Page 102 - Lavender-B-4

And so the days went by, but Poodik’s wings were in no hurry to grow.

One day a strong wind sprang up.

‘Twee-ee-eet! Twee-ee-eet! What’s this?’ Poodik wanted to know.

‘It’s the wind,’ his mother told him. ‘And it may blow you out of the nest. Then—
whoops! Down you go to the cat!’

Poodik didn’t like the sound of that, so he said: ‘Why are the trees swaying like
this? Let them stop swaying, then there won’t be any wind.’

His mother tried to explain to him that this was not how things worked, but he

would not believe her. He had his own explanation for everything.

A man walked past the bathhouse, swinging his arms.

‘His wings must have been twisted off by a cat,’ Poodik tweeted. ‘Only the bones

are left.’

‘He’s a man. They don’t have wings!’ his mother said.
Why do you think
‘Why not?’ Poodik was
impatient to fly?
Just a Minute!
‘That’s their job—living without wings. All they can do is
hop about on their two legs, see?’

‘But why?’

‘Because if they had wings, they would
come after us just as Daddy and I do,

after the insects.’

‘That’s twash!’ Poodik tweeted. ‘Twash
and twaddle! Everyone ought to have

wings. It can’t be so good on the
ground as it is in the air! When I grow
up, I’ll see that everyone can fly.’

So Poodik refused to trust his mother.
He was still too young to know that if
you don’t trust your mother things will

turn out badly. So he perched on the very edge of the sprang up: appeared suddenly
nest, chirping out a song he had made up himself: swaying: moving slowly from side
to side
perched: sat on

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