Fleabrain Loves Franny Read Online Free PDF Page A

Alf’s tail, tomorrow after your evening treatment, around 5:30 p.m.?
    Yours,
    Fleabrain

Other Things Fleabrain Knew
    F leabrain knew—he knew with all his heart, with every cell of his minute, ugly body—that he and she were Kindred Spirits. Spirits in Kind.
    (“Ugly” was a relative term. His mama, whom he resembled, would have found him handsome and dapper. But if he were human-size, he’d be a monster.)
    In fact …
    â€¦ he knew he loved Franny.
    And, as the English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, born March 6, 1806, died June 29, 1861, once wrote in her moving poem “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways … ,” his own microscopic brain enjoyed counting the ways that he, Fleabrain, loved Franny:
    1. Both were attached to the same dog.
    2. Both of their names began with
F
.
    3. Both felt small. Emphasis:
felt
.
    4. Both felt invisible. Emphasis:
felt
.
    5. Both were lonely.
    6. Both had feelings about Charlotte. True, not the same feelings. (Yes, he was bitterly jealous of Franny’s adoration of that storybook arachnid. Certainly not proud of that, he had to admit.)
    7. But, oh, how they both loved books! He himself was more than halfway through the texts of that lofty hallway bookcase, having absorbed treatises on geometry, philosophy, first aid, calculus, European history, and more. He was now gobbling up the foreign-language shelves. Spanish conversation. The French essayists. The German poets and philosophers. How clever of humans to communicate in a variety of languages. Nonhumans had only the Language of Instinct. Reliable, yet often limiting.
    Bug it! He, Fleabrain, with his ever-reliable instincts, his marvelous, brilliant brain, and his loving heart, knew that he and Franny could be the very, very best of friends. She didn’t really need any others.
    He could hardly wait to meet in person (so to speak)!

Believing
    F ranny believed.
    She believed the Earth was wondrous, as was its plant-making Sun and tide-making Moon. She also believed there was life on other spinning planets, somewhere in the dark mystery of space. An infinity of wondrousness.
    Teresa believed in God, who looked like a combination of Santa and her kindly great-uncle Donald, she said. But sometimes Teresa imagined God resembling Uncle Donald’s wife, Marie, also kindly, who made heavenly snickerdoodles.
    Min believed God looked like Rabbi Hailperin, in a stylish suit and tie under his prayer shawl. Of course, she was sophisticated enough to know otherwise, she said, but that’s what she imagined during services.
    Quiet Katy, the new girl, hardly ever said anything about anything. But one day she blurted out that she didn’t really know for sure what she thought about God. Maybe God was just a good feeling and didn’t look like anyone at all.
    Walter Walter believed in aliens. Most of them had gigantic eyes and blinking spokes for ears. They always commanded magnificent flying machines. He was positive they were out there, but Franny wasn’t so sure.
    In
Charlotte’s Web
, Fern had fervently believed in Charlotte. In
Peter Pan
, Wendy had believed in Tinker Bell and Never Never Land. True, those kids lived in books, but it had all seemed so real, Franny had believed, too! And wasn’t
that
kind of wondrous?
    There were so many possibilities to believe in.
    There were so many things, good and bad, that nobody could prove or understand.
    But Franny believed—she
knew
—that there were invisible alien viruses that could turn you into another person one fine morning, a person who could no longer walk. Nothing ever again could surprise her as much as knowing that.
    So Franny believed in a tiny flea, mutated and transmogrified into a writer of splendid notes.
    Fleabrain.
    At 5:30 p.m. the next evening, Franny checked the tip of Alf’s tail. Alf lay patiently stretched out on Franny’s coverlet, big head on big front paws. There had been no mention of