The Wacky Adventures of Zmittens

By Terry Fik

The Wacky Adventures of Zmittens is a crazy novella about a little girl who wants to meet something Strange and Unexpected and so she does. Big time. Maya gets slurped into a wall and she comes across a dragon-cat and his mighty Sparkler, a bowlegged Zmeu, a delightful horse and many other wacky creatures.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Terry Fik
• Release date: Jan 14, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386484196

Terry Fik

Terry Fik vaguely remembers writing at five years old a three-page story about some terrorists attacking the grocery store. Things are a little different when it comes to her more recent work. She remembers perfectly the launch of her first novel, Vrum-vrum, and the custom stamp she had made especially for the book signing session. It said `Stop gawking at the chatty fish!` and it put a nice baffled expression on her readers faces. The Wacky Adventures of Zmittens is a crazy novella about a little girl who wanted to meet something Strange and Unexpected and so she did. Big time. 

Book preview

Maya meets something Strange and Unexpected

THE SHRILLING SOUND of the Great Siren of Grey City woke everybody up. People were muttering, stumbling and craving for a hot cup of coffee or cocoa. But it was Monday and their intelligent houses only served hibiscus tea, and hibiscus tea is the worst. It has a nice red colour but no strawberries taste whatsoever.

Maya put on her ash coloured dungarees and went to the kitchen. On the table, sent from the Central Food Deposit through a complicated system of pipes and in complete agreement with Maya’s Living Decree, was a square shaped bowl of cereals, barely smeared with some wishy-washy yogurt.

`I hate you! `announced the little girl, sneering at the yellow mush. `You’re stupid and you taste like chewed cardboard! Oh, no, don’t you dare give me that mushy look! `

Then a fight started and apparently, Maya was winning. She attacked the bowl with a spoon and whacked the smeared cereals until her mother yelled from the living room to stop messing around and eat her breakfast. According to the Decree, she had to eat her breakfast, but she didn’t. Instead, Maya just left the house and this was the first unauthorized thing she did that day. To be honest, I’m not sure if it was a mistake, or the little girl simply wanted to make up for all the things she was forbid from doing.

Like braiding two pigtails. She would have loved to have long, wavy hair, but the Living Decree made her wear her brown hair short, like boys did, but somehow messier.

Or like petting Tootsie, the calico cat she wasn’t allowed to have.

Even taking the umbrella would have been a nice thing to do, but there was also a Weather Decree which strictly specified that rain was forbidden on Mondays.

Giving her little brother a wedgie... well, that would have been something really fun to do, indeed. But being a lonely child, as it was stated in Maya’s Life License, made that yearning really difficult.

Anyway, the bottom line is this is how the story begins. With a breach.

Right in front of Maya’s house were the moving sidewalks, called travelators. You were supposed to use them every time you went outside. Nobody was encouraged to walk with their own two feet. Strolling along the streets with friends was frowned upon, and everybody had to use the travelators if they went to the grocery store or to work, and even if they paid a visit to the neighbor next door.

`I hate you too`, grumbled the little girl scowling at the School Travelator. And just then she saw her math teacher, Mr Testy. He was a mean old man who loved to make math really hard to understand. He particularly enjoyed giving paper tests to his students, almost every day.

‘Why are you just standing there?’ the teacher yelled at Maya. ‘Get on the travelator immediately, or you’ll be late for today’s test!’

See what I mean?

Maya had nothing else to do but to step on the travelator and mentally prepare for that stupid test, which meant she would repeat incessantly things like „I wish math ran out of numbers or „Maybe, if I think really hard at math, I could make it explode or „Why do we even have to study math, the only thing she’s good at is having problems".

But suddenly, an unusual thought sparked her mind. It was one of those forbidden thoughts people seldom had anymore, and it was pretty straightforward and short. It only had one word and that word was jump.

Actually, when the thought reached Maya’s mind it had an exclamation mark with it that looked like a sword or knife, so the girl felt a little bit scared. Jump! Jump!Jump! went the thought and the exclamation mark poked Maya’s brain until she couldn’t take it anymore so she jumped off the travelator. Fortunately, nobody saw her. Mr. Testy was already pretty far away and everybody else kept looking straight ahead, numbed by the daily drabness. Maya started to run and jump over the other travelators, but she was really clumsy and fell a few times. She didn’t know where she was going or why she did that in the first place, she didn’t even know how to run because the greys never ran. They got on the faster travelators if they were in a hurry. But even so gawky and afraid as she was, Maya finally escaped from the crowd and reached the more quiet zone behind the swarming street.

‘Well, if someone saw me and called the poligreys, I’ll be on the Shame Board again’, thought Maya. That’s how everybody called the Grey Town policemen, poligreys, for obvious reasons. As to the Shame Board, well, that was some wicked tool for discouraging any audacity or rebellion. It was a gigantic board –actually, more like a TV screen, placed right in the middle of the town, and whenever someone did an unauthorized thing, the Shame Board played a short movie about him and his disgraceful acts. The movie played in a loop, for hours and hours, so that all the rebel’s neighbors, friends and especially enemies got a good look at it. It was like being famous for a while, but not in the fun way. Maya remembered the first time she was publicly shamed and felt a cold shiver running down her spine. It happened a while