into the pigeon. The creature stopped pecking. Like a gadget suddenly without batteries, it stood stock still. Its pea-brained mind registered Molly’s arrival. For a moment, it attempted to push her out. But its efforts were a futile grapple. In the next second, Molly eclipsed its personality and took charge of its body. She flexed her new, scrawny bird legs with claws on the end and stretched out her muscley wings. She peered out of its beady black eyes over her new pale, dirty beak. Below her, the ladybug whose body she’d borrowed stood stunned as it recovered.
Molly shook her feathery self and observed the inside of the pigeon’s mind. She saw rooftops and streets as though from a bird’s-eye view. She saw a great white sculpture of a woman with no arms, on which the pigeon liked to sit on sunny days.
Then she noticed that the other pigeon was still pecking at the ladybugs and knew that Micky hadn’t managed the morph yet. Quickly Molly gave the scruffy pigeon a sharp jab in the neck. For a moment she thought the creature would peck her back, since he was bigger than her. But instead it went very quiet.
“Is that you, Micky?” Molly asked.
“Just made it,” the scruffy pigeon replied, his voice a coarse trill. “Let’s fly up to that corner balcony before we get into any more trouble.” With the ladybug flying lessons under their belts, the twins flapped up to a balcony.
“Scary being a ladybug, wasn’t it?” said Micky as they landed. “Suppose it’s fine if you’re on a rosebush in the summer, eating aphids.”
“Yes,” Molly agreed, folding her wings. “And then, scary to be an aphid.”
Below, the traffic flowed past, a river of machinery.
“You know we’re in trouble, Molly, don’t you?” Micky suddenly said. “We can morph from animal to animal, but we don’t know how to morph back into
“Maybe,” Molly said, “we have to morph into a
Molly peered down at the two streets below. Near the hat shop was an alley where she could see some rats foraging near a smelly bin. She looked down at the main street.
“That old couple waiting for a bus,” she said. “How about them? You be the man, I’ll be the woman.”
The old woman was dressed in a brown-and-yellow tweed coat with a green hand-knitted wool hat on. She was sucking on a piece of candy and clutching her brown handbag tightly with mittened hands. She had a weatherbeaten face, pink cheeks, and little brown eyes that glittered behind round spectacles, and her gray hair was as thin as cotton candy. The old man wore a flat, dark blue beret and a nylon raincoat. Molly saw that imagining the old woman as a child wasn’t going to be as easy as she’d thought. She wondered whether mind reading would help, so, pulling her thoughts together, Molly sent out the message, Old lady, what are you thinking? However, to Molly’s disappointment, a bubble didn’t appear above the woman’s head. It was as if mind reading was something Molly could only do in her Molly Moon body. Molly shrugged her bird shoulders. She supposed it didn’t really matter. The book hadn’t said that mind reading would help a person to morph.
“Are you ready?” Micky the pigeon asked. Molly nodded. And they both began.
Molly looked about for a pattern. The bus shelter was good, as it had glass on the front of it that was stained with old watermarks. The drips definitely looked like mountains. Holding these in her mind, Molly did her best to imagine the old woman as a child. She would have been smaller and thinner, Molly thought, and much less wrinkly, of course. She would be wearing a child’s coat and hat, with a satchel instead of a bag. Molly’s eyes considered the old lady’s face and drank it in. And as though she had a magic eraser, her imagination erased the crow lines around her eyes and the puppetlike marionette lines around her mouth. The creases of her brow and the puckering around her chin dissolved, and the old lady’s mottled skin was replaced by the fresh complexion of a child.
Molly pulled the image of the water-stained mountain range into the center of her mind. And as the two visions merged, Molly aimed her being at the old lady. She felt herself shiver and quiver, and suddenly she lost all sensation of her claws, her wing tips, and her tail.
“Good-bye, and thank you!” Molly managed to cry as she whizzed away. In a split second she couldn’t feel her pigeon body at all. But this moment was minuscule, for in the next, the pouring feeling swished through Molly.
“EEK!” the old lady shrieked.
Molly had done it! She’d morphed into a
“Are you all right, dear?” her husband asked with concern.
Molly floundered for a second as the shock of her situation overwhelmed her. Then, seeing that the old woman’s personality was stronger than she had reckoned on, she concentrated hard. Molly felt like she was wrestling with the lady’s spirit, trying to pin her down. Molly was winning, but not entirely. Finally Molly took control, and the woman’s personality was submerged. As soon as Molly felt she was in charge, she thought apologies to her, explaining to her what was happening. At once, she felt the person who she was in relax.
Molly felt strange. It was extraordinary to be in another human body, and it was an extra shock to be in an
On top of the physical sensations were the mental ones. Molly was at once familiar with the woman’s life and her personal history. She didn’t see every memory at once, of course, for there were billions of them tucked away in the old lady’s mind. But Molly knew that she was called Sofia and that the man beside her was Wilf, her dear husband, who she had married fifty-four years before in a church in Rome.
“I said, are you all right, Sofia?” her husband repeated. Brought to her senses, Molly was now in the moment. She saw two street performers, one with a violin, the other with a flute, who were sitting near the bus stop filling the evening air with their music, and she saw the man, Wilf, looking concernedly at her.
“Yes, I’m fine,” Molly as Sofia said, an Italian accent rounding her words. “I think something stung me, that’s all.”
“Stung you? Where?”
“On my nose,” Molly said. Then she added, “Um, are you there, Micky?”
