Kate DiCamillo: Flora & Ulysses

Ulysses looked up at Flora, and then he looked down at his tail. He seemed relieved to see it. He lowered his nose and sniffed along the length of it.

“I’m hoping that you can understand me,” said Flora.

The squirrel raised his head. He stared at her.

“Wow,” said Flora. “Great, okay. I can’t understand you. And that’s a small problem. But we’ll figure out a way to communicate, okay? Nod at me if you understand what I’m saying. Like this.”

Flora nodded.

And Ulysses nodded back.

Flora’s heart leaped up high in her chest.

“I’m going to try and explain what happened to you, okay?”

Ulysses nodded his head very fast.

And again, Flora’s heart leaped up high inside of her in a hopeful and extremely uncynical kind of way. She closed her eyes. Don’t hope, she told her heart. Do not hope; instead, observe.

“Do not hope; instead, observe” was a piece of advice that appeared often in TERRIBLE THINGS CAN HAPPEN TO YOU! According to TERRIBLE THINGS!, hope sometimes got in the way of action. For instance, if you looked at your elderly aunt Edith choking on a piece of steak from the all-you-can-eat buffet and you told yourself, Man, I sure hope she’s not choking, you would waste several valuable lifesaving, Heimlich maneuver–performing seconds.

“Do not hope; instead, observe” were words that Flora, as a cynic, had found useful in the extreme. She repeated them to herself a lot.

“Okay,” said Flora. She opened her eyes. She looked at the squirrel. “What happened is that you got vacuumed. And because you got vacuumed, you might have, um, powers.”

Ulysses gave her a questioning look.

“Do you know what a superhero is?”

The squirrel continued to stare at her.

“Right,” said Flora. “Of course you don’t. A superhero is someone with special powers, and he uses those powers to fight the forces of darkness and evil. Like Alfred T. Slipper, who is also Incandesto.”

Ulysses blinked several times in a nervous kind of way.

“Look,” said Flora. She grabbed The Illuminated Adventures of the Amazing Incandesto! off her desk. She pointed at Alfred in his janitor uniform.

“See?” she said. “This is Alfred, and he is an unassuming, nearsighted, stuttering janitor who works cleaning the multifloor offices of the Paxatawket Life Insurance Company. He lives a quiet life in his studio apartment with only his parakeet, Dolores, for company.”

Ulysses looked down at the picture of Alfred and then up at Flora.

“Okay,” said Flora. “So, one day Alfred takes a tour of the Incandesto! cleaning solution factory, and he slips (Alfred T. Slipper — get it?) into a gigantic vat of Incandesto! and it changes him. And so now, when there is a great crisis, when malfeasance is apparent, Alfred turns himself into . . .” Flora flipped through the pages of the comic and stopped at the panel that showed the glowing, powerful Incandesto.

“Incandesto!” she said. “See? Alfred T. Slipper becomes a righteous pillar of light so painfully bright that the most heinous villain trembles before him and confesses!”

Flora realized that she was shouting the tiniest bit.

She looked down at Ulysses. His eyes were enormous in his small face.

Flora tried to sound calm, reasonable. She lowered her voice. “As Incandesto,” she said, “Alfred sheds light into the darkest corners of the universe. He can fly. Also, he visits the elderly. And that’s what a superhero is. And I think you might be one, too. At least, I think you have powers. So far, all we know about you is that you’re really strong.”

Ulysses nodded. He puffed out his chest.

“Flora!” her mother shouted. “Get down here. Dinner is ready.”

“But what else can you do?” said Flora to the squirrel. “And if you truly are a superhero, how will you fight evil?”

Ulysses furrowed his brow.

Flora bent down. She put her face close to his. “Think about it,” she said. “Imagine what we might be able to do.”

“Flora Belle!” her mother shouted. “I can hear you up there talking to yourself. You shouldn’t talk to yourself. People will hear you and think that you’re strange.”

“I’m not talking to myself!” Flora shouted.

“Well, then, with whom are you speaking?”

“A squirrel!”

There was a long silence from down below.

And then her mother shouted, “That’s not funny, Flora Belle. Get down here right now!”

When Flora came back upstairs after dinner, she found Ulysses curled up in a tight little ball, sleeping on her pillow. She put out her hand and touched his forehead with one finger.

His eyes twitched, but they didn’t open.

She picked up the pillow and moved it carefully to the foot of the bed. She changed into her pajamas, lay down, and imagined the words

A SUPERHERO SQUIRREL RESTED AT HER FEET, AND SO SHE WAS NOT LONELY AT ALL

emblazoned on the ceiling above her.

“That’s exactly right,” she said.

Before the divorce, before her father had moved out of the house and into an apartment, he had often sat beside her at night and read aloud to her from The Illuminated Adventures of the Amazing Incandesto! It was his favorite comic. It always cheered him up to read about Alfred T. Slipper and Dolores. Her father did an excellent parakeet imitation. “Holy bagumba!” he would say in the voice of Dolores. “Holy unanticipated occurrences!”

“Holy unanticipated occurrences!” was what Dolores would say when something truly unexpected and unbelievable was happening, which was basically all the time. Life was pretty exciting when you were Incandesto’s parakeet.

Flora sat up and looked down at the sleeping squirrel.

“Holy unanticipated occurrences!” she said.

It sounded better when her father said it.

Not that he said it these days. He didn’t say much of anything anymore. Her father had always been a sad, quiet man, but since the divorce, he had become even sadder and quieter. Which was fine with Flora. Really. Cynics don’t like a lot of chatter.

Besides, Alfred T. Slipper was a quiet man, too. For instance, when he was on his tour of the Incandesto! manufacturing facility and had fallen into the vat of Incandesto!, he hadn’t said a single word. Not even “oops.”

Words had appeared above his head, however, and Flora’s father had read those words to her so many times that she could recite them by heart:

HE IS AN UNASSUMING JANITOR. BUT HE WILL DARE TO BATTLE THE DARKNESS OF THE UNIVERSE. DO YOU DOUBT HIM? DO NOT. ALFRED T. SLIPPER WILL LIVE TO FIGHT THE FORCES OF EVIL. HE WILL BECOME KNOWN TO THE WORLD AS INCANDESTO!

Flora lay back down. If the squirrel were in a comic, she thought, what words would have appeared in the space over his head when he was sucked into the vacuum cleaner?

HE IS AN UNASSUMING SQUIRREL.

Yep.

BUT HE WILL SOON CONQUER VILLAINS OF ALL STRIPES. HE WILL DEFEND THE DEFENSELESS AND PROTECT THE WEAK.

That sounded good, too.

HE WILL BECOME KNOWN TO THE WORLD AS ULYSSES!

Holy bagumba! Anything could happen. Together, she and Ulysses could change the world. Or something.

“Do not hope; instead, observe,” Flora whispered to calm herself down. “Just observe the squirrel.”

And then she fell asleep.