The Big Fart Powder Sale
NILLY STOOD UP on the drinking fountain so that all the kids could see and hear him.
“Doctor Proctor’s Fart Powder will be for sale up at the top of Cannon Avenue. There’ll be a sign on the gate!” Nilly yelled, even though it was so quiet that he could have spoken in a totally normal voice. “We’ll start at six and keep going until seven! No pushing, let the little kids go first, and no farting until you’ve left. Understood?”
“Understood!” they all yelled.
“Any questions?” Nilly asked. He glanced out over the crowd and saw a hand sticking up in the air way in the back. “Yes?”
“Is it dangerous?” a small voice asked.
“Yes,” Nilly said seriously. “Unfortunately, there is one thing that is dangerous about using this powder.”
The faces before him got long, their mouths hanging open.
“You might laugh yourself to death,” Nilly said.
A sigh of relief ran through the crowd. The bell rang.
“See you this evening!” Nilly yelled, hopping down from the water fountain. Several people clapped and shouted “Hurray,” and a murmur of anticipation rose from the crowd, which slowly dissipated, heading toward the different doors back into the school.
“Do you think anyone’s going to come?” Lisa asked Nilly, who was whistling the national anthem to himself in satisfaction.
“You should be asking if there’s anyone who won’t come,” Nilly said. “Didn’t you see the gleam in their eyes? You might as well go ahead and book that plane ticket to Sarpsborg, Lisa.”
“Well, all right, then,” Lisa said, even though deep down she wasn’t so sure. But then Lisa was almost never totally sure about anything. That’s just the way she was.
“Absolutely positive,” Nilly said, raising his hands as if he were playing the trumpet. That’s just the way he was.
AFTER SCHOOL, LISA and Nilly ran home to complete the final preparations. After dinner they ran back to the doctor’s yard, where they found Proctor asleep on the bench. They let him sleep while they attached a sign to the gate. It said:
They took the lids off the shoeboxes and cartons in which the bags of powder were neatly stacked and set them on the picnic table. Then they each sat down in a chair behind the table and started waiting.
“It’s ten to six,” Lisa stated.
“Excited?” Nilly asked, smiling.
When it was five minutes before six, Lisa told Nilly that it was five minutes before six. The birds were singing in the pear tree. When it was six o’clock, Lisa told Nilly it was six o’clock. And when it was 6:02, Lisa looked at her watch for the ninth time since six o’clock.
“Where is everyone?” she asked, worried.
“Relax,” Nilly said. “We have to give them time to get here.” He’d crossed his arms and was dangling his legs contentedly.
“It’s five after,” Lisa said.
Nilly didn’t respond.
At ten after, they heard Doctor Proctor grunt from the bench. And saw him blinking his eyes. And then suddenly he leaped up, exclaiming, “Good heavens! Did I oversleep?”
“Actually, no,” Lisa said. “No one came.”
“Yet,” Nilly said. “No one has come yet. Just wait.”
At quarter past six, Doctor Proctor sighed almost inaudibly.
At 6:20, Nilly scratched the back of his head and mumbled something about how kids these days weren’t very punctual.
At 6:25, Lisa put her forehead down on the tabletop. “I knew it,” she whined.
At six thirty, they agreed to pack up.
“Well,” Doctor Proctor said, smiling sadly as they put the lid on the last box. “We’ll try again another day.”
“They’re never going to come,” Lisa said, sounding choked up. She was on the verge of tears.
“I don’t get it,” Nilly said, shaking his head.
“Chin up,” Proctor said. “I’ve been inventing things no one wants for years. It’s not the end of the world. The main thing is not to give up. Tomorrow I’ll invent something that’s even more fantastic than Doctor Proctor’s Fart Powder.”
“But there can’t be anything more fantastic than Doctor Proctor’s Fart Powder,” Nilly said.
“I’m going to go home and go to bed,” Lisa whispered, and started walking toward the gate in the front yard with her head down and her arms hanging at her sides.
“Good night,” Nilly and Doctor Proctor said.
They sat down on the bench.
“Well,” the doctor said.
“Well,” Nilly said.
“Maybe I should do a little more work on that time machine I started last year,” Proctor said, and looked up at the swallows.
“How hard do you think it would be to invent a machine that makes Jell-O out of air?” Nilly asked, and looked up at the swallows.
And that’s what they were doing when they heard Lisa’s voice from over by the gate.
“You guys …,” she said.
“Yeah?” the doctor and Nilly said in unison.
“Someone did come,” Lisa said.
“Who?”
“You kind of have to come see for yourselves,” Lisa said.
Nilly and the doctor got up and went over to the gate.
“Good heavens,” Doctor Proctor said, dumbfounded. “What do you say, Nilly?”
But Nilly didn’t say anything, because something extremely rare had happened to Nilly. He was speechless. He couldn’t utter a single word. Outside the gate there was a line of children that reached as far as the eye could see. At any rate, as far as you could see on Cannon Avenue.
“Why are you guys so late?” asked the kid at the front of the line, a boy in a cap with the Tottenham soccer team’s logo. “We’ve been standing here for over half an hour.”
Then Nilly finally found his voice again.
“But … but why didn’t you guys come in?”
“Because it says here on the sign, doesn’t it?” the boy in the Tottenham hat said. “It says that Doctor Proctor’s Fart Powder is for sale here and nowhere else in the world.”
“Yeah, so?” said Nilly, confused.
“And here is here, right?” the boy said. “And not in there.” The other kids in line behind him nodded. Then Lisa pulled a marker out of her bag, went over to the sign, drew a line through HERE, and wrote THERE in capital letters.
“Then let’s get to it!” she yelled so they heard her almost to the end of the line. “No pushing, let the little ones in first, and have your money ready!”
THERE WAS STILL a line out there at seven o’clock when Nilly shut the gate, but they were totally out of powder.
“Sold out!” Lisa shouted, and said that anyone who hadn’t gotten to buy fart powder could come back tomorrow, once Doctor Proctor had made some more. And even though naturally a few people were a little disappointed, they quickly started looking forward to the next day. Because all the way down Cannon Avenue, you could already hear the farts banging and the laughter from the kids who had gotten to buy the powder.
“Phew,” Lisa said, flopping down into a garden chair once everyone was gone.
“Phew,” Nilly said.
“You know what?” Doctor Proctor said. “We have to celebrate this. What would you guys say to a little …”
“Jell-O!” Lisa yelled in delight.
“A five-foot-long Jell-O!” Nilly yelled, jumping up and down in his chair.
The doctor disappeared, but returned quickly with the longest Jell-O Nilly and Lisa had ever seen.
“I made this just in case,” Proctor said, smiling slyly.
And as the swallows drew strange letters in the evening sky over the pear tree, silence settled over Doctor Proctor’s yard. In the end all you could hear was the smacking noise of three mouths devouring a four-foot-eight-inch-long Jell-O.