Tadpoles Are Falling on My Head

Here it is, the first chapter of Flat Like Fred:
   
   It was a school day.  The alarm clock Fred Floodle had invented, which he called the Fred-o-Matic, woke him in the usual way that morning.  First a long metal arm with a needle attached poked Fred sharply in the stomach.  When he screamed, another long metal arm reached out and stuffed a marshmallow into his mouth.

   Fred opened his eyes, which were blue and bulgy.  He rubbed his stomach, which was pink and bulgy.  Then he ran one hand through his hair, which was blond and looked like it had been cut with a lawnmower.  Chewing the marshmallow, he heaved himself out of bed.

   That was Fred's first mistake.  He took two steps, tripped over his dog (who was sleeping in the middle of the floor, with her paws sprawled in four different directions), and fell on his face.  "Oh, Barf!" he said.

   Barf was the dog's name.  Her fur was black with a few small reddish-brown patches that looked like squashed tomatoes.  Next to Barf, the hound of the Baskervilles would have looked like a midget.  Whenever anyone bothered Fred, he simply said, "Eat that person's head, Barf."  No one ever hung around to see what would happen next (which was lucky since what happened was that Barf wagged her tail and drooled).

   She did that now and then began to lick Fred's bare feet.

   "Cut that out!" Fred said, yanking his toes out of reach.  He'd coated them the night before with Protect-o-Fred, the new anti-licking wax he'd invented.  But it still wasn't working right.  Fred kept trying to make it taste like something Barf hated, only she didn't hate anything.  Judging by the remains on the floor, she'd recently eaten half a sweat sock.

   Reaching behind him, Fred turned on a piece of machinery that was sticking out of a half-open bureau drawer.  Carefully he spoke into a long tube which would probably give Fred's mother a heart attack when she found out that it was no longer attached to her vacuum cleaner.  After six seconds of buzzing, the machine barked: Growf woof-wff-wff snorp!  Fred hoped that meant, "Get your soggy tongue off my foot, you flea-bitten nitwit!"

   This machine, the Fred-o-Bark, would translate Dog into English too, but Fred couldn't persuade Barf to bark into the speaking tube.  So far she'd bitten it in half three times.  Fred had patched it together with duct tape, but his mother was going to have a hard time vacuuming into corners.

   The only time Fred and Barf had truly communicated was on the day they'd met.  Fred had been visiting his Grandmother Frickle, who baked the worst rhubarb pies in the northern hemisphere.  That day she'd set a batch of them on her kitchen windowsill to cool.  Fred was sitting at the kitchen table, wishing he had time to invent a pie-destroying machine before supper, when he heard a strange noise outside.  Something halfway between a slurp and a woof.

   Suddenly a huge black head appeared at the window.  Its ears flapped in the wind.  Its enormous mouth opened.  Sloop!  Wurf!  Its jaws closed on one of the pies.  Clang!  The head looked surprised.  "Ptui!" it said and spat out the pie pan, slightly bent but licked clean.

   "Good dog!" Fred said (having decided the animal was not a buffalo).  He got up.  By the time he reached the kitchen window, the dog was spitting out the last pie tin.

   "You ate three of Grandma Frickle's rhubarb and vinegar pies?!" Fred said.  "Who are you?  What's your name?"

   The dog wagged a tail the size of a tree branch and licked the edge of the windowsill.  "Barf!" she said.

   "I believe it!" Fred said.

   At first Fred's parents didn't want him to keep Barf.  But when they found out it was Barf's fault that Grandma Frickle didn't have rhubarb and vinegar pie for supper, they had to admit the dog deserved a good home.

   Since that day, Barf had devoted her life to licking Fred's feet.  "Stop it!" Fred shouted now.  Muttering under his breath some words it isn't nice to mutter, he put on a sweat sock and a half and looked out his bedroom window.

   It was raining.  "Oh, no, it's Monday!" he said.  It always rained on Mondays in Wampler, Wisconsin.

   And that was Fred's second mistake.  In fact, it was Wednesday, and Wednesday was Fred's bad day.  Usually on Wednesdays, Fred woke with a peculiar tingle in the back of his neck, which warned him to be careful.  But that particular morning his tingler wasn't working.  And so when he saw the rain, he said, "Mondays are so boring.  I wish something unusual would happen today."

   Always a dangerous wish, but especially on Wednesdays.

   Slowly Fred got dressed.  This was the worst Monday he could remember.  He was as tired as if he'd put in several days of school already.  And the rain this morning was the ugliest rain he'd ever seen.  The raindrops were short, squat, and greenish-gray like tadpoles.

   Sadly Fred left the room.  He didn't even remember to put on his sneakers.  Barf followed.

   In the next room, Fred's father was snoring.  It sounded like the section of the 1812 Overture where someone shoots off a cannon.  "I'm going outside," Fred whispered to Barf, "and take a closer look at that weird rain."

   And that was his third mistake.  The moment he stepped outside the back door, with Barf at his heels, Fred realized why the raindrops looked like tadpoles.  They were tadpoles.