4/16/12
Flippy the Fish was a butterfly fish, which is a silly name for a kind of fish because fish can’t fly, and everybody knows it.  But Flippy wanted to fly.  Ooooh, Flippy wanted to fly.  At the dock there was recently a birthday party for a little girl.  Left behind with the yummy bits of cake that had fallen into the lake were several helium balloons left taped to the wooden mooring posts on the dock.  Flippy could see that those balloons wanted to fly, too.  “Those balloons want to fly as much as I do.  Look how hard they strain against the string that’s holding them down!  Maybe if I strain as hard as they do, I can fly.”  So Flippy jumped and hopped all day, trying to free himself from gravity.  But even though butterfly fish do have long fancy fins, Flippy just couldn’t flap hard enough to get airborne.  All of Flippy’s jumping practise helped him get strong enough to jump as high as the string that was holding the balloon down. “Maybe I can jump to the string, bite the string, and then ride the balloon into the sky!”  So he jumped and grabbed the string with his fancy flippers, tied it in loop around his tummy, and then Chomp!  He snipped the string with his little mouth.  ZOOM!  The balloon and the fish zoomed away farther and faster than little Flippy ever imagined he could.