Instalment One Hundred and Eleven

"HUGS!?!" click to embiggen

Different things are created in different ways: Time carves mountains and worry lines, love breeds angels and monsters and hate multiplies hate.

The Rhinoceroos came to life through a simple spelling mistake. A slip of the pen, an accidental addition of a tiny O, which are more air than ink really, and a new beast was born.

Rhinocesroo, half Rhinoceros half Kangaroo.

Like all mistakes, Rhinoceroos were accident prone creatures with cheerful natures. They would hop across the savannas of Africa and the outback of Australia in mashes (mobs and crashes), frolicking joyfully, pounding the landscape pancake flat as we know it to be today.

There was nothing in this world they loved more than hugs.

It was their size that was the issue, size and the great big horn on the end of their noses. That combined with their perpetual desire for hugs caused trouble.

From across vast plains, one mash would spy another and the cry would echo, HUGS! Blissfully happy, each mash would charge the other in rapturous anticipation of impending embraces, their heads bowed, forgetting that they all had those damned horns.

So you will never see Rhinoceroos. They were killed by their own good nature.

Instalment One Hundred and Ten

Click to embiggen

The pen, the pen was the thing. She had never been able to write before she came across that pen. She knew how to write, of course, but she couldn’t write like she could when she held that pen. A pen that came at a cost. 

She and that pen, they told some stories, classics, the pen bringing them from her. And those stories brought her the world.

They would turn, in turn, a dull line to sparkling verse, polish a cliché to a gem, a groan to a laugh.

Soon it became hard to tell if she was scratching the nib across the page or if the pen was leading her hand. 

Ashamed, she only communicated in writing, finding her own tongue too clumsy and coarse, but on paper she soared.

Still she kept on writing, the pen wicking her wit, spilling her across the page for all to see in blood red ink. 

Her tongue withered to mute, she worked through writer’s cramp, hunger and sleep, until there was no more left to say. Her ink had dried. Used up by her pen and public, she died.
 
I found this pen, in her hand. It hasn’t left mine.