“Harry! Harry! The house is going up!” Peter screamed to his twin brother, jumping up and down. Harry raced to the window.
“Whoa!” he mumbled as he caught sight of the beautiful white flakes.
“C’mon!” Peter grabbed the boys’ coats, “Outside, we can watch it go up!”
“Peter wait!” Harry yelled. “If we step out of the house we’ll fall back to the ground, and who knows how high up we are. We need gear.” Harry tiptoed out of the boys’ room being careful not to wake up their parents on a Saturday morning, and once safely past their room, he raced down the stairs. Thinking fast, he gathered supplies and tiptoed back to the boys’ room. He dumped everything onto Peter’s bed. The brothers donned helmets, kneepads, and elbow pads. “Tie the jump ropes together,” Harry said as he opened their bedroom window. He looked down and stumbled backwards looking sick.
“What’s wrong?” Peter asked; he looked out the window. When his head reappeared his eyes were wide with fear. “We must be really high up. We’re higher than the clouds.” Then his face brightened. “Maybe, if we climb down onto the cloud, we could pull our house there and live in the sky forever.” Harry jumped back up. He tied the string of jump ropes to the bedpost, and then his face darkened again.
“Do you think Mom, Dad, and Gracie will like living on a cloud? Or will they get mad at us?” He asked throwing the end of the rope out the window.
“We’ll just tell them, we saved the house from floating out of the galaxy.”
“Maybe we should get their help with this,” Harry suggested. “I mean, what if we fail? What if we get left alone on the cloud forever?”
Peter’s voice was grave too, “Then we would die for… give me a good cause.”
“Their sleep?”
“Yeah, we would die for the sake of their sleep.” Peter began to descend using the rope, and Harry followed. When they reached the cloud, they both grabbed the rope and pulled with all their might. Then Harry looked at the bottom of the house.
“Look, we did it! The house is on the cloud.” But Peter was distracted.
“Harry, that’s Rachel’s house; that’s the tree that’s always been in our front yard.” Peter’s face lit up with his new discovery, “Harry, the whole world is going up!”
“Then this white stuff must be stars!” Harry exclaimed. “I’m walking on stars!” He began running in circles. Then he stopped and turned to his brother. “Do you think we’ll run into the moon?” Suddenly a window opened in their neighbor’s house.
“What are you doing? It’s two-fifty below!” Rachel, their neighbor, called.
The boys ran to her yard and gazed up at her window. “The world is going up!” Harry screamed.
“What are you talking about?” Rachel yelled, “The world is orbiting the sun.”
“But it must have stopped if it’s two-fifty below,” Peter said thoughtfully.
“And these are stars!” Harry said, holding a handful to his friend’s window.
“Oh, you mean snow. The world is fine. The snow is falling down, like rain.”
“Oh,” Peter said, and his eyes adjusted. “I see.” His voice was dull and factual. Rachel closed her window. The boys headed back to their house. Harry raced inside and grabbed an old glass jar. He filled it with snow. “What are you doing?” his brother asked.
“I want to keep some stars.” He put the top on the jar and skipped inside. “C’mon let’s wake up Gracie and tell her.” He said skipping to their younger sister’s room.
Peter sighed, “I’m done for today. You can go ahead. Just don’t tell her what we did with her jump ropes.”
Harry didn’t seem to hear him. Peter went into he and Harry’s room and sat on his bed. He went back to his window, and for a moment it looked as if he was rushing upwards while the flakes stayed still but only for a moment. Then from across the hall he heard a door creek open, the springs of a bed, and his sister groaning. Then he heard his brother yell, “Gracie! Gracie! The world is going up!”
“Really?” There was a shuffling of feet. “Whoa!”