The Yellow Fables by Spencer Henderson

Author:Spencer Henderson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Spencer Henderson

Six

Harty

Harty had a name that other children his age loved to giggle about. He could hear them behind the playground bushes and at the back of school buses on field trips. However, his name was not what worried him. It was his head. For you see, Harty had an apple head.

“Why! Why must I have an apple head?” he would wail at his mother.

“Why mustn’t you?” she would reply, looking up from her computer.

“No one else does.”

“So? What others don’t have is something you do have.” She would say this often, as if she were a wise owl.

This would always upset Harty even more and send him tearing off around the house, stomping and howling all the way to his room. He did not want an apple head. He had never asked for an apple head. He would gladly switch heads with anyone in the whole wide world. Except, perhaps, Mrs.Torte, his homeroom teacher. How awful would it be to switch heads, only to be asked questions all day long and have to mark papers all evening?

Months went by, quicker than expected–as they do–and Harty grew. His mother increasingly gawked at his growth spurts. Every few weeks, they would check his height, often finding another inch. Harty always insisted the stem on top of his head not be included in the measuring (but his mother kept a secret count anyways).

One Sunday afternoon, Harty found himself in a coughing fit. He felt like he had swallowed a tumbleweed. He hacked and hacked until he spat out a large apple seed. This had never happened before and it shocked him at first. Did it come from within my head? He ran to the mirror to make sure he wasn’t rotting. Looking back at him in the glass was his usual red and shiny self with a tinge of green at the top and an expression of relief.

“Mom!” He held the seed anxiously in his palms, his arms outstretched. “Mom, I’ve coughed up a seed!” And before his mother could find him in the house, he had suddenly coughed up three more.

“Well, I’ll be darned,” his mother said, carefully studying the seeds. And she rushed to her computer and began typing furiously, looking for answers but finding none.

The coughing continued on and off over the coming weeks, and eventually, the kids at school took notice. To Harty’s despair, he coughed up a seed with such force that it bounced across the classroom and spun around under Lizzy Button’s chair. Everyone burst out laughing. It didn’t help things when Mrs. Torte ran to sweep it up, but instead, rolled over it, crashing into Lizzy Button.

“I hate my apple head,” Harty announced that night at dinner. “I’m going to chop it off.”

“You’ll do no such thing to your lovely head,” his mother said sternly and fondly at the same time.

“I will!” he cried, pushing himself away from the table. He ran to the counter, grabbed their largest knife, and ran to his room, slamming the door.

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