I Licked My Way to Nothing

_We’ve been a fan of multi-hyphenate Liza Donnelly for a while now — her New Yorker cartoons, her newsletter, Seeing Things (subscribe if you don’t already!), her charming documentary highlighting women cartoonists, Women Laughing… So, when the idea came up at Narratively Academy to create a flash contest around one of Liza’s cartoons — and she agreed to illustrate the winner’s piece! — we were in. We asked you to uniquely interpret Liza’s popular cartoon, “I’d invite you in, but my life’s a mess,” and turn it into a flash essay about a hard sacrifice, and that’s just what you did.Keep reading for the end result, a dream collaboration between Liza and winning writer, Roger Pierangelo._ _Enjoy!_ I remember my mother collecting S&H Green Stamps in the ’50s. They were kind of like coupons, except instead of clipping them, you had to lick thousands of postage-sized stamps and paste them into little books to earn rewards.

Every night, after pasting 4,000 stamps, I went to bed with no saliva left in my mouth, feeling like I had just crossed the Sahara Desert. As the stamps became more popular, however, the number needed for each reward increased. Eventually, I simply stuck out my tongue while my mother swished stamps across it and into the book.

Then she told me the A&P was offering the ultimate prize: the Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopedia. One letter of the alphabet each week. I figured that by the time I was 21, I would know everything.

Every Tuesday night, I licked 15,000 stamps in preparation for Wednesday’s new volume. I became so dehydrated I was seeing visions of God and the Wright brothers in our kitchen. My mother sat in the car unusually long before entering the house.

We considered calling Mr. Funk, his wife, even his children. Surely someone could find a G!

The following Wednesday, Mom burst through the door smiling, carrying two books. That school year, everything I studied began with G: Greenland, gravity, glaciers, Galapagos Islands — even Allen Ginsberg. I tried explaining to my teacher that I was an expert on Hiroshima, Helsinki, helium and the Hellenic wars.