Pea-Proof Mattresses!

　　Pea-Proof Mattresses!

　　Princess Mattresses are truly fit for royalty! Don't lose another second of sleep to pesky peas placed precisely under your posterior!

Hildie Bitterpickles Needs Her Sleep
by Robin Newman, illustrated by Chris Ewald
ISBN 978-1-939547-23-1

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Hildie and Clawdia

　　There's a little - known secret about Hildie Bitterpickles. She needs her sleep.

　　Every night brushes her teeth, puts away her spell book, and goes to bed with her cat, Clawdia.

　　Until the night when Hildie's quiet neighborhood changed.

　　Someone moved in next door. A very big someone. A very loud someone.

　　... ...

Hildie Bitterpickles Needs Her Sleep
by Robin Newman, illustrated by Chris Ewald
ISBN 978-1-939547-23-1

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你是天上最明亮的那颗星星

妈妈送我一只小布狗，要我别再伤心。

我知道，你是风，你是云，你是天上最明亮的那颗星星。

≪我的世界都是你≫
几米 作品
ISBN 978-986-213-677-5

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你知道天堂在哪里吗？

你是不是很想去找他？
当然。你知道天堂在哪里吗？

天堂？应该就是在天上吧！
那里很好玩吗？为什么去了就不回来呢？

≪我的世界都是你≫
几米 作品
ISBN 978-986-213-677-5

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嗨，请问你是鬼吗？

嗨，
请问你是鬼吗？

我不是鬼，我是园丁。
以前住过这个房间，在附近的森林里研究各种奇妙的植物。

嗨，你不是鬼吧！
鬼会弹钢琴吗？

我不是鬼，我是搬运工。
在我最落魄的那段日子，住过这个房间。

≪我的世界都是你≫
几米 作品
ISBN 978-986-213-677-5

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Shadows of Ourselves

　　"D'you think people leave impressions of themselves in a place?" I asked.

　　"After they've died, you mean?"

　　I scored a cross in a square. "No, after they've been somewhere." I told him about the flashback images of my childhood. "It happened a few times while we've been on Bryher. Like the island is covered with traces of me from the past."

　　"Maybe it is." Uman made a nought, won the game.

　　"Wouldn't it be weird if we left millions of shadows of ourselves wherever we went?"

　　He seemed to give it some thought. "Or what if there are millions of shadows of us in all the places in the world we haven't been to yet," he said, "just waiting for us to make them real?"

　　I frowned. "How would that work?"

　　"Oh, and your idea does work?"

　　"Yeah, I mean, if you walk along this beach," I gesture at the wet sand, "you're going to leave a trail of footprints behind you —— but you can't leave footprints ahead of you."

　　"Not literally, no." He'd scuffed out the game and was marking the grid for a new one. "But in here," he tapped his head, "you can leave footprints wherever you like."

Twenty Questions for Gloria, p263
Martin Bedford
ISBN 978-1-4063-6353-1

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It's Saturday

　　"On Saturday, breakfast is much better."

　　"Slurp!"

　　"Glug! Glug!"

　　"See - it's the same but it tastes so much better."

　　"And that's because it's SATURDAY!"

The Big Wet Balloon, P8
by Liniers
ISBN 978-1-935179-32-0

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Indonesian Archipelago

　　"Taking the piss out of him wasn't such a good idea, was it?" I said.

　　"He would've done it anyway. Guys like that, they're looking for a fight —— and I just happened to be there, wearing the wrong skin colour and a silly hat."

　　"Yeah, but ——"

　　"Gloria, it's what I do. He has his fists and feet, I have my words —— my devastating wit and, frankly, genius-level intelligence. And you know what? In those few seconds before he hit me, I really, really enjoyed showing him how stupid he was."

　　"Can I say 'yeah, but' again?"

　　"No, you can't. And my final point is, my injuries will heal —— but he's going to remain a stupid, violent, racist bastard for the rest of his life." One or two passers-by glanced at him. Uman pressed the tissue against his nose, which had sprung a fresh leak. He held the tissue for me to see. "Look, the bloodstains have formed the exact pattern of the Indonesian archipelago."

Twenty Questions for Gloria, p235
Martin Bedford
ISBN 978-1-4063-6353-1

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Stowaway Time

　　"You don't like escapism?" I said, trying not to laugh.

　　"No. I don't."

　　"So what we have been doing for the last ten days?"

　　"This isn't an escape from reality," Uman said. "This is our reality."

　　Was it? I guessed it was, if we choose it to be. But who gets to choose their own reality, really? An for how long, even if they do? It occurred to me, just then, that we were like small children covering our eyes with our hands and imagining that the other people couldn't see us. Or that the rest of the world would leave us alone.

　　"The real reality is still out there," I said to Uman. "It doesn't go away."

　　"I never said it did," he replied.

　　We returned to an alleyway where we'd stashed our rucksacks behind an industrial-size rubbish bin. They were still there, protected from the rain by their waterproof covers.

　　"Stowaway time?" Uman Said.

　　"Stowaway time."

　　Butterflies in the tummy time. ... ...

Twenty Questions for Gloria, p220-221
Martin Bedford
ISBN 978-1-4063-6353-1

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Lives as the River Does

　　"Lives as the river does, never standing still or turning back but forever flowing onwards. If you should reach a dessert, transform yourself into cloud and float across it, then fall as rain on the other side to become a river once more." He shrugged. "It's an old Arabic proverb."

Twenty Questions for Gloria, p167
Martin Bedford
ISBN 978-1-4063-6353-1

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Magical

　　I woke early. Phoneless, I had no idea what time it was, but when I unzipped the flap carefully, so as not to wake Uman, and poked my head out, a smoky just-after-dawn light seeped through the woods, turning the trees into charcoal sketches. All was quiet, except for the songs of unseen birds. Tired and just-woken grump as I was, the effect was calming.

　　A movement caught my eye. A few metres away, a family of rabbits loped about the clearing: two adults, browsing, and four young, play-fighting. I held my breath, kept dead still. For a moment, they carried on, oblivious to my presence, then one of the adults spotted me and all six scampered into the bracken, vanishing so quickly and so totally that I might've imagined them. Thirty seconds, a minute? But those rabbit were the most magical thing I'd ever seen.

　　I waited in the opening of the tent in the hope they'd come back. They didn't.

　　Never mind. I was still smiling inside at the sight of them. At how beautiful the woods looked, now that the darkness had been erased by the breaking of a new day.

Twenty Questions for Gloria, p139-140
Martin Bedford
ISBN 978-1-4063-6353-1

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Strength of Character

　　"You don't like me very much, do you?"

　　Mum chips in. "Can you blame her, the way you're acting? You might think you're all grown up now, but——" Uman asked.

　　"Look, we're all getting a bit tired and tetchy," R.I. Ryan says. "Shall we call a time-out?"

　　I tell her that sounds like a brilliant idea.

　　"And, Gloria. It's not a matter of liking or disliking. I'm just trying to establish the facts and sometimes that means asking you to talk about things you'd rather not." She pauses. "As it happens, though, I do like you. I wish I'd your strength of character when I was fifteen."

　　I try to imagine what she was like when she was my age.

　　I can't, though. Any more than I could look at a picture of myself when I was a baby and find signs of the girl I have become.

　　Strength of character. Is that what I have? Uman thought so, and so does D.I. Ryan. But they've only seen what happens on the surface —— the things I do, the things I say —— and that's not where your character is. Uman knew me —— knows me —— better than anyone ever has, but even he never set foot inside my head or heart. Never thought my thoughts or felt what i felt.

Twenty Questions for Gloria, p114-115
Martin Bedford
ISBN 978-1-4063-6353-1

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Rules

　　We talked about rules; how you decided which ones to obey and which to break. It was like a class discussion in Citizenship ... only, it was nothing like a class discussion in Citizenship.

　　"Are you a rule breaker?" Uman asked.

　　"In my head I am, yeah."

　　"But not in practice."

　　"No. Not often, anyway. And nothing on your scale."

　　"Why is that, d'you think?"

　　"Don't know. Fear, probably. Fear of getting in trouble."

　　"And fear of standing out?" Uman suggested. "Fear of not fitting in?"

　　"Yeah, that too. As I've got older, I've become less daring. I guess."

　　He coughed. Just the once. "My father used to have a poster on the wall of his study —— a cartoon showing rows and rows of identical grey houses with identical grey roofs, with just one house in the middle with a roof painted in pink-and-purple stripes. Outside, the owner —— he's holding a paint pot and brush —— is being frogmarched down the street by the police." Another cough. It took Uman a moment to catch his breath. "As soon as I was old enough to understand that cartoon," he said. "I swore I would grow up to be a guy with a pink-and-purple roof."

Twenty Questions for Gloria, p70-71
Martin Bedford
ISBN 978-1-4063-6353-1

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Started with an Appearance

Where is he? It's all I can think about. Every minute since it ended.


D.I. Ryan wants to hear it from the beginning. The first of the fifteen days, I presume she means; the day I went missing. It started a couple of weeks before then, though.

　　It started with an appearance, not a disappearance.

Twenty Questions for Gloria, p16
Martin Bedford
ISBN 978-1-4063-6353-1

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