A story about impatience
Zippy and the Longest Wait in the World
The cake needs forty minutes in the oven and Zippy has checked it eleven times. A story about impatience, and what waiting is actually for.
3 minutes to read aloud · 🤩 Excited
Watch it read aloud · 3 min
The cake needed forty minutes.
Zippy asked how long was left after two of them.
"Thirty-eight," said Mello.
Zippy zoomed round the kitchen. Zippy lay on the floor. Zippy got up again. Zippy opened the oven door to check, which let all the heat out, and Mello said please do not do that, and Zippy said sorry and did it again four minutes later.
"Is it time yet? Is it NOW?"
"Twenty-six minutes."
"That's AGES."
Waiting, for Zippy, is not nothing. That is what nobody understands. For Zippy, waiting is a thing that presses. It buzzes in the legs. It makes the whole body want to fast-forward, and every minute is a minute of being held still when you could be going.
Mello, who waits without fussing and makes waiting feel safe, said: "Come here. Count backwards from twenty."
Zippy counted backwards from twenty, at a speed of about four seconds.
"Slower."
Zippy did it slower. Then Mello started humming a whole song, and Zippy joined in somewhere in the middle, and they got to the end of it, and then did another one because the first one had been quite good.
"How long now?" said Zippy.
"Nine minutes."
Zippy blinked. Seventeen minutes had gone somewhere, and Zippy had not felt a single one of them.
When the cake came out it was enormous and golden and smelled like the best thing in the world, and they had to wait another ten minutes for it to cool, and Zippy managed that too, mostly.
Zippy got the first slice, for waiting.
"Would it have been as good," said Mello, "if it had been ready straight away?"
Zippy, with a mouth full of cake, considered this seriously.
"No," Zippy admitted. "It'd have just been cake."
Zippy is the one who gets everybody moving, and the first to try when nobody else will, and Candyfloss Land would be a slow old place without that.
But Zippy can wait now. Hum a whole song, and the waiting does itself.
