Day Six:

It’s a miracle I’m alive really. I’ve managed to get out. It wasn’t as good as it sounds. Yes, I quite liked my jungle hiding place. But before long I forgot myself and I forgot the importance of my game of hide and seek – well, mostly hiding. You just can’t understand how much I love to sing and dance. I started to sing:

I’m Barney and I’m purple and I’m in the forest. I’m hungry and I’m lonely and my feet are the sorest. And, unlike the rest of me, my feet are rather blue. If you were frozen for a thousand years, yours’d be too. Oh I wish I could dance, to get the chance to move my feet, to feel that beat, to raise my hands in the air like, you know, I just don’t care.

And right there, in my jungle hiding place, I did. I couldn’t help myself. I danced. Perhaps the jungle rustled. Perhaps the golden-haired monster heard me. Spotted, I had to abandon my hiding place quickly. I jumped down out of my leafy oases and scurried to the nearest place I could find. I scaled up into a tall dark place. The dark place was filled with smelly, squishy, most soft things. With a little effort, I managed to wriggle into little cracks and found a cave, which, except for the unhappy smells, was also dark, darker perhaps, and altogether soft.

And so I remained for I don’t know how long. The nasty smells made me woozy and perhaps I slept.

I have heard of earthquakes. I have heard that the earth, from the inside, will sometimes shake. What happened then was not at all like that. I started from my sleep, from my reverie, when the earth dropped out below me. I felt it rather than saw it. My stomach pushed up into my neck. I panicked and clawed around inside the soft darkness but I could discover nothing. My fears and imagination went right to the golden-haired tyrant but I couldn’t see how even she could do this.

I continued to be tossed up and down and back and forth, jostled and tossed, jostled and tossed, inside my dark squishy, mostly soft place. The darkness remained complete. I could see nothing. I could hear funny metal noises. I blinked but no light would come. And then I felt the entire earth slant and slide. I became an avalanche. I was sliding down. I couldn’t grab at anything. Or rather, when I grabbed at anything it would slide with me. There was no foothold, there was nothing to hold onto. There was no way to stop this. A flash of light. But my eyes were startled and surprised and I could see nothing but white.

A splash. I was wet. I am so firmly tired of being wet. I was surrounded by squishy, mostly soft, and now thoroughly wet things. And then darkness again. Not quite complete. I tried to surface. But the lake, the swamp I found myself in started to churn and spin. And I was tangled among the squishy soft wet things. The spinning swamp smelled funny. Not unpleasant. But funny. This went on for some time. I was tossed and tossed in the spinning swamp. There was a nasty echoing clicking sound and then a sudden spin, not a churn as before, a spin, a wild, fast, unending spin. I, with a collection of squishy things that were less wet and less soft, was thrown, whipped really, against the shiny wall. The swamp left, but still the spinning, still the spinning, in the cold dark. I was sure I was dead. I had escaped the golden-haired tyrant only to die in this spinning darkness.

And it stopped, at last, I suppose. But my head continued to spin. I had lost all of my senses. I couldn’t put together a song, a rhyme, a word. And when light came, I thought I was rescued, I thought I had survived, I thought it was over. I was wrong. I was, together with the funny smelling tangle of squishy, not quite soft, not quite wet things, crammed into a new dark space. It was a cool dark, then a warm dark, then a hot dark and it too, spun. But this place was a tossing, sloppy, kah-lumping, kah-lumping spin. It got very hot. I could barely collect my thoughts, a thought. I remember thinking that it was funny that I had survived being frozen and that I should be killed by this flopping flopping heat. And just when I thought it was over, just when I thought I was at last to be dispatched from this cruel world, it ended. A buzzing noise. And then kah-lump, kah-lump, kah… And it stopped at last. I crawled out from under the less squishy, softer, and now very pleasant smelling things. I have since been collected and brought back to the place with the golden-haired monster.

But I live still. And on the plus side, I smell very fresh.

Bea Murphy