Read Ali in Wonderland: And Other Tall Tales for Free Online

I’m leaving! I’m running away!” And like that, she threw open the screen door and started waddling down the front path. My mother walked into the living room, where I was spread out on the floor surrounded by paper, pastels, paint, and a bunch of clamshells. “Go with your sister.”
    I looked up at her. “I don’t want to run away!”
    My mother tapped her foot on the knotty pine floor. “Please run away with your sister! I don’t want her out there alone!”
    “But I don’t want to run away!”
    “I’m asking you nicely, now go!”
    I was getting irritated. “I don’t want to run away, Mom! I want to stay home! I’m happy!”
    At this point she snapped, “GET OUT!”
    I stood up in a huff, grabbed a Channel Thirteen tote bag, and filled it with a can of tuna, a bottle of juice, two apricot fruit rolls, and a spoon. I slammed the screen door as I ventured out to find my sister lurching like Frankenstein through a cluster of pine trees. It’s hard enough to swallow your mother forcing you to run away, but when I finally caught up with Sissy, she screamed at me to go home. I considered running away on my own at this point, but knew my mother would invest all her efforts in finding Sissy first, and I’d be in Tijuana doing tricks with a donkey before anyone realized I wasn’t at breakfast. So I followed Sissy from twenty feet away like some nymph stalker. We were in a part of Massachusetts that was foreign to us, so I just followed her path and prayed it would lead to a Howard Johnson. Finally, as dusk began to fall, we collided with an actual paved road, an occasional car whizzing by. Sissy stormed along the side of the road and I scampered behind, giving passing cars the “don’t ask” look. I was seething. We were in danger of missing The Partridge Family , and I had forgotten a can opener for the tuna.
    We walked for yards. Sissy finally stopped and rested her cast against a stone wall surrounding a cemetery. A small cemetery, probably one family’s worth of deceased. I was starving and ready to face the consequences of going home for food and shelter. “I’m never going home,” Sissy huffed, trying to catch her breath.
    “You know it’s Friday night! We’re going to miss The Brady Bunch , Partridge Family , and Love, American Style !” I was on the verge of bursting into tears. I felt guilty; here was my sister, who had just had her back split open like a chicken breast, with a metal rod skewering her like a shish kebab, and my shallow universe was shattered by the idea of not hearing a family of bad shag haircuts belt out, “I think I love you.” Even though Sissy was tall, blond, and very beautiful, she didn’t deserve that horrific operation. Well, maybe her svelte legs merited a root canal, but not this.
    “What do I have to do for us to go home?” I asked as Sissy looked away. Silence. And then: “If you can make me laugh, I’ll go home.”
    I repeated the terms, so we were crystal clear: “If I make you laugh, you will go home?”
    “Yes,” she snorted. For the record, Sissy hadn’t cracked a smile in eight months.
    It’s difficult to be funny on demand. In the woods. Without pay. I’m sure if Richard Pryor had been in my position, he wouldn’t have jumped up on a mound of dirt and delivered a thirty-minute set, in Massachusetts, with no crack.
    I zipped across the road to the cemetery, because where better to find yucks than a plot of dead people? I looked around for props and anything that would trigger some creative initiative. Sissy stared at me like she was watching the Nuremberg trials. I found an unused black garbage bag caught in a branch. I hid behind the largest tombstone (clearly the moneymaker of the family), out of view from Sissy and the road. I stripped down to my white undies with pink faded bows. I used my teeth to make holes in the top and sides of the bag and pulled it over my head. I gathered a bunch of twigs and meticulously wrapped them around small