Zod Wallop by William Browning Spencer

delighting small children whose parents would never have been able to get their progeny into a tub were it not for the prospect of playing with these good-natured water babies.
    Botwobbles and humankind coexisted peacefully until a villainous entrepreneur discovered that a Botwobble, rubbed briskly all over the face, made wrinkles vanish. This rejuvenating process caused the poor Botwobble to dwindle to nothing, uttering a pathetic whimper all the while.
    Hard-hearted dowagers were indifferent to the creatures’ plight. Botwobbles were relentlessly pursued so that vain humankind could recapture youth.
    The book had a happy ending. Children refused to bathe without their playmates. Civilization foundered as millions of dirty, bad-smelling children brought social commerce to a halt. The lesson was obvious: it was dangerous to fool with nature’s delicate balance.
    All well and good except for the miserable yellow rubber Botwobbles that Harry had, in a moment of weakness and financial need, allowed a toy company to license. They looked much like Harry’s drawings of them, long, sausage-shaped critters with broad, goony smiles and bulbous eyes. But the noise this toy made when squeezed was a shrill, irritating whistle that sounded particularly plaintive when bathwater had been sucked into the thing. Amy had owned a Botwobble, and she had been skilled in making it elicit a dismal, asthmatic squeal that could disrupt the brain’s ability to think any coherent thought.
    Raymond owned one, and he carried it everywhere, squeezing it absentmindedly when he was agitated. He even took it to group, but it was quickly banned from that environment.
 
     
    Harry had been working late on Zod Wallop . Usually, when he wrote and illustrated a book, the drawings propelled the words. Then the words would surprise new drawings. The process was magical and energizing.
    Not so with Zod Wallop , which was powered by despair. It hurt to write it, creating real physical pain, migrainelike headaches that could distort his vision. The pain didn’t stop him, but fighting it was exhausting.
    When the drawing in front of him wavered, when the sepia colored dungeon became a meaningless blur, he got out of bed and drifted into the rec room just in time to see Melanie Jensen hit Raymond in the face with a Ping-Pong paddle.
    Melanie, a teenager as pretty as she was bad-tempered, turned away from Raymond, who was sobbing in that helpless, sagging fashion that somehow fails to inspire compassion, producing, instead, contempt. Raymond’s nose was bleeding copiously, darkening his mustache.
    Melanie glared at Harry. “I told him not to turn the TV off,” she said. “He’s not the only person in the world and just because he doesn’t like TV doesn’t give him any right to turn it off.” She flounced back to the sofa, grabbed up the remote, and snapped the television back on. David Letterman, bored and mean, blinked into lurid focus. He was insulting a guest, a celebrity who might, in fact, have been another talk-show host. A third person sat on the couch, a child dressed in a metallic jumpsuit and wearing what appeared to be a brassiere on his—her?—head.
    Harry snatched the remote from the end table and clicked the television off.
    “Hey!” Melanie growled. “What the fuck!”
    Harry leaned toward her. “Raymond’s right. That stuff will rot your brain and make your ears bleed.” He turned away. Raymond had left.
    “Hey, give me my remote.”
    “Sure.” Harry handed her the remote. Melanie sat on the couch, punching the remote at the television which refused to revive. “Shit,” she muttered. “Shit.”
    Harry left the room, the batteries in his pocket.
 
     
    Back in his room, he lay on his bed and closed his eyes. He never undressed for bed, never crawled under the bedcovers, never turned the lights out. The staff was always on him about that, but they didn’t understand. He had to take sleep by surprise. Preparing for bed simply