Humpty Dumpty

So I told you all how last weekend Princely and I went to Machame village. We actually went again yesterday and saw some GREAT football matches…all upsets except for Arsenal who beat their rival Tottham (woohoo!!). Via Princely, I’m becoming quite the European football fan. We were the only people there, but it was really exciting and we got revved up with the staff. We were up in the village for a family funeral and the two of us slipped down to Protea, a small hotel in the area, afterward to watch the games.

Anyway, point of the story is I never reported back with evidence from our visit from last time. Well, we were working on our computers and the power went out about twenty minutes after our arrival, so our writing time was brief (instead we spent a majority of the time exploring one of the many beautiful rivers that flows from the peak of Kilimanjaro through Machame villages). In the time that we did have, we opened with a prompt: write for 15 minutes. Begin with a line from a nursery rhyme.

This is what I stirred up. I enjoyed the exercise thoroughly, though I felt my outcome was a bit too flowery and forced. The exercise reminded me of my time at Columbia a few summers ago, I completed prompts like this every morning in my time there. They always help me to get the creative juices flowing…

Humpty dumpty sat on the wall.

“Oh no. God, please no. Not tonight”

Humpty dumpty had a great fall…

“Please! Listen, see I’m using the magic word!!!”

Despite her desperate pleading the image grew like a balloon in her mind. The giant egg we call Humpty was a cream color wearing leg-o blue pants and a bright red belt. His legs were like soggy little French fries wobbling and occasionally knocking against the wall. His smile was crooked, like it was drawn on his face with the unsure fist of a five-year-old.

“I think I might barf.”

Slowly, the crooked pencil smile began to morph. It grew almost straight, almost white teeth, light pink thin lips and a tongue that clicked against the roof of this new mouth as Humpty sang. But this wasn’t Humpty, anymore. Not quite anyway. The face was a little more shapely, not petite and angular like hers but somewhere in between. Crimson hair was sprouting fast, fast from the apex of this creature’s head and it stopped singing for a moment to itch its scalp in confusion.

The girl tried to open her eyes. She commanded her muscles to tug from the inside but they were sleeping with her limbs. She instructed her mouth to scream, her toes to wiggle, her belly to itch, anything to force herself awake from this nightmare. Instead, her mind’s eye held reign. It continued to elaborate upon the features of this creature it had birthed. It developed blue eyes and even a freckled nose, though it looked quite out of place on the egg-like figure. The soggy French fries became boneless arms that served no new function.

 To be continued....