Flat Stanley - Jeff Brown [0]
His Original Adventure!
by Jeff Brown
Pictures by Macky Pamintuan
For J.C. and Tony
—J.B.
CONTENTS
1. The Big Bulletin Board
2. Being Flat
3. Stanley the Kite
4. The Museum Thieves
5. Arthur’s Good Idea
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
1
The Big Bulletin Board
Breakfast was ready.
“I will go wake the boys,” Mrs. Lambchop said to her husband, George Lambchop. Just then their younger son, Arthur, called from the bedroom he shared with his brother, Stanley.
“Hey! Come and look! Hey!”
Mr. and Mrs. Lambchop were both very much in favor of politeness and careful speech. “Hay is for horses, Arthur, not people,” Mr. Lambchop said as they entered the bedroom. “Try to remember that.”
“Excuse me,” Arthur said. “But look!”
He pointed to Stanley’s bed. Across it lay the enormous bulletin board that Mr. Lambchop had given the boys a Christmas ago so that they could pin up pictures and messages and maps. It had fallen, during the night, on top of Stanley.
But Stanley was not hurt. In fact, he would still have been sleeping if he had not been woken by his brother’s shout.
“What’s going on here?” he called out cheerfully from beneath the enormous board.
Mr. and Mrs. Lambchop hurried to lift it from the bed.
“Heavens!” said Mrs. Lambchop.
“Gosh!” said Arthur. “Stanley’s flat!”
“As a pancake,” said Mr. Lambchop. “Darndest thing I’ve ever seen.”
“Let’s all have breakfast,” Mrs. Lambchop said. “Then Stanley and I will go see Dr. Dan and hear what he has to say.”
In his office, Dr. Dan examined Stanley all over.
“How do you feel?” he asked. “Does it hurt very much?”
“I felt sort of tickly for a while after I got up,” Stanley Lambchop said, “but I feel fine now.”
“Well, that’s mostly how it is with these cases,” said Dr. Dan.
“We’ll just have to keep an eye on this young fellow,” he said when he had finished the examination. “Sometimes we doctors, despite all our years of training and experience, can only marvel at how little we really know.”
Mrs. Lambchop said she thought Stanley’s clothes would have to be altered by the tailor now, so Dr. Dan told his nurse to take Stanley’s measurements.
Mrs. Lambchop wrote them down.
Stanley was four feet tall, about a foot wide, and half an inch thick.
2
Being Flat
When Stanley got used to being flat, he enjoyed it. He could go in and out of rooms, even when the door was closed, just by lying down and sliding through the crack at the bottom.
Mr. and Mrs. Lambchop said it was silly, but they were quite proud of him.
Arthur got jealous and tried to slide under a door, but he just banged his head.
Being flat could also be helpful, Stanley found.
He was taking a walk with Mrs. Lambchop one afternoon when her favorite ring fell from her finger. The ring rolled across the sidewalk and down between the bars of a grating that covered a deep, dark shaft. Mrs. Lambchop began to cry.
“I have an idea,” Stanley said.
He took the laces out of his shoes and an extra pair out of his pocket and tied them all together to make one long lace. Then he tied one end of that to the back of his belt and gave the other end to his mother.
“Lower me,” he said, “and I will look for the ring.”
“Thank you, Stanley,” Mrs. Lambchop said. She lowered him between the bars and moved him carefully up and down and from side to side, so that he could search the whole floor of the shaft.
Two policemen came by and stared at Mrs. Lambchop as she stood holding the long lace that ran down through the grating. She pretended not to notice them.
“What’s the matter, lady?” the first policeman asked. “Is your yo-yo stuck?”
“I am not playing with a yo-yo!” Mrs. Lambchop said sharply. “My son is at the other end of this lace, if you must know.”
“Get the net, Harry,” said the second policeman. “We have caught a cuckoo!”
Just then, down in the shaft, Stanley cried out, “Hooray!”
Mrs. Lambchop pulled him up and saw that he had the ring.
“Good for you, Stanley,” she said. Then she turned angrily to the policemen.
“A cuckoo, indeed!”