Free Patrick Griffin's Last Breakfast on Earth by Ned Rust

hard) nuts, and chalky yogurt. Patrick didn’t pry, but he gathered from this—and from last night’s dinner of eggplant mash, kale salad, and seed-filled pita bread—that the Pubers were vegetarian, like his parents’ friends the Nagars.
    Not that it really mattered. So far, at least, he hadn’t felt hungry in the slightest.
    The only discomfort he was experiencing—despite the overall strangeness of this dream—was a certain sensation of confinement, like he was being expected to sit still through an epically boring church service. Though it wasn’t that interesting stuff wasn’t going on; it’s just that he felt like he didn’t really have any control over any of it. Which, since it was his dream, he guessed meant there was nobody to blame but himself.
    Patrick glanced at Kempton. The light from the boy’s game was playing out on his cheeks.
    He hadn’t gotten a very good look at it but, from when they’d been walking and Kempton hadn’t had it strapped to his face, he’d seen that it involved spheres, cubes, and gelatinous blobs that grew, shrank, pulsed, and zipped around.
    He had a couple questions he’d have liked to ask—about what they’d be studying at school today, about what this “Lasters” thing was that he’d heard Kempton’s parents mention, about where Oma’s classroom was relative to Kempton’s—but he figured it would be rude, or at least pointless, to interrupt and instead turned his attention to the room’s central exhibit: a hovering, slowly rotating globe of the world. It was really big—you could have fit a small car inside it—and its textured surface was animated with swirling cloud masses and blinking temperature and weather conditions.
    Other than being unable to determine how they got it to hover and spin as it did—maybe there was an elaborate system of magnets under the floor?—he was most intrigued by how it was labeled. Iraq was I rak . England was ing L Ə nd . The Pacific was p Ə sifi k o ∫ un . France was frans . Luxembourg was L ux Ə m bōrg . Australia was ostr AL E Ə .

    Kempton moaned and unstrapped his device from his face.
    â€œHard level?” Patrick asked.
    Kempton nodded glumly.
    â€œSo that’s the storm you mentioned?” asked Patrick, gesturing at the churning red-and-yellow squiggle moving east across the North American continent.
    â€œYeah,” said Kempton. “It’s meeting all the models so far, should be a real record-setter. Lucky thing we live in AR 50 or it might really knock things for a loop.”
    â€œWhat’s AR 50, this area?”
    â€œNo,” said Kempton. “AR 50 is the yie. I was talking about our state of technological development.”
    â€œOh,” said Patrick. He regarded the big three-dimensional icon, i ð , hovering above the North Pole. “And what’s that?”
    â€œWhat do you mean, ‘What’s that?’”
    Patrick pointed. “The thing that looks like a backward six with a line through it.”
    â€œThe ‘eth’ in Ith, you mean?” asked Kempton incredulously.
    â€œI guess so. That’s a letter? What’d you call it? Eth? ”
    â€œUh, hello? How else would you write Ith ?”
    â€œI don’t know, I mean, we spell Earth E-A-R-T-H,” said Patrick.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œE-A-R-T-H.”
    â€œO- kay ,” said Kempton, widening his eyes and turning back to his binky.
    â€œHey,” said Patrick, leaning forward as he noticed other strangenesses: “And does that say Antarctica there?” The tribble-shaped island in the North Atlantic was labeled antarktik Ə . “Isn’t that Iceland?”
    â€œWhat are you talking about? Antarctica is Antarctica and Iceland is Iceland.”
    â€œBut, on Earth,” said Patrick, bending down and observing the continent at the bottom of the