“Melinda Mae”
The title character of this story says she will eat an entire whale. Her bites are small, her chewing is slow and it takes eighty-nine years to accomplish the deed, but she finishes what she started and completes the task as promised. The symbolism here should be obvious: Melinda represents the idea that tenacity and commitment can allow people to accomplish things they have been told are impossible.
“Hector the Collector”
Hector collects the refuse and cast away from society: bells that don’t ring and boats that don’t float among others. When he extends an invitation for others to share his treasures, they reject it as junk. While the story could be read symbolically as merely a variation on the idea of one man’s trash being another’s treasure, a deeper interpretation would be inspired by the accompanying artwork showing Hector as being absolutely devastated by the reaction of others and should focus on Hector’s appreciation of the outcasts of society and society’s rejection of him rather than his collection. In this reading, Hector comes to symbolizes those with a deeper compassion and empathy for the human outcasts rejected by society as ever so much junk.
Martians
A poem about Martians informs the reader that the beings of this red planet are strikingly similar to earthlings. Their clothes and shoes look like ours and they exhibit the same personality quirks. They even have faces identical human being with one exception. The accompanying artwork brings the exception to vivid life: instead of being situated on a head attached to shoulders, their faces are situated on a head attached to their behinds. One could read this as symbolism about being buttheads, of course, but the larger symbolic implication here seems to be directed toward the issue of prejudice based on slight physical divergences from our own.
"Lazy Jane"
Lazy Jane is thirsty and simply wants a drink of water. She’s so lazy, however, that rather than making the minimal effort to slake her thirst and fulfill her desire, she simply lays down flat on the ground with her mouth open waiting for it to rain. Jane is not just your average sort of lazy; she is the symbolic incarnation of that certain peculiar type of laziness associated with lack of drive and ambition and illusion that good things come to those who wait rather than those who make at least the minimal effort.
“Invisible Boy”
Like the poem about Martians, “Invisible Boy” is one of the selections that is equally dependent upon the words and the image accompanying. That image in this case is merely a rectangle drawn in black with an empty white space within. The words of the poem, meanwhile, describe this image as a portrait of a boy in his house feeding cheese to his mouse…except that the boy, the house, the cheese and the mouse are invisible. This poem may actually provide the central symbol of the entire collection since the drawing becomes a representation of the imagination by virtue of it containing something that isn’t there but once told it is there, it somehow manages to become real.
