The Troll Who Loved Ice Cream Trey’s school has been doing a thing where parents come up and read short stories to the class. The student picks the story. The parent reads the story. Sounds pretty simple, right? Right. Unless your child is Trey and the parent is Me. Instead of picking a story, my child decided that we should write a story. After many days of brainstorming, he finally comes up with, “A story about a grumpy, messy Troll that always eats too much food, and a kid that’s a Scientist who brings the Troll and a beautiful Fairy together so she can take care of him and they can be a family.” So basically, it is The Story Of Us and, while I’m deeply impressed that’s he’s already speaking in metaphor at 7 years old, I’m also slightly hurt that some part of him sees me as a grumpy, messy troll with an eating disorder. But oh well, you can’t have everything. He came up with the story idea, then plotted most of the individual elements. At the last minute, we added a change to the end (mostly for the sake of nuking a few “chapters” and keeping the length down, since I’ve got to read this out loud to his class within a 15-20 minute window), and he did the illustrations. And that, as they say, is that. We just finished it up just now, so it’s probably riddled with spelling, grammar and typographical errors, so shut up. The Troll Who Loved Ice Cream Googalaga was a troll. He wasn’t a very good troll, because as a rule, to be a good troll meant you had to be bad. But Googalaga didn’t care about doing mean things like hiding under bridges and scaring humans, and he had no taste for eating the sheep that good trolls liked to steal from the nice shepherds in the village. Instead, he preferred to keep to himself in his hut, and was quite content to pass his days doing nothing more than eating ice cream, which was the only thing he ever really loved. And he did love ice cream. Every flavor. He loved chocolate ice cream and vanilla ice cream, and even ice cream that had gone melty and dribbled onto the ground. He was a troll, after all, so he didn’t mind mixing a little dirt with his ice cream. In fact, one of his favorite flavor combinations was one scoop of vanilla, one scoop of strawberry, three scoops of chocolate and five tablespoons of dirt and rocks and sand. (Sometimes rabbit poop, if he was really lucky. But, like most sensible creatures, rabbits tended to stay away from trolls, fearing that they were very likely to be eaten if they got too close. And, with most trolls, this would be true – but not with Googalaga. He loved his forest friends, even if they kept their distance.) There was, however, a terrible problem with a troll loving ice cream, and Googalaga was all too familiar with it. In fact, it was a problem that he was determined to solve, one day. Some day. Maybe. If he ever figured out how to read and managed to get a little smarter. (Trolls, by nature, aren’t very bright, which doesn’t usually matter when coupled with a bad temper because being angry and stupid never hurt a troll. But being nice and not too bright? That could be a problem.) Not being a very bright troll himself, Googalaga never learned that trolls should not eat ice cream. They can’t digest it properly, since their natural diet consists mostly of rocks and sheep, and of anything nasty and squishy and squirmy that they can dig out of the ground with their big, fat fingers. But ice cream? Ice cream was tricky. The digestive tract of a troll was used to handling all things nasty, so any old troll could eat just about any old icky thing and continue on with its day like nothing ever happened. But when a troll ate something as sweet and as wonderful as ice cream…well, something different happened… Googalaga was sitting at the table of his dirty hut, having just finished a very large meal with a double serving of chalk rock with obsidian sprinkles, along with a side of nightcrawler worms and scorpion soup. He still had desert to eat, and he was trying to decide which flavor of ice cream he’d eat tonight, since he always ate ice cream after every meal. “Better go check the freezer,” he said as he pushed himself up from the table and knocking over the pile of dirty dishes sitting beside him that he meant to wash a few weeks ago, but just never got around to it. He shoved some old trash out of the way and kicked aside the empty ice cream buckets that littered the floor. Slowly, he carved a path from his chair to his freezer, where he kept his ice cream. “Ah,” he said to himself, opening the lid a bit to peek inside. “What shall I have tonight?” He dug around the freezer, pushing aside the frozen mudbug snack cakes and iced barnacle pops until he found the ice cream. He was running low. “Looks like it’ll be chocolate stinkbug surprise,” he said, hauling the giant bucket out of the freezer. “And I’m down to my last ten scoops!” Googalaga carried the bucket back to the table, where he sat down and pulled a large, dirty spoon from his back pocket. “Mmmmm,” he said as jabbed the spoon into the ice cream. “Extra stinkbugs!” It didn’t take him long to finish the bucket, since there were only ten scoops left. But ten scoops was enough. He pushed himself back from the table, and gently patted his enormous stomach with his big, fat hand. “That was delicious!” he exclaimed. He sat back in his chair, let out a long, satisfied sigh and smiled. And then, he exploded. ***** From down the hill and around the bend, up the stream and through the woods, a little boy in a long white coat heard a loud *POP* and immediately took cover under his chair. After a few minutes had passed and he realized he hadn’t been blown up into tiny bits, he stood back up and looked around. “Hrmmmm,” he pondered. “Everything looks ok, I guess. Nothing exploded, anyway.” He dusted himself off and pushed his chair underneath a long, black table. Different flasks and vials with long, swirly bits of glass were set along the table. Some were bubbling, others were smoking, and a few were making very peculiar gurgling noises. “Well, that was a little scary, wasn’t it, Atlas?” asked the boy, to no one in particular. “It sure was, Atlas,” he replied, again to no one in particular. “Oh well, no harm done, I think. Now, where’d we put that TNT?” Atlas was a very interesting little boy, no older than seven or eight, with short brown hair that shot out in all directions from the sides of his head, and big, blue eyes that darted back and forth just fast enough that they only made him look a little bit crazy. He lived alone, here, in a little cottage that had once belonged to his parents. They had gone away to hunt for food in the forest one day, and had never come back. That was three years ago. He was used to being alone now. And he talked to himself a lot. “Oh, never mind about the TNT, Atlas,” he said to himself. “Let’s finish the experiment tomorrow. I don’t think anything will explode tonight, anyway.” “OK,” he said back to himself again. “See you in the morning, then!” “Goodnight, Atlas.” “Sleep tight, Atlas.” He took off his long, white coat and tossed it over a hook by the stairs, which he then climbed up to make his way into a tiny crawl space that had no exit. He reached out his right hand and pushed hard against the solid stone wall, which began to grind and twist and spin open into a tiny room in his little cottage. His father had been a scientist, and he’d built himself a secret laboratory underground in a little cave Atlas had discovered when he was only three years old. Atlas used it himself now that he was old enough and on his own. He spent almost every waking moment down in the lab, doing experiments and coming up with inventions to keep his mind busy so he didn’t ever spend too long thinking about how much he missed his family. It helped that he talked to himself the whole time, too. He enjoyed his company. Stepping out of the crawl space and into his tiny room, he spun the wall back around and heard it click back into place. On this side of the wall was a bookcase, and the large red book that opened the secret passage slid back into its place on the shelf. If you didn’t know any better, it looked like an ordinary book on an ordinary shelf in an ordinary cottage. “Time for bed,” he told himself, as he shuffled over to his little mattress on the floor. He’d outgrown his baby bed a long time ago, but sleeping in his parents’ bed didn’t feel right. So, one night, he took the mattress out of the bed he could no longer fit in, and set it on the floor.