Atlas and the Dino Ship

Once upon a time, a long time ago, there was a boy named Jonah who had a tooth that was only a little bit loose. Every night when he brushed his teeth his mommy would check his tooth and remind him to wiggle it so that it would come out, and Jonah would wiggle it three times gently. His mom would ask if he wanted her to check how loose it was and he would say no because he was worried that she might pull it out before he was ready. 

For about a million years, Jonah had been asking his mom to get him real bubble gum and teach him how to blow bubbles, and one day when they were at the grocery store buying fruit she winked at him and put some bubble gum onto the conveyor belt at the checkout counter. That afternoon, Jonah’s mom taught him to chew the bubble gum until it was nice and soft and then flatten it in his mouth, push it against the back of his teeth and then blow so that air would go into the bubble. The first time Jonah tried to blow a bubble the bubble gum moved and he had to start again. The second time he tried, the air went right through a hole in the bubble gum without making a bubble at all. The third time he tried, he made a bubble so tiny that it was invisible. But he kept trying and trying, and the more he tried and the more he chewed his gum and the softer it got the bigger and bigger the bubbles he could blow. Jonah was so proud of his bubbles that he forgot all about his loose tooth until it was time for bed and his mom told him to throw away his gum and brush his teeth.

As Jonah was brushing his teeth he noticed that his little bit loose tooth was not a little bit loose tooth any more - now it was a very loose tooth! In fact, it was so loose that as his mom was reading stories that night Jonah pushed on the tooth with his tongue and it fell right out. After story time Jonah put it under his pillow so that the tooth fairy would come and leave him a dollar, and he went to sleep. That was when things got very strange. 

There are more than 2 billion children in the world and each of those kids will lose about 20 teeth by the time they grow up; there’s no way that the tooth fairy could visit that many kids without using magic. In order to get quickly from house to house to collect all of the teeth and leave all of the dollars every night, the tooth fairy uses some magic dust that she keeps in a little bag attached to her hip. She uses one speck of dust to give kids sweet dreams so she can leave money without waking them up, and she uses one more speck of dust on kids’ windows which turns the windows into a kind of portal that zooms her straight from one kid’s room to the next so that she can visit all of the kids who left teeth under their pillows every day without having to drive in a car or fly in a plane or even walk up stairs. 

The thing about magic dust though, is that it’s very powerful and VERY unpredictable. Strange things can happen if you use too much. On the night that the tooth fairy visited Jonah she had a tickle in her nose, and as she was reaching down to leave a dollar under Jonah’s pillow she sneezed and a big cloud of magic dust came out and began to swirl all around Jonah’s bed. But the tooth fairy was so focused on finishing up her job and getting to the next kid’s house that she did not notice, and she stepped through the window into the next kid’s house just as though nothing had happened. 

Jonah had a very special bed that looked like a red Jeep, and when the magic dust got onto it it came to life and began to make engine noises just like a real Jeep, and as the magic dust swirled and swirled around the real Jeep bed it formed a bubble that began to float. When Jonah woke up and saw that his bed was a real Jeep and was floating in a magic bubble, he woke up his brother Jesse and pulled Jesse up onto the bed with him and they stared in amazement as the Jeep floated higher and higher in the room and then floated right through the window to their room even though it was closed. Jonah wrapped a blanket around Jesse to keep him warm and gave him a stuffy so he wouldn’t be scared, and then he went to the steering wheel of the real Jeep bed and used it to steer the bubble so that it wouldn’t bump into any houses or trees. Pretty soon the bubble was high enough up that he didn’t need to steer it, and Jonah and Jesse were able to look down and see all of the lights from their city and then the car lights running along highways that connected their city to all the other cities in their county, and then in their state. 

As they floated and floated and took in the sights, Jonah and Jesse realized that the bubble around their real car bed was drifting toward a dormant volcano but for some reason they were not scared. There was a light sort of like daylight coming from inside the volcano, and Jonah steered the car bed toward that light and as the bubble dipped deeper into the volcano the light got brighter and brighter and then slowly Jonah and Jesse realized that the car bed in a bubble had floated them all the way to a secret world where dinosaurs were still alive but the dinosaurs did not look like the dinosaurs they read about in books - instead they were all purple or blue or rainbow-colored and they had glittery skin with beautiful feathers and they wore eyeglasses and spoke a dinosaur language that kids can understand even though they don’t know the words.

The car bed landed in the dinosaur world, the bubble of magic dust faded, and Jonah and Jesse got down to explore. A dinosaur named Maurice offered Jonah and Jesse some skittles and told them that they had not had a human visitor for many years, ever since a hang glider who was using a bicycle-powered blow dryer as an engine had visited them many years ago. Maurice had many questions for Jonah and Jesse, like why do human kids go to school, what is gymnastics, and why aren’t all human houses just made out of legos. Jonah and Jesse answered as many questions as they could, and they rode around the dinosaur land on Maurice’s back and saw many strange things like trees that were made up of thin bark like paper that you could tear off and draw on with crayon rocks, all covered in moss that tasted like cotton candy. There was a waterfall where the water floated up from a pool and into the stream above and instead of mist the air was filled with bubbles. And there were bright pink ferns with spiral-shaped leaves that had little bumps on them, and if you touched one of the bumps then purple dust would come out and make you sneeze like crazy.

It was really fun in the dinosaur’s land but after a while Jonah could see that Jesse was getting tired because he kept rubbing his eyes, and he knew that it was time to get home so he asked Maurice to take them back to the floating car bed. But when they got there, Jonah could see that there was a problem. The magic dust had blown away and the bubble around the car bed was gone so it couldn’t float. When Jonah looked up, the mouth of the volcano that they had come down through was just surrounded by sky so there was nothing they could climb up on and even if there was, the volcano would still be miles and miles from their house. But Jonah had an idea.

Jonah asked Maurice if dinosaurs ever loose their teeth and Maurice told him that when dinosaurs lose their teeth they leave them in a special lake, and dinosaurs have been leaving their teeth there for so long that all the shores of that lake are covered with dinosaur teeth instead of sand. Maurice brought them to the lake and Jonah let Jesse pick out a tooth that was the same size as a kid tooth, then they used a red crayon rock to make a little dot at the bottom that looked like blood so that it would look like a tooth that a kid had just lost. They brought the pretend kid tooth back to the car bed and placed it under the pillow, then lined the whole bed with sneezy pink fern leaves, being careful not to touch any of the dots or release the sneezy dust. 

Then Jonah and Jesse laid down in the car bed and Jonah asked Maurice to tell them a story, and as he did they drifted off to sleep. Not too much later, the tooth fairy arrived to pick up the tooth and when she did she stepped on one of the sneezy fern leaves and purple sneezy dust came out of the bumps in a big cloud. The tooth fairy sneezed and just like it had the first time, the magic dust swirled around the car bed and made it into a real car, and the car began to float. Jonah and Jesse waved goodbye to Maurice as they sailed back up through the mouth of the volcano, and Jesse lay down again to rest while Jonah steered the car bed all the way back to his town, then his house, then his bedroom window and they floated right through to the bedroom. By this time Jonah was so sleepy that he went right to sleep next to Jesse and didn’t wake up again until morning. Jonah and Jesse never told their mom what they had done that night, and when she asked if the tooth fairy had visited Jonah and Jesse just smiled at each other and nodded, and showed her the dollar the tooth fairy had left.