The narrator is a 12-year-old boy who comes from a low-income family—Mom is an experimental school teacher and Dad is a freelance inventor. The family cares deeply for one another and they cultivate a light atmosphere: “My mom and I have learned not to ask too many questions about what [Dad’s] doing because if we do, he wants to use us a guinea pigs and we learned our lesson during what we now refer to as the Voice-Activated Door Incident” (2). The boy implies he recently came into money, and that his wild story begins with an old riding lawn mower.

The boy’s grandmother speaks as though “maybe a screw came loose” somewhere (4), but her roundabout logic always has a purpose. Grandma gives the boy her late husband’s riding lawn mower as a gift for his twelfth birthday, then promptly leaves.

The boy doesn’t have much experience operating machines, so he studies the mower, toying with the levers and pull-rope to make it start. As he stares perplexed at the machine, it suddenly feels as if the mower is speaking to him. The boy mocks the absurdity of the sensation, claiming that he’s “not one of those woo-woo people or a wack job” (7), but the machine compels him to climb aboard and trim his yard’s patchy grass with considerable skill.