A story about restlessness
Squirmy and the Sitting-Still Contest
Squirmy has to sit still for a whole story and the wiggles will not go away. A story about restless bodies, and the trick that actually works.
2 minutes to read aloud · 🤩 Excited
Watch it read aloud · 3 min
The story was twenty minutes long, and Squirmy had to sit still for all of it.
Squirmy lasted forty seconds.
It started in the feet. It always starts in the feet. One foot began to tap, and then the other one joined in, and then the legs wanted to bounce, and then the whole of Squirmy was a bottle of fizzy drink that somebody had shaken.
"Squirmy. Sit still."
Squirmy sat still for nine more seconds and then fell off the chair.
Here is what nobody sees from outside. Squirmy is trying. Squirmy is trying enormously hard, the whole time, and being told to sit still when you have got the wiggles is like being told not to sneeze. The telling makes it worse. Now there are wiggles and there is being told off, and Squirmy is not hearing a single word of the story anyway.
Tidy noticed, because Tidy notices.
"Come on," said Tidy. "Outside. Quickly."
"I'm in trouble," said Squirmy miserably.
"You're not in trouble. You're having a wiggle break."
In the garden, Tidy said: "Ten big jumps. As big as you can. Go."
Squirmy jumped. One, enormous. Two, enormous. By six, Squirmy was laughing. By ten, Squirmy's legs were pleasantly heavy and the fizzy-drink feeling had gone out of the top like a bottle left open.
They went back in. Squirmy sat down and listened to the rest of the story without falling off anything, and afterwards could say exactly what happened in it, which had frankly never happened before.
"It's not that you can't sit still," said Tidy afterwards. "It's that you have to put the wiggles somewhere first. They don't just evaporate."
Squirmy has the best dance moves in Candyfloss Land and can shake the grumpy right out of a room.
Now, before anything that needs sitting still, Squirmy does ten big jumps.
It takes about fifteen seconds and it saves everybody twenty minutes.
