Free Selby Speaks by Duncan Ball

the tip. It was hot and Selby was walking towards the shade of a big tree when he looked in the open drawer of an old cupboard. There, on the bottom of thedrawer, was a page from a copy of the
Bogusville Banner
with his favourite comic strip,
Wonderful Wanda, Maker of Music.
Selby put his head in the drawer to read it and then he climbed right in to get out of the sun.
    Wonderful Wanda
was about a woman who travelled back and forth through time trying to catch the villain who had stolen her grand piano when she was a girl. The villain, Larry Low-Note, had been frightened by a trombone when he was a baby and ever since he’d hated music. He promised to put a stop to all music; not only in the present but in the past and the future as well.
    “I will destroy all musical instruments,” Larry Low-Note yelled as he twirled his fingers around his black moustache and stomped a violin to matchsticks. “That will put an end to all this musical nonsense forever! Ha ha ha! He he he!”
    “I must stop that villain,” Wanda said, tearing through time in a spaceship that looked like a kettledrum. “If there is no music there will be no joy. The hearts of people will shrivel like flowers that fall in the desert.”
    And whenever she said this, in every comic strip, Selby felt a tear come into his eye and his nose begin to run.
    “Don’t worry, Wanda,” Selby said. “You’ll fix that scoundrel.”
    And in every episode Wanda caught up to Larry Low-Note and kept him from destroying another musical instrument. But in every episode Larry tricked her and she was captured and left to die a terrible death. In the beginning of the next episode Wanda always escaped and went on with the chase.
    Selby read the comic strip in the cupboard. In the end, Larry Low-Note captured her when she fell through some branches on the ground and was trapped in an orchestra pit. He tied her up and gave her to a tribe of cannibals who put her in a pot.
    “It’s all right, Wanda,” Selby said, knowing that she’d pull out the magic conductor’s baton she kept in her boot and get free. “You’ll get away. I know, I’ve read the next episode.”
    Just then the cupboard tipped backward and the drawer slammed shut. Selby felt himself being lifted up onto the council truckand then bouncing along towards the Bogusville tip.
    “Crumbs,” Selby said, pushing on the drawer but not being able to open it because the cupboard was lying on its front. “Trapped like a rat. Let’s not panic now. Hmmmmmmmmm … I wonder how Wanda would get out of this one? I remember the time she was trapped in a pit of cobras and she played her flute to keep them from biting her. No, that won’t do me much good. First of all I don’t have a flute. Secondly, there aren’t any cobras around. Let’s see now … Then there was the time she was tied to the railway tracks and she made a loud whistle with a blade of grass. The engine driver thought there was another train coming so he stopped the train just in time. No,” he said calmly, “that’s not much good to me either. Hmmmmmmmm. I’m not going to panic. There must be a way.”
    Selby felt the truck stop.
    “And then there was the time …” Selby thought as he suddenly remembered that the Bogusville tip was at the bottom of a cliff and that the truck would soon dump everything over the edge, including the cupboard.
    “But what am I talking about!” he screamed. “Wonderful Wanda is just someone in a comic strip! I’m a real, live, thinking and feeling dog and I’m about to be dumped over a cliff! It’s time to panic! Help! I don’t want to die! Save me!”
    Selby heard the driver get out of the truck and walk around to the back.
    “What’s going on here?” the driver said to a metal filing cabinet. “Who’s yelling for help?”
    “I am,” Selby said, knowing he was giving away his secret and that he would probably be the Trifles’ servant for life but not caring because it was better to be a live