Newton’s Law of Gravity

by Rod Drake

Lily Newton started out as a thin child, but around age 4 she began eating voraciously, continuously and grew really fat very quickly; not pleasingly plumb, or even chubby cute, but a real earthbound blimp. Her parents, both slender and proud of it, were mystified as to why this was happening to their once beautiful little daughter. So they took her in desperation to one doctor after another, each of whom ran all sorts of complicated tests and took endless measurements, but none of them had an answer for the condition. Finally a psychiatrist discovered the truth - Lily had been frightened by Lulu Floats to the Moon, a children’s book about a girl so thin and the moon’s gravity being so strong that... well, what the title said; four-year-old Lily was frightened that she would drift up into space like Lulu, so she decided to pack on the pounds, making herself too heavy to float. After months of therapy, the psychiatrist cured Lily of her childhood trauma and along with her parents’ daily reassurance that the story was just make-believe, Lily soon became her petite self once again, a well-adjusted and happy little girl. Then one night, while casually leaning out her bedroom window, looking up at the huge night sky, she started floating up to the moon; she railed against her psychiatrist and her parents using every bad word she knew (which was four) realizing, as she rose higher into the dark night, that she should never have trusted adults.

6S

Rod Drake, author of Thoroughly English Alice, learned early to never trust grown-ups; they only want to spoil adolescent fun. Check out his longer stories in Flashes of Speculation, Fictional Musings, Flash Flooding, Flash Forward and MicroHorror.