Saturday 23 January 2010

And they all lived hap ... aargh!

Don’t you just hate it when you’re in the middle of an interesting dream and someone wakes you up? And then you never get to find out what happens???

This morning I was blissfully asleep, dreaming I was browsing in a bookshop. I found this gorgeous picture book about a little black chicken. He was drawn very simply, just a little egg-shaped blob with stumpy wings and two dots for eyes, but really cute.

Every day all the chickens gathered in a clearing in the woods to see Mr Fox’s magic show. Every day Mr Fox made one of the chickens magically disappear, which the other chickens thought was cool, but our little black hero was getting suspicious. So he decided to run Mr Fox out of town.

His plan was to scare Mr Fox away, so he gathered up all the plastic bottles and styrofoam hamburger boxes the chickens left littering the clearing after the show every day. He turned all this litter into styrofoam chickens and arranged them in the trees of the clearing. There was a great illustration of all these ghostly white styrofoam chickens perched in the trees at night, hundreds of them staring accusingly out of the dark.

The little black chicken climbed into the trees too and began a ghostly squawking, pretending to be the voice of all the dead chickens, so when Mr Fox came out to see what was going on he’d be terrified, thinking the ghosts of all his victims were after him.

Unfortunately Mr Fox wasn’t taken in. Even though it was night time, the moon was out and it was easy to spot one black chicken among all the white ones. It was as Mr Fox stared hungrily up at him that our hero realised he was now stuck in this tree with no escape and maybe this hadn’t been such a good idea after all.

And then …

“Brring brring, brring brring.”

No, I am not attempting to render the sound of a phone ringing. Those are the actual words that were spoken into my sleeping ear.

Torn from my little black chicken story, I opened my eyes to find Demon Duck kneeling on my bed, her mouth next to my ear.

“Brring brring,” she said. “I’m your alarm clock. It’s 7:26. Time to get up!”

Aaaargh!! Now I'm left with a whole bunch of unanswered questions. Does the little black chicken make it?? Does Mr Fox get his comeuppance??

And why on earth am I dreaming about styrofoam chickens???

5 comments:

  1. Sounds like a great story just waiting to be written! My last novel was inspired by a dream, but fortunately I got to sleep long enough to see how it ended.

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  2. Ah... how long have you had this chicken fetish?

    Just kidding. If the story stays with you, you'll find the end; like... 'and then Mr Fox found himself crushed to death by the tree which fell, weighed down by non-recyclable trash. The little black chicken and his friends lived happily evah...'

    Of course, you could write the first children's horror book... What? I'm just sayin'.

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  3. Vonna, I'm jealous you managed to get the whole story!

    Jaye, I think it all started when I had that terrible experience with the rubber chicken ...

    Revenge of the Recycling: a bedtime story that will keep you awake all night ...

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  4. I'm hooked :) please finish it.

    (if it was me, right as Mr Fox was having a nice cackle to himself and saying how much he's going to enjoy eating the little black chicken, I'd have the styrofoam chickens start moaning and moving towards him. He flees with his bushy tail between his legs and it's revealed that all the other chickens had been curious about what little black had been upto and heard Mr Fox gloating... but that's me :))

    (why is it I can write endings for other peoples' stories and not my own? ;))

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  5. Ooh, nice twist, Inkpawprints!

    I find that too -- I can always spot problems in other people's work, but it doesn't stop me doing the exact same thing in my own stories and not even notice. Frustrating, isn't it!

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