Kimberly Mae and The Fibble Wibbles Part One of Nine
Kimberly Mae and the Fibble Wibbles
Author: Carl Dobbs
All Rights Reserved. Copyrighted material.
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Chapter One: Practical Jokes and Fibble Wibbles
It was a hot summer day. Too hot to be sitting in Mr. Lambert’s office. Kimberly Mae thought that at least she didn’t have to sit in that classroom with the teacher always on her back. Mr. Lambert was sitting at his desk with his thick glasses on looking at some sort of records or something. That’s what principles do, look whether or not you had good or a bad mark here or there. Kimberly Mae figured that he knew all of her secrets by heart. You know, how many “D’s” she got on her spelling tests and how many times she was late to class. He wasn’t looking at her. That was important. As long as he looked at papers, she didn’t have to see his eyes and she’d be all right. He had super eyes that chilled you to the bone when they caught you doing something you weren’t supposed to do.
She looked at his balding head and tried to see if she could see herself in the shine. She read in a comic once that a girl did that and was able to see herself so she made a face. It didn’t work. All she got was a sneer from Mr. Lambert.
She found a hole in the pants legs of her genes. It was a small hole. She stuck her finger in it to see how large it was. The hole just got bigger. Momma would probably yell at her later for it but there was nothing to do and sticking a finger in the holes of her genes seemed to be a worthwhile activity.
Kimberly Mae anxiously watched the clock high on the wall, counting the seconds to freedom. “Fifty-five seconds; fifty-six seconds; fifty-seven seconds; fifty-eight seconds; fifty-nine seconds . . .”
Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrring!
“All right, Kimberly Mae,” Principal Lambert said. “Time to go home. Now let this be a lesson to you. Don’t give Mrs. Foster any more problems. Remember to be good. Now, go!”
“Yes, Mr. Lambert,” she replied as she grabbed her book bag. The petite blond-haired girl hurriedly left Mr. Lambert’s office and waited in the school’s foyer until she saw her brother come down the hall. He was wearing a T-shirt with a caption that read, Have you hugged a Fibble Wibble today? On the back of his shirt was a picture of a smiling, baggy-pantsed imp with colorful clothing, holding an M&M candy which was as large as his hand. “Hi, Christopher,” she called.
“Hey ya, Kimberly Mae,” her twin brother replied. “Man! That’s the seventh time you’ve been sent to the office this year. How do you think Mommy’s going to take it?”
“She doesn’t have to find out,” Kimberly Mae replied, as she straightened a fold in her red flannel shirt.
“If I were you, I’d leave town! Hey, where’s Tommy?”
“He might be out in front,” she said, “Let’s go.”
Kimberly Mae and Christopher went out the front of the Barnaby Manor Elementary school. Kimberly Mae looked at the wall clock. “He’d better not be late again, ‘cause if he is we’re leaving without him.”
From down the hall came a light-haired second grader. He wore baggy jeans with a patch on each knee. “Hey ya, Tommy!” Christopher shouted when he saw his little brother. “We’re over here! How was school today?”
Tommy ran up to them. “I had lots of fun!” he said. “They showed a video in class of a lion eating a cantaloupe!”
“You mean an ‘antelope.’ A cantaloupe is a melon,” Kimberly Mae said.
“Yeah,” Tommy replied, “This antelope was a melon, ripe for the picking, because that lion ate it alive!”
“That’s gross!” Christopher said. “But it doesn’t match what Kimberly Mae and I saw. Mrs. Foster had a real live snake in the class and it was breakfast time!”
“Ewww!” Tommy said. “How big was it?”
Christopher stretched out both arms, “Three feet long! And as thick as your wrist!”
“Just wait until I tell Mommy about what we saw,” Kimberly Mae said to Christopher. “She’ll be grossed out. Then maybe she won’t make me go to school anymore.”
Christopher shook his head. “I know you don’t like school, Kimberly Mae, but that’s no reason to do what you did to Mrs. Foster. That was horrible!”
“What did she do? What did she do?” Tommy asked.
“Your big sister,” Christopher began, proudly, “put the snake in Mrs. Foster’s desk drawer when she had her back turned, that’s all.”
“She did?” Tommy exclaimed. “Then what happened?”
“You should have seen Mrs. Foster’s eyes bulge out when she went to get her chalk! It jumped out and coiled around her arm! She screamed so loud Mr. Lambert heard her all the way from the front office. All the teachers from the other rooms came running. It took me and two other boys to pull it off her! I’ve never had more fun!”
“It must have been great!” Tommy replied. “All us kids heard something was happening a few class rooms down. Our teacher ran down the hall too. We didn‘t know it was your teacher screaming! Did you get sent to the principal’s office Kimberly Mae?”
“Of course she did,” Christopher said.
“I wish I could get out of class every day,” Kimberly Mae said as they walked out the front door.
The three got onto their school bus and sat together in the rear.
“Don’t you wish,” Christopher continued. “I don’t see why you don’t like school. I think it’s interesting. I enjoyed seeing the baby boa constructor having a meal in class.”
“Yeah, only I’d like to have seen Mrs. Foster be the meal,” his sister replied.
Tommy looked at Kimberly Mae and grinned a familiar grin.
Kimberly Mae eyed her little brother suspiciously. “Thomas, why do you have that giant smile on your face? Are you planning something?”
Tommy’s smile got larger. “It wouldn’t be right if I told you all my secrets, now would it?”
“Kimberly Mae,” Christopher said, “Why don’t you like Mrs. Foster. I think she’s neat.”
Kimberly Mae grimaced. “You can’t be serious, Christopher!” Then she smiled, and announced, “I know! You have a crush on Mrs. Foster!”
“You take that back!” he shouted. “I’m no teacher’s pet. I just said she’s nice.”
“Nice? Nice?” she mocked. “Why, I heard she once bit a bull for looking at her wrong. That’s how ‘nice’ she is. And have you seen her snarl? It’s enough to make the devil wet his pants. So how can you call her nice?”
“You tell him, Kimberly Mae,” Tommy said.
Christopher continued, “She’s not all that bad, Kimberly Mae. She makes me feel good about learning. I learned a lot yesterday about grammar.”
“Not me,” Kimberly Mae continued. “She makes me so tense that when she told us about past tense, present tense and future tense, I thought she was talking about my being tense yesterday, today and tomorrow.”
Tommy giggled but Christopher thought she was being too disrespectful.
“You’re exaggerating, Kimberly Mae. She’s not that bad,” Christopher said. ”She’s even pretty.”
“Oh yeah?” Kimberly Mae exclaimed. “Then why do all the kids dress up like her on Halloween? Huh? Tell me that?”
“Only you dress up like her, Kimberly Mae,” Christopher said.
“And you do a good job of it,” Tommy said. “You’ve gotten pretty good at acting like her.”
At the third stop they all got off and started toward their farmhouse. Kimberly Mae’s shoulder-length, hair swayed in the breeze as she hurried along the dirt road. The three siblings went through the wooden gate bordering their front yard. Kimberly Mae quickly grabbed a wild flower from along the fence, smelled it, then went on toward the front door. “Chris, take your key out of your shoe!”
“No duh,” he said. “How else will we get in?”
Christopher unlocked the door and went in. He then headed upstairs to do his homework while Kimberly Mae chose to look for Mommy. Tommy ran into the bedroom to get something, then scurried into the living room.
“Mommy,” she called. “Mommy, I saw something really gross. Mommy!”
“Yes, Kimberly Mae?” Mommy answered.
Kimberly Mae scurried toward Mommy, who was in the kitchen making strawberry preserves. “Mrs. Foster had a real live snake in class! Mommy!”
“She did?” Mommy finally said, as she gave her daughter her attention. Mommy’s tanned face was pretty, but it bore the appearance of someone who worked very hard for a very long time. She rinsed some strawberry juice from her housedress. Then she turned toward Kimberly Mae.
"Yes! And she did something really gross! I mean gross! She fed it a real mouse! Ugh! And the snake ate it too! In one gulp! While it was still alive and kicking its furry little legs and screaming for its mommy! That’s the grossest thing I’ve ever seen in my whole life!”
Mommy just smiled, “Oh, that must have been terrible! But you know, to the snake it was just breakfast.”
“Ewwww - gross!” She said. “Why couldn’t it just eat hotcakes and grits like everyone else?”
Mommy chuckled.
Thomas sneaked up behind her, “Kimberly Mae, you know the old saying, ‘Eat a live mouse in the morning and nothing worse can happen to you for the rest of the day.’”
Kimberly Mae started to laugh, but when she turned around, she saw Tommy had put a candy Kandy Mouse in his mouth, half in and half out. He wiggled the tail and back legs to make it look as real as possible.
“EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEK” Kimberly Mae screamed.
Mommy said to Tommy, “Thomas Matthew Doobebe! You take that out of your mouth!” And he did, but not before biting the candy mouse in half.
“Ooooh! Gross!” Kimberly Mae said, “AHHHHHHHHHHHH!”
Tommy couldn’t resist. He took the back end of the mouse and stuck it into his sister’s still-screaming mouth. Kimberly Mae froze solid.
“Tommy!” Mommy shouted. “Stop that immediately!”
“Yes, ma’am!” Tommy replied. “Ha, ha. Made Kimberly Mae scream!”
“Tommy! That’s just as bad. Now you get to the naughty seat right now!”
Mommy hugged her daughter, “Don’t worry, Kimberly Mae. It is a Kandy Mouse. It’s made of candy.”
Kimberly Mae returned to life. “A Kandy Mouse?” she replied. “I fell for that old trick? I know one seven-year-old who’ll get it for sure this time!”
Kimberly Mae found Tommy in the corner of the living room on the naughty chair. House rules say she couldn’t do anything to him as long as he was being punished. So she just sat there on the tattered couch and told him tauntingly, “Tommy! That’s the worst joke I’ve seen you do all year! You better be thinking about what I’m going to do to you when you get out of that chair! You better hope Mommy’s going to keep you there till you’re grown up!” That made Kimberly Mae feel really good because when he’s in the corner he can’t say anything, so she got to do all of the talking.
Tommy began acting like he was screaming like she did, then silently mouthed, “It was worth it.”
“You’re not sorry you grossed me out with a Kandy Mouse. You’re having fun.” Kimberly Mae said. She sat there trying to think of a good get back. Mommy finished the preserves and came into the room.
“How long is he gonna be there, Mommy?” Kimberly Mae asked.
“A half hour!” she said. Then she went to Tommy and gave him a kiss on the forehead. “That’s to help you to be a better boy!” Then she said to Kimberly Mae, “You don’t have time to sit here. Mr. McGregor called and said he needed you!”
“Mr. McGregor!” Kimberly Mae shouted. “Oh boy!” She quickly left and didn’t stop running until she got to the next farm over. Mr. McGregor meant money for candy when her mom and dad didn’t have any. Kimberly Mae went over to Mr. McGregor’s house to work in his rose garden. When she rang his doorbell and the door opened, there stood her old friend clad in denim overalls and smelling like the field.
“Hello, Kimberly Mae! Thank you for coming. Are you ready to work?” he said, brightly.
“I sure am, Mr. McGregor! I’m real ready.”
He smiled the sunniest smile his round face could manage. “That’s great Kimberly Mae. But before we get started: milk and cookies!”
“Yummy!” she said.
They had freshly baked chocolate chip cookies and milk. Then they got on their gloves and went into his garden to prune the rose bushes. Mr. McGregor was one of two farmers in Maryland with prize rose gardens. He won the gardening club contest almost every year, and supplied the local flower shop with his blooms. Kimberly Mae thought he looked funny because he always used mustache wax on his whiskers that made them shoot out, left and right, from the sides of his upper lip.
After the cookies, they began to work. “Be sure not to prick yourself with a thorn, Kimberly Mae. But if you do, there are Band-Aids in the usual place,” Mr. McGregor cautioned.
“I won’t,” she said. “I’ll be careful.”
They were weeding and pruning his rose bushes for nearly two hours. It was hard work, but she knew there was candy in the future. After the roses were pruned, Mr. McGregor said, “And now for your payment!” He took out a ten-dollar bill and handed it to her.
“Wow! Ten whole dollars!” she said. “Thank you, Mr. McGregor!”
“I thank you, Kimberly Mae. I’ve gotten too old for this work. Now don’t forget to take the pruned flowers,” he said, handing her a large paper bag full of blooms.
“Gee, thanks, Mr. McGregor. See ya.”
Kimberly Mae counted the blooms. There were thirty-five in all. She walked to the grocery store and stood in front, waiting for a customer. Finally, Mrs. Connie Jenkins came by in her car.
“Flowers today Mrs. Jenkins?” Kimberly Mae said.
“Sure enough!” she said. “I like them pretty flowers. They still two bucks each?” She bought one from Kimberly Mae. After that Mr. Arias bought two of them, then the Ollar brothers bought some for their mom. It took her three hours, but she sold all the ones that were fresh and pretty enough to be sold. She counted her money. “Forty-two dollars!” she said. “With the ten that Mr. McGregor gave me, that makes fifty-two. That was the most I made in a long time.”
Next, she went into Mr. Drake’s convenience store. “Hello Kimberly Mae,” Mr. Drake said. “What can I get for you today?” Mr. Drake was an old man who always had a good word to say. Kimberly Mae yelled, “I got fifty-two dollars! I earned it by selling roses! So I got lots of money.”
“Fifty-two dollars! Why, that is a lot for a ten-year-old girl to have. What do you plan on doing with it?” he asked, with a smile on his slender face.
Kimberly Mae didn’t have to tell him. She went right to the candy shelf and started picking up all the bags of M&Ms she could. “Just tell me when I have fifty-two dollars worth.”
“Oh, you don’t want to buy that much!” he said. “You wouldn’t be able to carry it all!”
So he got out a big bag and started loading it with all the M&Ms Kimberly Mae could carry. Mr. Drake took her money, added up her purchase, and gave her the change. Thirty-seven dollars left over.
“Thanks, Mr. Drake!” Kimberly Mae said. “I love M&Ms.”
“Have fun eating them kid,” he said, as she exited.
That bag was heavy for a ten-year-old little girl. She heaved it up and waddled out the door. It was just her luck that when she got home, the front door was locked. Her Mommy left a note on the door saying, “Kimberly Mae, Tommy and I are going to Mr. Drake’s store. We’ll be back in five minutes. I’ll get you a bag of M&Ms.”
“That’s all I need, more M&Ms. But I guess we can’t have too many of them!” she said.
Kimberly Mae started to walk to the back yard, to go into the rear door Mommy always left unlocked. “This is not the place to be with a bag full of M&Ms,” she said to herself. “No, this is certainly not the place to be. I had better be careful.”
She tiptoed around a soccer-ball-sized opening in the ground. Suddenly, Kimberly Mae heard a little voice from below, “Hey, look!” Then a tiny bugle sounded.
“Oh no!” Kimberly Mae cried out. “I’m caught!”
“Tax time,” she heard.
“Not while I can still run!” she shouted.
She darted toward the door, but that bag was just too clumsy. She lost her balance. “Whooooops!” she called out, as she tumbled. Bags of M&Ms scattered in front of her. “Stop! Time out!” she screamed. “It doesn’t count this time! Wait! Slow down!” she yelled in vain.
Suddenly, hundreds of tiny Fibble Wibbles come out of their underground burrows. The Fibble Wibbles were like little people. Each was about three inches tall and wore brightly colored, baggy clothes. They quickly charged toward the candy.
“STOP!” Kimberly Mae shouted. “It’s mine! You can’t do this!” She hastily grabbed hands full of M&M bags, stashing them into her pockets. “I got some back! Nanny nanny poo poo!” she shouted. She stood and started to back away.
“Not for long!” one little guy shouted.
Kimberly Mae felt hooked threads cling to her shirt. Fibble Wibbles scaled her, as one would a sheer cliff, to get to her pockets.
“Cheaters!” she said. “Get off me!” She felt one hook slightly prick her tummy. “Ouch!” she said. Get off of me!”
“Cheaters!” she heard them repeat, mockingly. “Nanny nanny poo poo,” they taunted.
One Fibble Wibble stood in her pocket and pushed out any bag of candy she tried to put in. Dozens of waiting Fibble Wibble children scurried after them like little mice after a dropped piece of cheese. “Got to pay your tribute,” one of them called out.
“You Fibble Wibbles! You got my M&Ms!” Kimberly Mae ran after them. “I’ll get you!” she said. “I’ll get you all for sure!”
Kimberly Mae watched as bag after bag of her candy was hoisted from her grocery bag and sent hastily through the large colony holes.
“Give them back!” she said. “I’m too young to owe taxes,” she shouted to no use.
Too late. Now they were all down their holes. Not one was in sight. Kimberly Mae stood there silently for a second, then sat on the back steps and lowered her head into her hands. “I worked so hard,” she said. “But I should have never taken candy into the yard. That’s their territory.”
“Kimberly Mae! What’s wrong?” she heard. Looking up, she saw that Mommy was standing over her, having come home from the store. Zack and Erica, her baby brother and sister, were tagging behind her.
“My candy is gone! I had a whole bag!”
“Oh dear,” Mommy said. “You took a bag of candy into the yard? What did you have? M&Ms?” She looked at Kimberly Mae’s sad eyes, then kissed her daughter on the forehead, “That’ll make things better.” And it did. Mommy’s kisses always healed the soul. They tingled like a morning spring shower.
Mommy and Kimberly Mae stood there looking at each other for a good, long time. Then Mommy said, “You know they are probably gone for good. This isn’t the first time things like this have happened. And you know they do have their rights. Now come on inside so I can fix you some dinner.” She turned to go inside, then turned back to Kimberly Mae. “Oh, here take these.” She reached into her pocket and threw her daughter the promised bag of M&Ms. “At least you have these.”
“Thank you, Mommy.” She stuck the candy into her pocket, then took out the cash that was there. “Here’s the money left over from Mr. McGregor’s job.”
“Thank you, Kimberly Mae,” Mommy replied. “My! That’s quite a lot. Thirty-seven dollars. You were busy! This deserves a reward. Sometime this week, I’ll have your favorite pie ready for breakfast.”
“Blueberry pie for breakfast? Thank you Mommy!”
“You deserve it, dear.”
When Mommy went inside, Kimberly Mae sat and thought for a second. “Maybe all is not lost. Maybe I can still get my M&Ms back. Maybe it’s worth a try.” She opened the bag she got from Mommy, walked to the middle of the farmyard and scattered the M&Ms onto the ground. Then chanted,
“Fibble Wibble king,
Dance and sing!
Accept the tribute
That I bring!”
Immediately, Kimberly Mae felt a tugging at her right pant leg from behind. She turned around and looked down. There was King Fibble, the king of the Fibble Wibbles, looking as fat and jolly as ever! He had his aluminum crown on and his royal-purple robe. An M&M was half-in and half-out of his front shirt pocket. He had a half-eaten M&M in his right hand.
“The nerve of him!” she thought. “He came out of his Wibble hole munching one of my treats!”
“Yes, Kimberly Mae? How can I help you, my darling child?”
She bent over with her chin to the ground, so she could talk to him eye to eye. “Your Fibble Wibbles took my M&Ms!” she said.
“Yes, ha ha,” he laughed. “Of course we took them! What else would we do? You handed them right to us that time! We got them fair and square!”
“Fair and square!” came out of the holes as hundreds of Fibble Wibbles joined in.
“Well, I want them back!” she said. Kimberly Mae heard hundreds of giggling Fibble Wibbles.
“You WHAT?” he shouted. “That isn’t part of the game! We got these by the rules!”
“Rules schmools!” she said. “I want my M&Ms!”
She got up and ran toward the garden hose with drenched Fibble Wibbles in her mind’s eye. But before she could turn around again thousands of Fibble Wibbles popped up out of their holes, each with his own squirt gun. Then King Fibble asked in his loud, baritone voice, “You want to try it?”
She stood there for a bit, then decided to turn off the water. But when her back was turned, she felt her whole body being drenched by hundreds of tiny water streams. Kimberly Mae ran, screaming “You had no right to squirt me! That’s not fair!”
“Yes it is!” she heard, as she entered the house through the back door.
Kimberly Mae ran upstairs and dried off. “This’ll fix them,” she said, as she took balloons out of her toy box. She went into the bathroom and started to fill each of them with water. “I can lob these from the window safely,” she thought. But she stayed at that window till she got quite discouraged, without seeing a single target. “Well if they aren’t coming out, I’ll go to them.” So Kimberly Mae went downstairs with a whole bag full of balloons, then went outside. “They won’t be able to do anything when I toss these into their holes!”
Just when she got out the door, she heard a tiny voice from above her. “NOW!” As Kimberly Mae turned toward the voice, she felt dozens of water balloons falling down on her all at once. Through the splashing water she saw hundreds of Fibble Wibbles on the roof rolling more balloons into position.
“NO!” she shouted! “You Fibble Wibbles! Now I’m drenched again!” she cried as she ran inside.
Tommy was in the living room, watching Star Trek. When he saw her, he started to giggle. “You can’t win the battle Kimberly Mae!” he shouted. “There are just too many of them! How many times they gonna drench you before you give up?”
“You just zip up your mega-mouth!” Kimberly Mae said. Then she went upstairs and changed clothes to plan phase two, seeing phase one was such a failure.
Just then, Daddy came up. Now Daddy was a short man who worked hard on the farm. He was jolly and kind but when he gave orders, Kimberly Mae knew she had to obey. He said, “Kimberly Mae, Tommy told me what was going on. Look, you can replace the M&Ms but you’ll bring yourself to ruin if you try to get back at the Fibble Wibbles! Now I want you to stop it right now! Hang the towel and do the Dance of Defeat.”
“But Daddy!” she pleaded.
“Tut, tut. No arguing.” He left to go back downstairs.
It was no use. Kimberly Mae sighed, then went to the linen closet for a white towel. She moseyed back to her room to hang it out her window. Then she called out:
“Fibble Wibble king
Dance and sing,
With this to-wel in your sight,
Let this end our Fib-ble fight.”
Then she hopped on one foot and halfheartedly called out, “Tweet - tweet.” Kimberly Mae heard a “hurrah” from outside her window. “Dumb ceremony,” she mumbled to herself. Kimberly Mae knew Daddy was right. All she could do now, was to stay dry and think about all the M&Ms that she could have been eating, and wouldn’t get a chance to.
“Carl,” Mommy said to Daddy, “I don’t mind them taking our junk food. It’s bad for us to eat so many sweets anyway. And look, aren’t they entertaining us now?”
“I suppose so,” Daddy said. “It’s a good trade off. You know, honey, some of the Fibble Wibbles seem to be lacking M&Ms. I wonder if they are running out.” Then he said to Tommy, “Son, get three of the four large bags of M&Ms I just brought home from the store. Then give them to the Fibble Wibbles. I think they might need them.”
“Give them M&Ms?” he said, quite amazed. “Haven’t they taken enough?”
“Why shouldn’t we give to them?” Daddy said. “This much entertainment would have cost us twenty times as much if we had to pay for it. Why not give them their due?”
Within seconds of the time Tommy put the opened bag onto the ground, dozens of Fibble Wibbles came to quickly carry it away. One stayed behind and shouted, “Thanks!” before scurrying away.
“You’re welcome,” Daddy and Mommy called.
The Doobebe family listened and danced for hours, after which Kimberly Mae, Christopher and Tommy retired to their room. Mommy took Zack and Erica upstairs and put them to bed. Everyone hit the sack, exhausted. The only sound you could hear in the stillness of the night is the sound of, as was supposed, a far away Fibble Wibble yodeling.
