I hadn’t gone far when I suddenly realised… the spiders! I dashed back to see that Muff was gone, Buff was sulking in his corner and the stranger daddy-long-legs reclined over Muff’s web. Where had Buff been when poor Muff was ousted? I spied the shrouded corpse Buff was trying to hide – ha! Gorging while his smaller brother was conquered.I twanged the stranger’s leg experimentally. He immediately shuddered in alarm. Buff shot aggressively out of his corner to the midpoint between the webs. As our bathroom roof is very small he didn’t have far to go, even in spider terms. The stranger had calmed his movements – Buff hesitated. I plucked the connecting threads several times but Buff decided he’d need much corpse juice to fight this taciturn foe and scrabbled back to feast again. The stranger settled comfortably into the stolen web. I decided to call him Tuff.
It was a dark and stormy night. Flashes highlighted the bloated clouds in pink then paused as if waiting for the encore. It didn’t come. Storms seem rather pathetic here in
The coolness is our main pleasure and we open our windows and door onto the balcony so the stuffiness inside is chased away. The downpour arrives with a gust of wind and abruptly all signs of the meager storm are washed down the roofs to lay glimmering in puddle heaps on the street, beaten by the raindrops until even the rain gives up and gathers its remaining troops to sulk away.
It isn’t that I dislike monkeys; in fact, I quite like them. I just had no wish to be savaged on the leg by an insolent, arrogant and no doubt rabid monkey. It sat down directly in front of me and looked away, as if to imply that it was here first and I was the imposition. I gently kicked the air in front of its nose… it bared its teeth at me. Ok, freaky! I won’t do that again. I threw a lotus flower at its head… it ducked. It ducked another then fixed its beady eyes upon me.
I saw a glint of something infinitely ancient and evil in its eyes and decided hastily that I was in the error, the monkey had clearly been here first and my inferior mind had deluded me. Scrabbling warily up and backing away left the creature unmoved… thankfully. If it had moved I may have been impelled by adrenaline to do something a little more drastic like running away screaming or kicking it down the hill.
This clearly would have meant my death, either by Ebola monkey or Anthropomorphic tourist. The monkey walked away. I gnashed my teeth and took a photo for posterity… of the monkey that is, not my gnashing.
Two pairs of uncomprehending eyes stared at Miriam and I. Lekuna, the eldest of the three girls, repeated our instructions. Those bewildered eyes metamorphosed swiftly into disgruntled and sulky eyes. We gave our reasons but clearly they weren’t good enough. What was our crime? How did we upset these precious forerunners of the future generation? Essentially we denied them ownership rights, including showing off and constant access, to the gifts we had just given them.
“How cruel,” said their faces, “to give us a wonderful pad and wonderfully coloured pencils and a wonderful sharpener and not allow us to take them home.”
What was our rationale? What made us unyielding to the ensuing pleads and sulks of these pretty young things? These girls are our Sunday School class and we had given them a small pack each of Sunday School drawing supplies to use each time they came to our flat for lessons. We know the ways of children and possessions. The likelihood of those items arriving with the three girls every Sunday was highly improbably: hence, our decision for them to remain at our flat.
We shall see next Sunday whether we have returned to their good books. In the meantime, we shall continue to teach them from The Good Book.
P.S. Photos generally have no relevance to text.
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