At Woomeroo — Daniel Quinn

At Woomeroo is a land . . . where mirrors wink in the sunlight as people signal one another from the hilltops . . . where a squirming pink infant, babbling with excitement, arrives by mail . . . where a man turns his kite over to his small son, who is borne off by it over the hill . . . where a rooster says,"Oh good. Wonderful fine beautiful good. Really. Because now I'm going to kill you" . . . where between Tiffany's and Ferragamo stands Tetwilder's, a boutique dealing in designer children . . . where a king struggles to evade an inescapable curse . . . where, with the addition of a girl's packing crate, the boy's refrigerator carton becomes a commodious two-room hovel . . . where a digger finds all sorts of things in the ground, including an attractive young woman . . . where a top court confirms: No Civil Rights for Stomachs . . . where it gets to be time for visits, and the children from the workhouse come, weeping in their rags and sooty shoes, and everyone begins to feel much better . . . where a girl standing in the boundless sea shakes her head and asks with perfect innocence: "What is land?" . . . where as a captive in Japan, a U.S. State Department courier hones his skills playing table tennis with the unacknowledged son of the Emperor Hirohito.