92. Wee Elmira

               

“Are you on a Japanese strike?” Fergus MacLob O’Toora asked his son Michael upon finding him with his pupils in his classroom on the twenty-seventh of July. “Working on your birthday?”

“No,” said Michael. “I’m not on vacation because I lack the means to go anywhere special this summer. My pupils may be on a Japanese strike, though. They want to learn more English this summer. Sancho has blindfolded Alonso and Alonso has pinned a thumbtack on a town  in the map of places where you can learn English. And that’s where we are going on a one day field trip.”

“And what place is that?”

“A place we had never heard of,” said Don Alonso.  

“And he is good at geography,” said Sancho.

Fergus walked up to a wall on which was painted a map of every place where English was spoken as a native language in both worlds. 

“More to the left,” said Sancho. “Where the green thumbtack is.”

“What? There is a place beneath the thumbtack? This is worse than a flea circus.I need glasses to see this.”

“Wee Elmira,” said Don Alonso, offering him a magnifying glass.

“No!” cried Fergus, before even glancing at the map. “I can’t believe this!”

“Do you know what kind of a place is that?” asked Michael.

“Yes!” cried Fergus. “One that hates Binky worse than the Leafies.”

“Why?” asked Michael.

“Elmira is so small a town that Binky wants to make it part of a larger neighboring town. And the Elmirans don’t want their town to lose its status.”

“Then the natives aren’t friendly?”

“Not to Binky. They have filed a petition asking him to invent a mental asylum and lock himself in it until he admits small is beautiful. That’s their motto: Small is beautiful! There must be about ten people living there. I remember they don’t make a dozen.The town consists of three houses, a gasoline station and a hamburger joint. The townhall is in the gasoline station, next to its tiny general store.”

“Would the natives be friendly to us if we visited?”

“The natives are magical people that live like humans and cater to humans at the gas station and the burger. The hamburgers are good, and popular with the humans, who have no idea they are not made of meat but of black beans spiced with fairy dust to make them addictive.”

“Does that mean they would be bad for us if we tried them?” asked Sancho, who was already longing to.

“No! But you might have a problem of flatulence if you eat more than six at a time and are prone to. Are you really going to visit this place?”

“Are we?” asked Michael.

And his pupils shouted “Yay!”

They had never been to a burger, plus they meant to record all the conversations in English they heard there and study them later at home, to check what they had understood and what they had not.