When Robbi and I were contemplating Bobbledy Books (back before it was even called Bobbledy Books), one of the big questions was whether or not I was actually capable of writing books for children. And so I decided to find out. Every day for about three months, I wrote a story that was (presumably) for children. Some of them worked, and some of them didn’t.

Today, I was reviewing my file of children’s book manuscripts, looking for ideas as we develop the next book we’re sending out to the kids in the Bobbledy Club. I stumbled upon a story that made me chuckle, but that we’re clearly never going to make into a children’s book. So I thought I’d share it here.

Keep in mind that the following is unedited, has no plot, and ends badly. But there are things about it that I love.

Edson was a Robot

Edson was a Robot who had two legs, two arms, two hands, and three thumbs. His right hand had two thumbs. You might have thought this would be helpful, but it wasn’t.

Edson’s job was pulling a lever every fifteen seconds. Because of his two thumbs, it was difficult to pull on the lever at exactly the right moment. Edson got fired and had to live under a bridge.

It was lonely under the bridge, except for a family of rats who also lived there. They all had the right number of thumbs and so they made fun of Edson at every opportunity. Every time Edson cried, his water tank got empty, so he had to stick his head in the river to refill it.

One night, one of the rats loosened Edson’s neck bolt when he was asleep. The next morning when he went to the river to fill up his water tank, his head fell off and sank to the bottom.

It was awful. Edson’s head could see all the old tires, shopping carts, and car batteries that people had thrown in the river, but his body didn’t know where to go or what to do. “If I had an extra head instead of an extra thumb, I’d be just fine right now,” said Edson’s head. Edson’s body said nothing because bodies don’t talk.

“If I don’t get out of here pretty soon, I’m going to rust away to nothing,” said Edson’s head. Edson’s body got tired of waiting for Edson’s head to show up and jumped into the river. Fortunately, he landed on his own head. Edson’s body picked up his head and put it back on. Once he was all back together again, Edson walked toward the shore and went looking for a fluffy towel.

Before long, he found a nice sandy beach where a family was having a picnic. Edson asked politely if he could use one of their towels. When the family saw him, they screamed, ran back to their van, and drove away as quickly as they could. Edson decided that it wouldn’t hurt anything to use one of their towels.

A few minutes later, just as he was drying off his extra thumb, the police showed up and arrested Edson for using a towel without asking. They tried to put him in the police car, but he wouldn’t fit, so they removed his head and put it in the trunk. “Great,” said Edson’s head, which couldn’t see anything because it was pitch black in the trunk. Edson’s body was actually relieved not to have to see, hear, or smell anything for a while.

At the police station, Edson had to sit on a hard bench and then answer a bunch of questions. Later, they let him go with a warning because Edson was shiny and the chief of police liked shiny things. “But don’t let it happen again,” he told Edson sternly.

Edson didn’t know what to do. He had three thumbs, one of which he didn’t want. He didn’t have a job, didn’t have a place to live, and didn’t have any friends. Whenever he tried to ask someone for a towel, they called the police to haul him away. Life seemed unfair.

Edson knew he needed to figure out something useful to do with his extra thumb.

He thought and thought. “I could hitchhike twice as well!” he thought.

“I could give someone a triple thumbs up!” he said next.

“I could be a professional baseball player,” he said, though he wasn’t sure what this had to do with having an extra thumb. He just really liked the idea of playing professional baseball.

But none of these ideas seemed like the one that would turn his luck from bad to good.

Just then, a big truck rolled by. It was full of scrap metal. It slowed down just enough for Edson to jump on. He rode all the way to the dump.

At the dump, Edson considered just lying down on a heap of scrap metal and taking a long nap. “It would feel so liberating to simply give up,” he said.

But giving up wasn’t something that Edson wanted to consider. He was, after all, a very functional robot. Other than his extra thumb, he exceeded most industry standards. He could lift things that weighed seven tons. He could eat iron, melt it down, and turn it into wire. He could translate from Portuguese to Italian. “Why is that useful?” Edson had wondered from time to time.

“Don’t question your gifts,” his mother always told him. “Just find a way to put them to good use.”

As it turned out, the junkyard was run by an Italian man and his Portuguese wife, who loved each other very much but didn’t understand one another very well because neither one of them spoke the other one’s language.

Once they figured out what Edson could do, they were so excited that they invited him to have dinner at their house every night. It didn’t matter to Edson that he was a robot and did not eat food. He was so happy for the company.

The junkyard owner gave him a job lifting cars into the car smashing device. Once the car was smashed, they used some of Edson’s wire to tie it up so that no loose bits would fall off on the way to the construction site where some king was building a huge castle out of the cubes of smashed-up cars.

Edson had never felt so useful and so understood. The junkyard man and his wife were nearsighted, so they never noticed that Edson had an extra thumb.

So everyone was happy.

And there you have it. Part of me would love to see this illustrated as a children’s book. The other part knows that no actual children would benefit from that exercise. Let me know if this pleases you, and perhaps I’ll post more tragic outtakes in days to come. I have about 80 more to choose from.