Jack and the Broccoli

“Come on, Jack, eat your broccoli, and then you can leave the table,” said Mum.
“Mmf mmf mmmmf,” said Jack. His hands were clamped over his mouth in case she tried to force the horrible stuff in.

“What was that, love?”
“I hate broccoli,” he said through a tiny gap in his fingers.
“How do you know? You’ve never even tried it.”
“No.”
“It’ll make you big and strong.”
“No.”
“If you just try a little bit, I’ll let you have ice cream for pudding.”
Jack stared at the nasty green trees on his plate. Mum put the ice cream tub on the table, then a squeezy brown bottle. Wow! Chocolate sauce! Jack grabbed his fork and put a tiny piece of broccoli into his mouth. He chewed, pulled a face and swallowed.
“See, it wasn’t that bad was it?” said Mum, giving him a spoon.
Jack reached for the ice cream, but before he could take off the lid he felt a funny tingling in his fingers. It went up his arm and round his whole body, and before he knew what was happening, he found himself floating up from his chair like a bubble.
“Muuum!” he cried, as he rose through the air.
Mum turned round from the sink and screamed. Jack tried to grab onto the back of his chair, but the movement sent him zooming across the room. He bounced off the wall, and straight out of the open window.
“Jack!” Mum cried out of the window as he floated down the street. Jack flapped arms, trying to get back to the ground, but felt himself speed up. This was incredible. He was flying! But he had just started to enjoy himself when the tingling stopped, and he bumped down onto the pavement.
The front door was thrown open and Mum ran outside. “Jack! Are you all right?”
“That was brilliant!” said Jack. “Did you see me? I was flying!”
“What...how did that happen?” stammered Mum.
“I think it was the broccoli,” said Jack.
He picked himself up and they walked back to the house. Back in the kitchen, Jack ate another piece of broccoli. At once he felt his body tingle, and he floated up towards the ceiling. Mum screamed again as Jack rolled over mid-air and flew back out of the window. This time, he reached the end of the street before the tingling stopped, and he dropped onto Mrs Brady’s front lawn.
He ran back to the house, planning to eat a big piece of broccoli and see how far he could fly, but when he got into the kitchen Mum was already washing up his plate.
“Where’s the other bit of broccoli gone?” he said. “I was going to eat it.”
“I threw it away,” said Mum. “I’m not giving you broccoli again, it’s dangerous!”
“Ohhhhh!” Jack stamped his foot. He wanted to fly.
“Be a good boy and eat your ice cream.”
“I don’t want ice cream. I want broccoli!”
But he ate his ice cream anyway. He didn’t want miss out on the chocolate sauce.

Next day at school, the class were learning about allergies.
“An allergy is something that makes you ill, or gives you a funny reaction,” said Miss Robinson. “Is anybody here allergic to anything?”
“I’m allergic to peanuts,” said Ravi. “They give me a rash.”
“I’m allergic to milk,” said Chloe. “It makes me feel sick.”
“I’m allergic to broccoli,” said Jack.
“No you’re not,” said Miss Robinson impatiently. “You just don’t like it.”
“No, really, I am allergic to broccoli! It makes me fly.”
Everybody laughed.
“It does!”
“Prove it,” said Kerry.
“Yeah, prove it,” said everyone else.
So at lunchtime, Jack walked straight past the burgers and chips and got himself a plateful of broccoli. Mum wasn’t there to stop him this time, so he ate as much as he could. The tingling started quickly and Jack grabbed his plate as he started to float upwards, still cramming broccoli into his mouth. People screamed and pointed as he drifted up to the ceiling and started to fly around the room.
“See! I told you!” shouted Jack, as he whizzed over their heads. “Broccoli makes me fly!”
He had eaten so much of it he was going higher and faster than before. He zoomed out of the door and into the hall, hearing his friends shouting and cheering behind him. He bashed open the main school doors and sped out over the playground. Higher and higher he flew, still holding his plate of broccoli. This was amazing! Soon Jack was so high the school was a dot beneath him, and he could see the whole town.
“Haha! Brilliant!” he shouted into the wind.
He flew for miles and miles, over patchwork fields and winding roads with miniature cars. Every time he felt the tingling stop and began to fall, he ate another piece of broccoli and sped up again. The air was cool, and the only sound was the wind in his ears. It was the best feeling.
Before long a huge city appeared on the horizon: London. As Jack flew over it he saw the river Thames winding through it like a giant brown snake, the Tower of London and Big Ben. He flew lower and landed on the top of St Paul’s cathedral, scattering a group of surprised pigeons. Sitting on the top of the dome, the view was Amazing with a capital A. Much better than the time he’d been on the London Eye. He could see people as small as ants walking around below, black cabs like beetles and tiny red buses the size of lego.
Jack stuffed the remaining broccoli into his pockets, left his plate on the roof of St Paul’s and took off again. He circled the Tower of London with the ravens. He saw Piccadilly Circus, Buckingham Palace and Trafalgar Square, where he spent some time doing funny poses on Nelson’s Column for the tourists. He flew all afternoon, topping up on broccoli each time the tingling stopped. But he forgot to monitor how much he was eating, and after about two hours, when he was flying over London Zoo, he put his hand in his pocket to get some more and found it was empty. He had run out of broccoli!
He began to fall.
Mayday! Mayday!
Luckily he wasn’t very high, and a small grassy area broke his fall. He hit the ground and rolled. Picking himself up, he became aware that there were a lot of people standing on the other side of a high wire fence and shouting at him. They were making so much noise he couldn’t make out what they were saying, but they were all pointing at something behind him. He turned round and saw:
“Aarrrrgh! A lion!”
A really big one. Staring at him. And drooling.
Jack frantically searched his pockets for the teeniest piece of broccoli. But there was none left. How was he going to get out?
The lion took a step towards him. The people on the other side of the fence screamed.
A zoo keeper in dark green overalls shouted at him through a gate in the fence: “Stay still, son. Don’t move, now. Don’t look him in the eye, or he’ll go for you!”
He loaded a rifle with a large dart.
“You’re not going to kill it are you?” screamed a woman.
“Of course not, it’s just tranquiliser. It’ll put it to sleep while I get the boy out.”
He aimed and fired. The lion let out a snarl as the dart hit it, then it keeled over and began to snore. The keeper unlocked the gate, took Jack by the scruff of the neck and hauled him out of the enclosure.
“Thank you,” said Jack, going to walk away. But the keeper didn’t let go of him.
“Where do you think you’re going? You’re coming with me to see the zoo manager.”
The keeper marched Jack to an office that smelled like monkeys, where a monkey-like little man in a suit was sitting behind a desk. The keeper explained what had happened. The manager scratched his head and did not look pleased.
“How on earth did you get in there?” he said.
“I flew,” said Jack.
“You fell? Climbing on the fencing I’ll bet. That was a very dangerous thing to do.”
“No, I said I flew.”
But the zoo manager wasn’t listening. “Where’s your mother?” he said. And then: “Where’s your entrance ticket?”
Ten minutes later, Jack was escorted from the zoo by a policeman.
“I’ve got a lad here that’s run away from school,” said the policeman into his walkie-talkie.
“I didn’t run away,” said Jack indignantly. “I flew!”
“A likely story,” said the policeman. “Your poor mother must be worried sick. Let’s take you home.”
“Are we going in a police car?”
The policeman nodded.
“Cool!”
This was turning out to be the best day EVER.

Next day at school, Jack was a hero. Mum hadn’t been impressed with his flying incident at all, but his classmates thought it was brilliant. At lunchtime, the dinner ladies were amazed as the children went straight to the vegetables.
“What are you doing?” said Jack, who was eyeing up the sausages and chips.
“We all tried broccoli yesterday, but it didn't make us fly,” said Ravi. “So now we're trying all the vegetables to see if they give us superpowers.”
“It's carrots today!” someone shouted from the front of the queue.
“My nan says carrots make you see in the dark,” said Sam.
The whole class rushed to get some. Then they took it in turns to shut themselves in the broom cupboard to see if it worked. It didn't.
But Jack wasn't interested in carrots or other vegetables, only broccoli. That night, determined to fly again, he waited until Mum had gone to bed then snuck into the kitchen, pulled a chair up to the fridge and stole the broccoli from the top shelf where Mum had hidden it. He put some pieces in the microwave, careful to stop it before it pinged and woke up Mum, then put them in a plastic bag then snuck back to his room. He opened the window and sat on the sill with his feet dangling in the cool night air. As he lifted off, Jack continued to stuff as much broccoli into his mouth as he could chew. Soon he was soaring over the twinkling lights of the town, turning somersaults and cartwheels in the air. He felt as light as a feather, free as a bird. He wheeled after the bats, swooping and diving in the starlight. He surfed the air currents, diving back down to the ground and skimming the grass in the fields with his fingertips before soaring back upwards again.
He was having so much fun he didn't notice how high he was. The sound of the wind was loud in his ears, and he didn’t notice a roaring sound, becoming louder and louder and closer and closer until it was almost too late. He spun round just in time to see the red and green flashing lights of an aeroplane coming straight for him. Jack dropped the bag of broccoli in shock, then came to his senses and dived out of the way. The plane passed right through the spot he had been hovering only seconds before, and he narrowly missed a clip round the head from one of the wings.
Quaking with fear, Jack decided he'd had enough flying for one night and started a slow descent to the ground, hoping he had eaten enough broccoli to get there. He was nearly over his house when the tingling stopped. Uh-oh.
He plummeted to earth at a frightening speed, swerved to avoid a pylon and crashed into some telephone wires. For a moment he lay suspended, tangled in the wires, before they untwisted themselves with a jerk and catapulted him onto the road. He heard a nasty crunch and his right leg exploded with pain.
“Oooooowwwwwwww!”
Jack’s cry set lights turning on in windows all the way up the street.

“You must never, never eat broccoli again, do you promise me?” Mum scolded, as she drove Jack home from the hospital three days later. His broken leg was in a cast and he had to use crutches to walk. It hurt a lot.
“I promise,” said Jack. There was no need for her to worry. He decided he would rather stay on the ground, thank you very much. He didn’t even like broccoli anyway; it tasted horrible.
When Jack he back to school the next week, he found his classmates had all gone vegetable mad.
“Sweetcorn makes Annabel sing,” said Ravi, as they waited in the lunch queue. “She’d never eaten it before because her brother said it was horrible. You should hear her, it’s amazing!”
“What vegetable is it today?” said Jack, thinking he should probably try something that gave him safer superpowers than broccoli.
“Runner beans!” shouted someone from the front.
“Ah, runner beans,” said Ravi knowledgeably. “Make you run fast.”
They all had beans with their chicken pie and raced outside to try it out. Jack hobbled after them and sat on a bench to watch as they ran round the playground.
Suddenly a cry went up: "Look! It's working!"
Jack felt a rush of air as someone sped past, moving so fast they were a blur.
“Who is it?” said Jack.
“It's Megan!”
The blur hurtled out onto the playing field, then slowed to a normal run as the beans wore off. Everyone rushed excitedly to her and carried her back to the dining room.
“I never ate them before because they looked horrible!” Jack heard her exclaim. “I never knew!”

The next day it was fish and chips and -
“Yuck, not peas!” moaned Jack, pulling a face.
“My cousin’s friend’s brother ate some peas once,” said Ravi, “and they made him invisible.”
Jack looked at the nasty green balls on his plate, wondering. He hated broccoli, it had made him fly. Annabel hated sweetcorn, it made her sing. Megan hated beans, they made her run. Hmmm…
He skewered a pea, screwed up his face and put it in his mouth.
Chewed.
Euurrrrrghh.
Swallowed.
He felt a tingling in his fingers. He looked down at his hand, and his mouth dropped open. It had vanished.
“Cool!”
Jack loaded his fork with peas and prepared to have some fun. He had to admit, vegetables weren’t so bad after all.

*

If you enjoyed Jack and the Broccoli, you might like to read the opening chapters of my children's novel, Time Travelogix, at www.timetravelogix.com