On what would have been a perfectly nice Saturday morning, George’s mother decides to go shopping and leave George at home to care for Grandmother. George is instructed to give Grandma her
medicine at precisely eleven o’clock. What George’s parents don’t know is how terribly Grandma treats George while they are away. Not only is Grandma cranky and demanding, she yells at poor George for growing too fast.
George knows he would be happier if Grandma was more like other grandmothers, so he decides to make her a medicine that actually works. If the medicine doesn’t make her nice, George reasons, it might be the shock she needs to set her on the right path.
George has just one hour to work. He carries a stewpot from room to room, dumping in everything he can find. He even uses oil and antifreeze from the garage and animal pills from the henhouse. He boils his stinky, smoking mixture on the stove. Out of nowhere, magic words pop into George’s
head, so he says them out loud while he stirs. The medicine is blue when George is done cooking, so he dumps a can of brown paint into the mix to make it the same color as Grandma’s medicine.
At precisely eleven o’clock, George
gives Grandma a spoonful of his medicine. Grandma shoots straight up into the air and hovers for a minute. When she crashes back into her chair, her insides are on fire. George pours water into her. Grandma swells and shrinks, stands up for the first time in years, and grows very tall and thin. Her head crashes through the ceiling. Grandma yells for more medicine, which George gives her. Grandma’s head shoots through the roof.
Grandma tells George her magic powers caused the growth spurt, so George gives some medicine to a
chicken to prove that it was his invention that caused her to
grow. The chicken becomes huge, and then lays an egg the size of a football.
When George’s parents come home, they are so excited they give the medicine to as many animals as they can. George’s father insists that George make more medicine so they can sell it and become rich. They have a problem, though. George can’t remember everything he put into the medicine.
George’s dad walks around the house and makes a list of all the empty bottles and cans. George cooks a second batch, and they feed a test spoonful to a chicken. The chicken’s legs grow very tall, but the chicken stays the same size. George remembers a few of the missing ingredients, so they
try again. The third batch
causes a chicken’s neck to grow very long, but the chicken stays the same size. The fourth try causes a chicken to shrink, so they give a whole cupful of the medicine to Grandma. She shrinks until she completely disappears.
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