Morgan and the Millipede
'Quite frankly, this is the best book ever written about a boy named Morgan, a millipede named Limpy, a cat called Ginger and an alien girl from the planet Ur named Sally' – The Ur Daily Express
'Superb! 5 stars!' – Ginger the Cat
'I’d give my 998th leg for another story this good!' – Limpy the Millipede.
Morgan and the Millipede
by
Carol Astbury, Nigel Barker, Nadine Browne, Michelle Edmonds, Phil Mayne, Tim Nelson and Sarah Ryan
Published by Write-a-Book-in-a-Day at Smashwords
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2011 Individual Authors
This book is available in print from kspf@iinet.net.au
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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About this Work
Morgan and the Millipede is a collaborative work by:
Carol Astbury, Nigel Barker, Nadine Browne, Michelle Edmonds, Phil Mayne, Tim Nelson and Sarah Ryan, all members of the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers’ Centre Thursday Night Group. It is a product of the KSP’s annual Write-A-Book-In-A-Day Competition, designed to benefit Children’s Hospitals in Australia, wherein the authors were presented with:
Two primary characters (a naturalist and a spacetraveller)
A non-human character (a millipede)
A setting (a school)
An issue (the loss of a limb)
They were then given one day in which to write a short book using all of those elements.
Contents
Chapter 1 Simultaneous Explosions
Chapter 2 Voices3
Chapter 3 Space Traveller
Chapter 4 Sally Meets Morgan
Chapter 5 Sally Wins Morgan Over
Chapter 6 The Story of Ur
Chapter 7 Green Slime
Chapter 8 How Do We Stop It?
Chapter 9 Run Away!
Chapter 10 Not Enough Water
Chapter 11 The Bridge
Chapter 12 Farewell
Chapter 13 Limpy’s Legacy53
Chapter 1 Simultaneous Explosions
The flash of light was possibly worse than the noise of the explosion, sending glass test-tubes shattering across the room. Morgan slowly wiped green slime from his safety glasses and stepped backwards, shattered test tubes crunching under his shoes. The smell was revolting, somehow managing to include rotten eggs and black bean sauce.
It seemed like a good idea at the time: test the strength of a millipede’s ‘armour’ with tiny drops of chemicals. Now the broken pipette fell from his blackened fingers, and Morgan couldn’t remember what liquid had actually caused the explosion.
He didn’t know it, but exactly the same experiment (and explosion) had taken place a long way away. The odds were about a billion to one that exactly the same amount of the same chemical was being dropped onto the same segment of a millipede’s back at the same time.
Morgan wasn’t like all the other students at Pritchard Grammar. He could hear his classmates playing footy on the oval nearby while waiting for the bus. He used to sit on the sidelines, hoping someone would speak to him, trying to fit in, but to the other twelve year old boys he was invisible. As he slowly turned deep pink with sunburn, despite the hat perched on his frizzy red hair, Morgan would find himself looking at the grass rather than the playing field.
There wasn’t much point in following a game anyway – no one was going to ask him to join in. Morgan had lost half a leg the previous year to cancer, and although he could run on his new prosthetic leg, he wasn’t up to kicking a ball. The fake half a leg was really convincing, and as long as he was walking on a flat surface (and wearing jeans or long pants) no-one would ever know. The only problem was that it was the height of summer, and he was the only one wearing long trousers.