Girl-Tortoise on #UgBlogWeek

So there was once a girl-tortoise who thought herself pretty. She was, indeed, kind upon the eye; for her shell was a deep and rich green, with inlays of blood-red that drank in the glow on moonlit nights in ways that turned her ethereal – like a vortex of angels making violent love had been trapped in her shell’s grooves, restlessly trying to escape.

On windy nights, she liked to hide her head inside her shell and think of summer. Of the clear, clean skies and the golden sun shining like an ear of burning corn on the table of the sky-man. The whistling wind made her skin shiver and set her heart to a tremulous quiver.

Sometimes, it would rain – a slight drizzle that plopped on her shell like liquid pebbles that burst on contact; followed by heavier pelts that sounded like bony knuckles knocking upon a tin drum. She preferred the drizzle – for she could stick her tongue out and catch the needle-like drops, which felt like a thousand-thousand tickles inside her mouth.

Her bosom-friend was another girl-tortoise, who liked to stick a peach-colored flower at the right corner of her mouth, as if the mini-festoon would make the boys come out of their brown crusty shells and crawl after her through the thorny undergrowth that Father said was named tortoise-country.

In the small cove neighboring her family's, lived a boy who fancied her. He'd snuffle tirelessly though the earthy greenery - foraging for the tenderest young shoots which he'd bring to her; blinking shyly. She'd take them from his gaping mouth and nibble upon them delicately; then rub her nose against his in gratitude.

He once told her that if she wanted, she could fly. That tortoises have a secret the world knows not - wings hidden inside their shells.

On Sunday nights, the seven families who lived in tortoise-country – which was really just a small marshy patch marked-out by four ancient oaks near the zebras’ watering hole – crept out from underneath the wild hedgerow and sat in a circle around a small fire that Father’s father had learnt to make when he visited a far off land in the days before the seventh of the world's first nest of tortoise eggs had been hatched.

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