

“Open your eyes, fraidy cat!” said the voice, now taunting him. And this is what Rodney did. He opened his eyes and glanced in the direction of the voice — in the direction of his brother’s bed— and there, sitting up against the wooden headboard that had been painted with a long wagon train, was a chubby baby of somewhere between one year and two years of age (Rodney was not good at telling the age of babies and toddlers since he didn’t spend much time around them). The baby looked very much like Wayne had looked when he was very young, for it had taken at least two years for Rodney to gain some weight and Wayne to lose some weight and the two to look more like twins. This is the way it often is with identical twins: one is born bigger than the other, and it takes a while before they grow into their identical-ness.

The baby looked quite comfortable and casual sitting against

the headboard. But he did not look entirely happy. “Will you get a load of this? I’m a baby!” he said in a not-very-happy voice. “And you’re a baby too. And I would have woken you up sooner but you were sleeping so peacefully. You were sleeping like a baby.”

Rodney stretched out his little arms and stretched out his little legs and knew now for certain that he was a baby too.

“Has everybody in Pitcherville been turned into babies?” asked Rodney in his own high and squeaky voice.

Baby Wayne shook his baby head. “I don’t think so. I heard Aunt Mildred a little earlier singing in the bathroom. I’m pretty sure she wasn’t singing in a baby voice.”

“But that doesn’t make any sense!” said Rodney. “Usually, when a bad thing happens to the town, it happens to everybody equally.”

At just that moment the boys could hear the bathroom door open.

“Now we’ll find out!” said Wayne. “AUNT MILDRED! COME IN HERE!”

A moment later Aunt Mildred stepped into the room. She had a turban on her head made out of a bath towel. There was something very different about her that the boys could not put their finger on (besides the fact that she wore a towel turban — something they never remembered her doing before).

“I wondered when you were going to wake up,” said Aunt Mildred cheerily. “You were both sleeping so peacefully. You were sleeping just like babies.”

“Because we are babies. Look at us,” said Wayne. “And why aren’t you a baby?”

Aunt Mildred shrugged. She had a smile on her face that did not go away.

“Why are you smiling?” asked Wayne testily. “Are you enjoying the fact that your great-nephews have been turned into babies?”

“I wasn’t enjoying that at all! I was merely taking momentary pleasure in the fact that when I looked at myself in the mirror this morning, it seemed as if I had grown at least ten years younger!”

Rodney nodded. It was making perfect sense to him now. “Aunt Mildred,” he said, “how old would you say Wayne and I look right now?”

“Well, if I can remember back to when you actually were babies, I would say you look as if you’re about eighteen months old.”

Rodney calculated aloud: “Wayne and I are around eighteen months old. Yesterday Wayne and I were thirteen years old and two months. That means that we have had a little over eleven-and-ahalf years chopped off our physical ages.”

“Oh don’t say ‘chopped,’ dear. Say ‘trimmed.’ It’s a much nicer word.” Aunt Mildred could not help herself: she giggled. “And what an even more pleasant surprise for me ! I’m not just ten years younger! I’m eleven-and-a-half years younger! Let me see. Oh goodness! I was sixty-five and now I’m fifty-three. And what’s more, I don’t look a day over forty-nine. Please note how soft and supple my skin looks now!”

Aunt Mildred pinched her cheeks so hard that they turned red.

Wayne’s face now took on a pout. He looked like a baby who had just done a little business in his diapers. “Don’t you even care that Rodney and I are now helpless infants?”

“Of course I care, dear. I care very much. But I’m not sure how helpless you are. Let’s see if you can walk so I won’t have to carry you around. But first, let’s get you out of these giant-sized pajamas so you won’t stumble.” Aunt Mildred went to Rodney’s bed and helped him out of his pajamas. He tried very hard with his little arms to be of some assistance but his tiny hands would not do what his brain wanted them to do. After Aunt Mildred had removed the top and bottom halves of his pajamas, Wayne started to laugh. It was very much a baby’s laugh, like a little baby giggle, but there was definite thirteen-year-old mirth involved. Mirth at Rodney’s expense.