Twelve Impossible Things Before Breakfast Read Online Free PDF

over the arbor. The lawn was so damp, Harlyn went out barefooted, but she couldn’t find the fairy anywhere. Not even a trace of it.
    Though what could be considered a trace of a fairy? she wondered. Torn rose petals? There were plenty of those. A second rose, a yellow one on a different bush, had opened, and the wind accompanying the rain had beaten off some of its petals, scattering them like a miser’s treasure onto the lawn.
    It was just when she had decided there was no fairy to be found and her imagination had indeed gotten the best of her that Harlyn heard a strange, tiny, thin wail, a meager thread of sound. It was not like anything, or at least not like anything she had heard before. She followed it, rather as if winding it up around her finger, until she came to an old and shaggy birch tree at the edge of the garden, in the untidy “natural” part she liked best, which ran down to a little stream.
    The sound was louder now, but not any more robust, and Harlyn cast about for whatever was making that sound. For a moment the sound seemed high, then it was low, then somewhat oddly in between.
    And then she saw a line of ants—rather large ants, about the size of her knuckle, the stinging kind, dark and purposeful—marching around the tree’s trunk. They had been disguised at first by the birch’s dark patches, but soon she could distinguish them against the white. They were heading toward the thicket on the right, where there were mean and wicked-looking thorns. When Harlyn squinched her eyes, she could see that the ants in front were carrying something tiny and light colored. She bent over and stared and, at last, realized that what they were carrying was a teeny-tiny baby—no bigger than her pinkie nail—wrapped in a yellow rose petal. The baby was waving its little arms and crying. It was that crying that Harlyn had heard.
    Suddenly the grown-up fairy simply materialized above the marching ants, dithering at them and swooping and swerving overhead, shaking its tiny fist and screaming. It tried several times to snatch the baby, but the ants fought it off fiercely each time, hardly pausing in their march toward the thicket.
    For a moment Harlyn watched, fascinated. They were all so small—ants and fairy and baby—that she could hardly feel anything but amusement at first. But then the fairy saw her and broke off its chittering attack on the ants to fly her way, waving its tiny arms and haranguing her again in its high-speed language. Without thinking, Harlyn put her hand out and the fairy alighted on her thumb.
    When Harlyn brought her hand to her eyes, she could see that the fairy was unmistakably female—probably the baby’s mother. And she was crying and yelling at the same time.
    â€œAll right. All right,” Harlyn said. At her voice the fairy was silent. “I’ll see what I can do.” She waved her hand gently, which sent the fairy sailing back into the air.
    Harlyn snapped off a dead branch of the birch and, using it as a kind of a whisk broom, tried to brush the closest ants away. But as if they had some dark magic binding them together, they scattered for a moment and then re-formed their line, marching on and on with the fairy child toward the thicket of prickers and humming an evil-sounding ant chant.
    Harlyn tried a second and a third time with her stick broom, then angrily tried stomping on some of the ants. But each time she did, the rest of them scattered and returned.
    The fairy flew up by her ear and chittered loudly at her.
    â€œWell, I don’t know what else to do!” Harlyn shouted back, loudly enough to make the fairy shove her tiny hands over her tiny ears. “I mean, it’s like they have magic or something. And I don’t. You know—magic! Ugga-bugga-abracadabra-zam-booie! ’ ’ She waggled her fingers.
    The fairy went “Oh-ah!” in a high-pitched voice and suddenly fluttered around her three