Everybody has a Flirt and a Sulker. They live on your shoulders, one on each side. They’re small creatures with large furry feet so they have very good balance. A Flirt has brightly-colored hair that points straight up. A Sulker’s hair is brown or black and almost always hangs down over its ears. Both like to wear warm button-up coats — even in the summer when it’s hot outside.
Your Flirt and Sulker have been there since you were born. When you learned how to talk, your Flirt and Sulker learned how to talk, too, and that’s when they started trying to change you. You see, your Flirt and your Sulker are always telling you what you should do, but they have very different ideas about what that is. When you decide to listen to one instead of the other, that choice can change the kind of person you are.
The Flirt really likes adventures and wants you to try new things, but the Sulker likes it when you stay home and read your favorite books. The Flirt wants you to have a lot of friends so you can always have someone to play with, but the Sulker thinks one or two friends is enough. The Flirt sometimes tells you to do naughty things, too, like take all your toys and dump them out of their containers onto the floor. Your Sulker can also be naughty. Sometimes, when your parents ask you to clean up a mess, the Sulker will tell you to pretend you didn’t hear them.
If your Sulker or your Flirt tell you to do something that you don’t want to do, you don’t have to listen to them. If either or both of them keep trying to tell you something you don’t like, you can teach them a lesson. To teach your Sulker a lesson you grab him off your shoulder, put him on the ground, kick him as hard as you can, and then run the other way so he can’t find you for a while. Teaching your Flirt a lesson is almost the same, but instead of kicking him you have to throw him as far as you can.
If you look carefully, you will see that most kids have a Flirt that is larger or smaller than their Sulker. Sometimes they are a lot bigger or smaller. This happens because the more you listen to your Flirt or your Sulker, the bigger they will get. If you see a person with a Flirt that’s a lot bigger than their Sulker, that means they have listened to their Flirt a lot more than they have listened to their Sulker. People whose Flirts are a lot bigger than their Sulkers can be a lot of fun to be around, but they can get annoying after a while. The same is true of people whose Sulkers are a lot bigger than their Flirts. They can be a lot of fun to play with if you like some of the same things that they do, but if you try to get them to do something new, then they’re not so much fun any more because they don’t want to try it.
You might be wondering where Flirts ans Sulkers came from. Your mommy and daddy have Flirts and Sulkers, too. When we got married, mommy’s Flirt married my Flirt and mommy’s Sulker married my Sulker. (The Flirts and Sulkers helped us get married because they wanted to live together, too!) Then, when we had a baby, the Flirts and Sulkers each had a baby, too: one baby Flirt and one baby Sulker. Right after you were born, they moved onto your shoulders and became your own.
Nobody really knows where the first Flirt and Sulkers came from. Some people think they came from outer space. Other people think they’re just really smart animals that learned how to talk and like to ride on shoulders and get you into trouble. I’m not sure who is right, but I do know that they can be very helpful about as much as they can be naughty. Part of growing up is learning when it’s good to listen to them and when it’s good to kick them or throw them away.
