Kate DiCamillo: Flora & Ulysses

Only Alfred’s parakeet, Dolores, knew who he was and what he could do.

“The world will misunderstand him,” said Flora.

“You bet it will,” said Mrs. Tickham.

“Tootie?” shouted Mr. Tickham from the back door. “Tootie, I’m hungry!”

Tootie?

What a ridiculous name.

Flora couldn’t resist the urge to say it out loud. “Tootie,” she said. “Tootie Tickham. Listen, Tootie. Go inside. Feed your husband. Say nothing to him or to anyone else about any of this.”

“Right,” said Tootie. “Say nothing. Feed my husband. Okay, right.” She began walking slowly toward the house.

Mr. Tickham called out, “Are you done vacuuming? What about the Ulysses? Are you just going to leave it sitting there?”

“Ulysses,” whispered Flora. She felt a shiver run from the back of her head to the base of her spine. She might be a natural-born cynic, but she knew the right word when she heard it.

“Ulysses,” she said again.

She bent down and held out her hand to the squirrel.

“Come here, Ulysses,” she said.

She spoke to him.

And he understood her.

What the girl said was “Ulysses. Come here, Ulysses.”

And without thinking, he moved toward her.

“It’s okay,” she said.

And he believed her. It was astonishing. Everything was astonishing. The setting sun was illuminating each blade of grass. It was reflecting off the girl’s glasses, making a halo of light around the girl’s round head, setting the whole world on fire.

The squirrel thought, When did things become so beautiful? And if it has been this way all along, how is it that I never noticed before?

“Listen to me,” the girl said. “My name is Flora. Your name is Ulysses.”

Okay, thought the squirrel.

She put her hand on him. She picked him up. She cradled him in her left arm.

He felt nothing but happiness. Why had he always been so terrified of humans? He couldn’t imagine.

Actually, he could imagine.

There had been that time with the boy and the BB gun.

There had, truthfully, been a lot of incidents with humans (some involving BB guns, some not), and all of them had been violent, terrifying, and soul-destroying.

But this was a new life! And he was a changed squirrel.

He felt spectacular. Strong, smart, capable — and also: hungry.

He was very, very hungry.

Flora’s mother was in the kitchen. She was typing. She wrote on an old typewriter, and when she pounded the keys, the kitchen table shook and the plates on the shelves rattled and the silverware in the drawers cried out in a metallic kind of alarm.

Flora had decided that this was part of the reason her parents had divorced. Not the noise of the writing, but the writing itself. Specifically, the writing of romance.

Flora’s father had said, “I think that your mother is so in love with her books about love that she doesn’t love me anymore.”

And her mother had said, “Ha! Your father is so far off in left field that he wouldn’t recognize love if it stood up in his soup and sang.”

Flora had a hard time imagining what love would be doing standing in a bowl of soup and singing, but these were the kind of idiotic words her parents spoke. And they said the words to each other, even though they were pretending that they were talking to Flora.

It was all very annoying.

“What are you doing?” her mother said to Flora. She was sucking on a Pitzer Pop. It made her words sound rocky and sharp-edged. Her mother used to smoke and then she stopped, but she still had to have something in her mouth when she typed, so she consumed a lot of Pitzer Pops. This one was orange flavored. Flora could smell it.

“Oh, nothing,” said Flora. She glanced at the squirrel in her arms.

“Good,” said her mother. She whacked the carriage return on the typewriter without looking up. She kept typing. “Are you still standing there?” her mother said. She typed some more words. She hit the carriage return again. “I’m on a deadline here. It’s hard to concentrate with you standing over me breathing like that.”

“I could stop breathing,” said Flora.

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous,” said her mother. “Go upstairs and wash your hands. We’re going to eat soon.”

“Okay,” said Flora. She walked past her mother and into the living room, still carrying Ulysses in the crook of her arm. It didn’t seem possible, but it was true. She had smuggled a squirrel into the house. And she had done it right under her mother’s nose. Or behind her back. Or something.

In the living room, at the base of the stairs, the little shepherdess lamp was waiting, a pink-cheeked smirk plastered on her face.

Flora hated the little shepherdess.

Her mother had bought the lamp with her first royalty check from her first book, On Feathered Wings of Joy, which was the stupidest title for a book that Flora had ever heard in her life.

Her mother had sent away to London for the lamp. When it arrived, she unpacked it and plugged it in, and then she clapped her hands and said, “Oh, she’s so beautiful. Isn’t she beautiful? I love her with all my heart.”

Flora’s mother never called Flora beautiful. She never said that she loved her with all her heart. Luckily, Flora was a cynic and didn’t care whether her mother loved her or not.

“I think that I will call her Mary Ann,” her mother had said.

“Mary Ann?” said Flora. “You’re going to name a lamp?”

“Mary Ann, shepherdess to the lost,” said her mother.

“Who’s lost, exactly?” said Flora.

But her mother hadn’t bothered to answer that question.

“This,” Flora said to the squirrel, “is the little shepherdess. Her name is Mary Ann. Unfortunately, she lives here, too.”

The squirrel considered Mary Ann.

Flora narrowed her eyes and stared at the lamp.

She knew that it was ridiculous, but sometimes she felt as if Mary Ann knew something that she didn’t know, that the little shepherdess was keeping some dark and terrible secret.

“You stupid lamp,” said Flora. “Mind your own business. Mind your sheep.”

Actually, there was just one sheep, a tiny lamb curled up at Mary Ann’s pink-slippered feet. Flora always wanted to say to the little shepherdess, “If you’re such a great shepherdess, where are the rest of your sheep, huh?”

“We can just ignore her,” said Flora to Ulysses.

She turned away from the smug and glowing Mary Ann and climbed the stairs to her room, holding Ulysses gently, carefully in her arms.

He didn’t glow, but he was surprisingly warm for someone so small.

She put Ulysses down on her bed, and he looked even smaller sitting there in the bright overhead light.

He also looked pretty bald.

“Good grief,” said Flora.

The squirrel certainly didn’t look very heroic. But then, neither did the nearsighted, unassuming janitor Alfred T. Slipper.