I’ve been struggling to come up with ideas for the last few of these. “If I could be any animal” kinda came outta nowhere (not unlike a certain Randal Keith Orton), but I decided to roll with it once I realised I could Photoshop (poorly) a Shark-Bear.
Incidentally, I would also be a hedgehog so I could curl up and poke strangers with my hedgehog spikes.
Incidentally, April is Autism Awareness Month…
Copyright
J.B. Norman
Dunstana, Annie, Ginger, and Sally are gathered in the living room of Darkstone Manor, sitting around the low table in the middle of the room around a plate of cookies provided by Estelle.
“If I could be any animal,” Dunstana says thoughtfully, “I’d be a bear. Or maybe a shark.”
Her face lights up as a thought occurs to her.
“Oh, Shark-Bear!”
She grins.
“You know, like, the shark of a shark and the bear of a bear. Yeah. Awesome. Shark bear.”
“I’d be a hedgehog,” Annie says. “Because if there were strangers, I could just curl up into a ball and poke them with my hedgehog spikes.”
“Aww, Annie,” Sally says, moved with pity for her best friend. “Don’t worry about the strangers, me and Count Bunnyescu will bite them!”
“I’d be a bird,” Ginger says. “Being able to fly would be so cool. Also, the feathers are pretty.”
Sally looks thoughtfully down at her beloved rabbit doll.
“I mean, Count Bunnyescu is the best,” she muses. “So I wouldn’t mind being a bunny, too. But I think I’d like to be a crocodile. Or a lion. Anything that would help be at biting people, anything that would make it so that when I did bite somebody, people wouldn’t look at me and go ‘Grr, Sally. Why can’t you be normal?, because, crocodiles and lions bite things a lot.”
“Aww, Sally,” Annie says.
“Pfft,” Dunstana scoffs. “That just means you should bite them more.”
She looks up at Estelle as she comes to clear away the plate of cookies.
“Hey, Mom,” she says, “if you could be any animal you want, what would you be?”
“Hmm,” Estelle says, thinking for a moment. “Any animal at all? Maybe something that could spit poison into my enemies’ eyes? Some kind of snake I guess.”
Dunstana’s jaw drops at she stares up at her mother.
“M-Mom?” she stammers.
“Yes, dear?” Estelle asks slyly, smiling down at Dunstana.
“I c-can’t believe it,” Dunstana continues to stammer. “That is s-so…”
She leaps to her feet in excitement.
“That is so cool!” she exclaims. “That’s, like, the coolest thing I have ever heard in my entire life!”
“Thank you, dear,” Estelle says.
“Also,” Dunstana asks, “can we have more cookies?”
“I don’t know about that,” Estelle says.
Dunstana glances from side to side.
“C-Can…” she ventures tentatively. “…Kat have more cookies? She didn’t get any!”
“Yeah,” Kat calls, sprawled on her beloved plaid couch. “Because you ate them all before I could.”
“It was Ginger!” Dunstana declares.
“Dunstana,” Ginger gasps. “It was not!”
“Don’t be a jerk, Dunstana,” Kat says from the couch. “Don’t worry, Ginger. I know it wasn’t you.”
“So, animals?” Dunstana says suddenly, desperately trying to stir the conversation towards anything other than pointing the blame at her..
“What about you, Kat?” she asks, glancing over to her sister. “What animal would you be?”
“Take a wild guess,” Kat mutters before rolling over.
“Oh, I know!” Dunstana says eagerly. “A dog, right?”
The, uh, the joke is that Kat would be, you guessed it: an axolotl.
That was also a joke.
It’s that she’d be a cat.
Because her name is Kat, and all. In fact, I’ve made that joke already…
Check out the rest of my Spring 2024 writing exercises here.
And follow me here:
If you’ve enjoyed my content, please consider supporting me through Ko-fi or Patreon, or through Paypal by scanning the QR code below:
Follow Realmgard and other publications of Emona Literary Services™ below:
Subscribe to the Emona Literary Services™ Substack newsletter here.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
The author prohibits the use of content published on this website for the purposes of training Artificial Intelligence technologies, including but not limited to Large Language Models, without express written permission.
All stories published on this website are works of fiction. Characters are products of the author’s imagination and do not represent any individual, living or dead.
The realmgard.com Privacy Policy can be viewed here.
Realmgard is published by Emona Literary ServicesTM
