My cousin Will's piece.

This is my adult cousin Will's piece. Enjoy and comment and say hi.

Chapter 1.

Wherein we meet our hero

and a few other people.

There once was a young man with the improbable name of Flannelmouth Finnegan. That was not his original name. The birth record said Vernal Equinox Finnegan because he was due on the 20th of March, but as luck would have it his mother traveled over a road full of potholes on March 18, and he arrived two days early. His father, who had the good Irish name of Seamus, would have preferred Patrick or Francis, but he was busy at a tavern at the time the child arrived, so the mother got to choose. So Vernal E. for Equinox Finnegan it was.

When Flannelmouth was barely three years old, the mother, who was Rose, died while giving birth to a sister, so he hardly had memory of it all. The babe was whisked away by the Sheltering Arms Adoption Agency at the behest of the mother’s older sister Theresa and was never heard from again.

The father insisted on raising the lad by himself, though he was always a few dollars short of solvency and a few drinks short of enough. The child welfare workers tried to stop it, but they were overruled because the county was facing a terrible budget shortfall that year.

So Flannelmouth was raised, more or less, by his father. Beyond filling the child’s head full of stories from the old country that came over in the l850s with his forebears, he did blessed little for the lad. To be more accurate, Flannelmouth raised himself. Necessity is an effective if harsh teacher, and Flannelmouth developed an amazing ability to survive under adverse circumstances. Among other life skills, he honed lying into an impressive art form.

The Flannelmouth part? This is where that came from: He stumbled over an uneven patch in the sidewalk and bit his tongue on his way to school one day, so speaking became not only painful but clumsy as well. It took him a long time to answer a first grade teacher’s question, and when the words came out it must have sounded like he had a wad of cotton flannel in his mouth. The teacher, wanting only to be funny and not thinking about the longterm effects, dubbed him Flannelmouth on the spot. His classmates took it from there, so Flannelmouth it was forevermore.